Sweet Potato Pudding

INGREDIENTS

• 2 pounds sweet potato
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1 cup flour
• 2 cups coconut milk
• 1 1/2 cups dried fruits
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon mixed spice
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon margarine

METHOD

1.   Wash and pare off the skin of the potatoes

2.   Wash again then grate

3.   Grate coconut, add water and squeeze juice through a strainer

4.   Blend flour, mixed spice (raisins etc), salt, and nutmeg.

5.   Combine this mixture with the grated potatoes and mix well

6.   Add sugar, fruits and coconut milk. Mix well.

7.   Grease pan, pour in batter, bake at 350 degrees F for 40-60 minutes or until done

The Community Literacy Project or CLP is now partnering with the Parenting Project to meet its objectives.

Based in Porus, Manchester the Parenting Project focuses on providing young mothers with the requisite parenting and survival skills.

Now the Community Literacy Project which focuses mainly on increasing the number of literate individuals within the community of Tulsa Road has regrouped and is temporarily being offered in Porus in conjunction with Parenting Project.

The Tulsa Road CLP has been temporarily disabled to facilitate a proper restructuring and will be revamped to offer something fresh and even more impactful.

CLP now targets the young mothers by improving their confidence levels, helping them prepare for the job market and also reinforcing literacy skills.

The Project Officer is working on keeping the activities on the CLP sustained in the absence of volunteer participation. The plan is to engage retired educators or relevant professionals to fill the gaps until volunteers available to carry out the objectives of the CLP.

Volunteers are keen on fulfilling the objectives of the project and have been working hard to make the Project a success.

The Teaching Project has a new dimension; volunteers will now host a series of motivational talks on various topics for primary and junior school students.

The motivational talks were started by a former Project Officer for Teaching, Rhoseen Davis. Since Rhoseen’s time the motivational talks have added a new dimension and is now looking to evolve even further thanks to the efforts of a new Teaching Project Officer.

Initially the talks were designed to target the boys within the school system in a bid to reinforce positive values that gradually have become second place to some of our young males within our society. The idea was to use male volunteers as positive role models for the boys, to encourage them to excel and provide face to face discussions with the boys.

Currently the Talks have included girls and have branched out on various topics to include abstinence and safe sex practices (as a precautionary measure for those students who are already engaging in sexual intercourse). Also talks on basic skills useful for manoeuvring through life, such as good time management skills and good study tips.

The future plan for the talks by the new Project Officer, Collette Kerr is to conduct a needs assessment before sending volunteers into the schools to host these talks. She wants to ensure that there is a specific need to meet. She will liaise with the Guidance Counsellors, Teachers and the Deans of Discipline in each school to properly structure the talks.

Specific volunteers will be used to deliver the address, for example the Medical volunteers will be used to give health talks and the teaching volunteers will be used to give study tips and other relevant talks. The last talk given was a Girls Talk session where two female volunteers addressed a group of teenage students at the Villa Road Primary and Junior High School.  

On the third Friday of every month Projects Abroad Jamaica, volunteers and staff, embark on an outreach journey to help our specific placements enhance their surroundings.  This initiative is dubbed Dirty Day; on some Dirty Days you may find as little as fifteen (15) or as much as forty-one (41) persons working to assist the placements in maintaining the upkeep of their facility.

On April 15, 2011 twenty-seven volunteers and staff journeyed to the Hanbury Children’s Home to assist Major (Mr.) Simeon and Major (Mrs.) Simeon with making the surroundings that much cleaner and brighter for the children who call Hanbury home. The tasks scheduled for the day coincided with National Volunteering Week. Having arrived around 9:15am, we quickly went into five teams; the teams were given Jamaican names and one or two staff members were assigned to each group, all teams subsequently went about doing their respective work.

Team “sabolious” headed by Bridgette (Country Director) took to the boy’s housing area with paint, rollers and brushes to repaint the walls in charcoal gray and cream. Meanwhile team “tek it to them” headed by Collette (New Project Officer for Medicine and Teaching) got busy painting the curb walls which border the front and side of the property, these were repainted a pristine white. Not to be out done Team “swaggerific” headed by Cherricha (Assistant Country Director & Desk Officer) and Stacy Ann (Assistant Project Officer for Culture and Community) split their time between painting the main walkway walls and a water tank both were painted in charcoal gray.  

We made use of the helping hands and made a full-house cleaning effort. The remaining volunteers and staff split their time between thoroughly cleaning an abandoned store room and reorganizing its contents, thank you Team “Fashion ova Style”, Denise (Social Manager) was the staff in charge. “Guh hard or guh home” Team was responsible for ridding the surroundings of litter, Patrina (Project Officer for Care) was the staff responsible.

Volunteers executed their tasks in an efficient and clean manner, the job was thoroughly done and activities were completed on time and together. The volunteers received their lunches, of a chosen patty and drink. Everyone had lunch, packed up and readied themselves to be transported to the office by the designated taxis. The day was meaningfully spent and the volunteers were happy they could lend a hand.

A popular Easter Bun in Jamaica.

Enjoy your Easter Holidays everyone by trying a delicious slice of this Jamaican Easter Bun recipe. Bake it and taste it!!

INGREDIENTS:

• 3 cups flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs beaten
• 1 tablespoon browning
• 1/2 pint milk
• 2 tablespoon melted margarine
• raisins and mixed peel (amount based on your taste)
• 1 tablespoon mixed spice
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon nutmeg

METHOD:

Measure all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.

Pour into bun shaped baking pans and bake in a moderate 350F until done well.

Glaze with Sugar and water or pancake syrup and serve.

Outgoing Project Officer for Medicine and Teaching, Paula Andreewitch, excitedly relates the sequence of events that led to a successful “Girls Talk” at the Villa Road Primary School. The Girls Talk initiative is aimed at providing a suitable platform for teenage girls to express themselves about issues affecting or critical to their successful transition from teenagers to young adults.

The initiative is fairly new and based on the reviews from the students Girls Talk will be an ongoing initiative. The volunteers will be responsible for forming topics and discussing these topics in format of their choice with the girls.

Lies Cannaerts and Karen Ruts both two and half months volunteer from Belgium chaired the April 2011 session of Girls Talk at the Villa Road School. Both volunteers came to the conclusion that collectively they would look at healthy and unhealthy practices associated with being in a relationship. The chalkboard was divided into two sections; one section would list all the unhealthy practices and the other section would list the healthy practices.

One of the unhealthy practices decided upon is having unprotected sex with one’s partner. Lies and Cannaerts began to flesh out the discussion they both wanted to get the girls opening up and talking, providing the necessary feedback that would help with providing useful information.

For the most part the discussion centred on sexually transmitted infections; the children were informed that foe the most part you can’t tell by just looking. The students were often times shy to be having such a candid conversation about sex.

The discussions went really well, Paula had reported and the girls showed an appreciation for the information. The only glitch/distraction was that some of the boys had sneaked up to the discussion area and began peeping through cracks in the wall and laughing. Despite that minor glitch the talk was a success.

The pen pal concept has been in existence for many years; the most common feature of the pen pal is to have students within a formal school system trade letters with another group of students, often times this exchange is trans-national, existing outside of their home country, in a bid to improve literacy. Long-term relationships have blossomed from these pen pal exchanges. Pen pals will even go on to meet face to face. This earlier form of the pen pal utilizes the postal system, letters will be written, put in an envelope, a stamp added, taken to the post office and the letters delivered to the pen pal recipient. Normally this process will continue for as long as both parties wish to maintain contact.

Today in our global existence the pen pal has reshaped itself to cater to the technological diversities that prevail within most modern societies -as such we now have as a modern feature of the traditional pen pal-the "keypal". Individuals will now rely on the internet to fulfil the similar of objectives of the traditional pen pal.

Projects Abroad Jamaica has decided to evoke feelings of excitement within the psyche of several individuals who are a part of the Teaching Project. The Teaching Project is currently focusing on literacy as one of its strongest thrusts; as such it is embarking on a pen pal initiative with two of its groups. We are angling this concept towards that of an exciting new project, which will work to strengthen the writing skills and foster cultural exchange   of the participating individuals.

Students of the Villa Road All-Age School posing with their trophies and prizes from the Reading, Attendance, Punctuality and Discipline (RAPD) Competition.

The children of Villa Road All-age School- nine and ten year olds and the adults on the Community Literacy Project (CLP) are the target group for the Pen Pal Project. The Villa Road students will write letters to students living in the United Kingdom at the Swanage Middle School. Adults on the CLP project will write letters to a women’s group in Brazil called “Recomencar” meaning to begin again.  Pen pals will be paired based on similar age range and common interests.

Members of the CLP Project in Porus Mandeville and volunteer Sanobia  Palkhiwala

The coordination for this is to have the volunteers play an integral role in providing writing support, as well as ensuring logistically that the letters are being exchanged in a viable manner. The pictures will be scanned and email to key persons in the participating countries. In the schools teachers/ volunteers will collect and monitor the writing of the letters; they will be responsible for scanning the letters, saving them and emailing them to the contact person in the United Kingdom and vice versa. A similar process will be employed to the participants on the CLP Project.

Currently the Project is in its preliminary stage, all players are now in place and the projected start time for the sending off of the correspondence will take place within two weeks.

A closer look at the participants of Project Abroad Jamaica's third annual Partnership Workshop

On April 7, 2011 Projects Abroad Jamaica staged its third annual partnership workshop at the Golf View Hotel Conference Area. The event began at 8:30am with all participants registering; registration signalled the start of something great that would unfold as the workshop progressed.

The workshop was initially conceptualized as a format for allowing all the Projects Abroad stakeholders and staff to meet on a platform where issues could be raised and discussed as a means of maintaining a mutually beneficial partnership. That format has been followed for the initial two years- Host families, placement staff, community project participants and our important drivers are usually on the list of invitees at the workshops- they usually attend with the aim to flesh out matters that are of paramount concern to them.

This workshop for the third time would feature a new twist. The partners were invited to help brainstorm on a new Project that Projects Abroad Jamaica will be undertaking.  Stakeholders would now fill out issues forms instead and focus on planning for a positive venture.

The workshop opened with a welcome done by the outgoing Project Officer for Medicine and Teaching, Paula Andreewitch. Colette Kerr , the soon to be new Project Officer for Medicine and Teaching did the devotions. The Social Manager had an ice-breaker activity with the group and spoke about the objectives, expectation and outcome for the workshop. The objectives were strategically designed to incorporate all elements of the Projects Abroad Jamaica 2010 operations and to chart the way forward for the promising 2011 period, including an update on the accomplishments of Projects Abroad Jamaica .Also to have participatory feedback from the participants on a Major new project dubbed “Immunitiative.” This new Project mentioned before is a partnership with Projects Abroad Jamaica and the Bridg IT Foundation in Australia to build a Child Care facility in Mandeville. We also facilitated the characteristic medium for partners to express themselves about issues that they wish to call attention to as it relates to their role in the cycle of operations at Projects Abroad Jamaica.

As it relates to the new project the participants were later asked to meet in small groups to have facilitated discussions about their knowledge on specific topics such as the safety and security of the proposed facility, brainstorm possible ideas for the facility design, consider legal matters, they were also asked to help choose a suitable name for the facility among many other important tasks. It is expected that we would have garnered enough information to compile a working plan of action which will fast track the planning and execution of the facility.

The Country Director, Dr. Bridgette Barrett- Williams gave a detailed powerpoint presentation on Projects Abroad giving our stakeholders the statistics and trends, showing that the destination has been growing since its inception in 2008. She also spoke about our Projects, the volunteering and application process. Following that presentation Patrina Thomas-Morrison, Project Officer for Care gave a powepoint presentation on the “Immunitiative” Project.

Country Director making her presentation to the workshop members

Following the break the groups were put into groups to brainstorm all the important elements of the project. All staff members acted as facilitators for the respective groups and used flip charts with specific headings to capture the information needed to help make the Project a success. The groups were vibrant and gave valuable information to help make this vision a reality. The day was a true success and the participants gave their commitment to help in any way possible, they also applauded the initiative and said it was a commendable move.  

An attendee making an emphatic point