Hitting the tracks.

 My love of trains comes from the days when I used to have to frequent that form of transportation to go home on weekends, after moving from Malvern, St. Elizabeth to Kingston.

 I took the train every Saturday from Kingston to Balaclava in Northern St. Elizabeth, where my father would pick me up and drive me home. 

I am still nostalgic about those days but alas, Jamaica does not have a good all Island rail service anymore😡.

So, wherever I go,  I still grab every opportunity to ride the rails when I have the time.

(Joan, my views: LYMING IN UTAH (joan-myviews.blogspot.com)

Joan, my views: Riding the rails (joan-myviews.blogspot.com)

Even the little street cars in San Francisco 😁.

These little cable cars have been chugging up the hills of San Francisco for 150 years and they are still working.

The longest trip I have ever taken though, is recently on the Amtrak Zephyr from San Francisco to Chicago, over a two-day period. 

The distance is almost 2000 miles and the scenery is simply stunning.

The Colorado River accompanied us for 238 miles.

We were joined by a large party of Mennonites in Grand Junction, Colorado.  Their dress is distinctive.The women all wear similar hair ties. The men wear suspenders and most have long beards.

They hail from Pennsylvania and speak their own language, a dialect practiced over the years, made up of words and phrases from Dutch, German, and English.

 It is only an oral language, I was told. 

One member of the group told me they were vacationing and had visited towns in Indiana and Colorado and were heading to Naperville in Illinois, one stop before ours in Chicago. 

The journey was so memorable and the scenery so unforgettable, that I found myself feeling sad when we drew into the Chicago terminal, though over two hours late. 

Our quiet, comfortable Zenith.

Inside the viewing car.

That delay was caused by a problem with cargo trains in Nevada, for apparently, they have priority on the tracks.

                                        

During the entire journey, I found myself longing for the day when technology can take us to the point where one can simply look at something and our eyes take photos! For the beauty of this world is beyond verbal description and even the scenes we managed to capture as we went along, cannot do them justice.

California and Colorado are super beautiful. Nevada being mainly desert, is not so great but it has attracted a lot of movies over the years. Maybe it's because it has so many wild horses. 

However, I only saw 4 or 5 as we crossed that state. They were quenching their thirst by a small creek.

Utah is quite attractive too but not to the same extent as Colorado.

We descended from the mountains with their magnificent trees, beautiful deep valleys and gorges and rivers wending beside us  into the plains of Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Omaha,  where the scenery changed totally from mountains and valleys to neatly laid out irrigated farms. 

For many hundreds of miles too, we could see windmills behind these farms as wind power seems to be a big thing out there.

 And of course, there were lots of churches!

Important info.

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MORE MEMORIES IN PICTURES

Denver, Colorado as seen from the Rockies at night.

Our Zephyr.

Arid Nevada

Red rocks cover much of Colorado.

My schoolmate and fellow traveler Sonja

Links: 

https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2023/08/its-desantis-fault.html?m=1

https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2023/08/chicago-born.html

https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2023/08/i-love-san-francisco.html

A cultural powerhouse

 Ghana which has more than 100 tribes (which all live peacefully together), is considered the cultural powerhouse of the 54 nations that make up our motherland.

I became a member of the Krobo tribe when I got my new name KORLEKi. 

(https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2023/06/a-cultural-awakening.html?m=1).

The Krobo people are mainly farmers and below is the Chief; Nene Sasraku II.

He is also the President of the Council of Chiefs in Ghana.

As I learn about my roots, I also have to learn about their cultural norms. 

Below are videos of excerpts from a female puberty ceremony and a male one. 

I am being taught that the human body is God's great creation and we should never be ashamed of it.

Morikama Gardens

I guess because I am always searching for outdoor things to do, FB kept featuring the Morikama Museum on my page. You know how google and fb are, they watch what your interests are and place comparable ads in front of you! 

I am accustomed to them knowing all my business now so don’t really mind as its often useful. 

So I went with a friend.

According to their information, in 1904, Sakai, a Japanese graduate of New York University, returned to his homeland of Miyazu, Japan, to organize a group of pioneering farmers to settle in Boca Raton. They named their farming settlement Yamato, an ancient name for Japan. However, their crop experimentation were disappointing and the Yamato Colony fell far short of its goals and by the 1920s, most of the community, which was about 35 people strong, gave up and one by one and most families left for other parts of the United States or returned to Japan.

Morikami would become the last of the original colonists to remain in Palm Beach County. Ultimately, his is the classic immigrant’s story — an ambitious young man, seeking opportunity, travels to America to make a better life for himself. Through hard work and ingenuity George Morikami found prosperity here, achieving a personal worth in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Despite this, he was a man of simple tastes for whom the trappings of wealth meant little. He preferred to live out his life simply, finding pleasure in his closeness to nature. Toward the end he lived reclusively in a mobile home on land he had purchased in the closing days of World War II —land that would become Morikami Park.

A Timeless Gift

George Morikami was one of the original settlers to remain in Palm Beach County and he made a fortune there. However he preferred to live the simple life, finding pleasure in his closeness to nature and acquiring land in the closing days of World War II.

 Almost 20 years later he began what would become a 10-year campaign to give the land away, first to the city of Delray Beach, and later to Palm Beach County. 

In 1977  the Morikama Museum and Gardens were established in his name to showcase Japanese arts, history and culture in South Florida. It hosts several traditional festivals several times a year.

  

The museum’s architecture is inspired by traditional Japanese design. The building features three exhibition galleries, a 225-seat theater, an authentic tea house with viewing gallery, classrooms, a museum store, all imparting worthwhile information.

On the outside, around 200 acres they say,  you find well designed strolling paths, nature trails, lots of picnic areas, resting areas, and lakes teeming with koi and other wildlife. 

                                         

In the gardens, one of the many sculptures is a statue is of Buddha. I noted that some visitors left donations in paper and coins on around this particular statue, for good luck, I guess.

There's money atop this scupture😊

Since Buddha is more or less synonymous with meditation, I recommend these well-kept grounds as an excellent place to meditate and find peace.

                                                            MEMORIES

                                             

 

DON'T DILUTE OUR CULTURE!

I couldn’t agree more with the late great Marcus Garvey more, when he said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."

 One’s culture is the sum of the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements and cannot be revised or changed willy nilly.

 A lot of our Jamaican culture has been solidified and expressed through Mento/folk music.

 Mento is Jamaica's first recorded music and it evolved from the musical traditions brought by enslaved West African people. The lyrics of mento songs often deal with aspects of everyday life in a light-hearted and humorous way. They were put to catchy tunes and sung by the slaves or those who did backbreaking labour in the fields during the brutal Colonial British colonial period, to make their chores feel less onerous.

 I am on this topic, as I noticed recently that some Facebook users are determined to dilute and change one aspect of our culture. That is, how land was obtained and farmed immediately after slavery was abolished. This they are trying to do by changing some words of a popular mento song "Sammy Dead."

 This song begins; “Sammy plant piece a corn dung a gully, an it bear till it kill poor Sammy.” However, modern-day the revisionists have been changing it to “Sammy plant peas an corn dung a gully…….”

 They almost had me convinced too, until I fact-checked it with an expert in the field of Jamaican culture. That is Colin Smith, a foundation member of Jamaica Folk Singers and currently leader of Tallawah Mento band.

 Smith, spent many years at the feet of the late, great social anthropologist, Dr. Olive Lewin, OD OM, studying Jamaica folk music and literature. She died in 2013.

 Wikipedia describes her thus; "Lewin was the author of several books and has made numerous recordings of folk music, performed by the Jamaican Folk Singers, which she founded. She was honoured by the Government of Jamaica, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Government of France and by academia for her outstanding lifelong contribution to the arts. In 2001 she was awarded the Jamaican Order of Distinction."

 Regarding whether Sammy planted piece a corn or peas and corn, Smith was emphatic. “It was piece a corn.”

He then went on to explain the conditions that prevailed when that song was written. In those days, freed slaves who wanted to farm, had no land of their own, so they had to rent/lease piece a land from their former slave/colonial masters. On this small holding, they would plant, piece a cane, piece a pumpkin, piece a cane, piece a yam, etc. (In some areas small yam holdings are known  as yam grung) Those who planted tree crops described their holdings as walk. Hence you have walk mango walk, orange walk etc.

On the other hand, large land barons planted fields or plantations, so their holdings were called cane plantations, banana plantations etc.

This other folk song called “Missa Potta” confirms the use of the word piece in reference to small farming Smith.:

 He sang;

“Good mawning Missa Potta ,good mawning to yu sah,

A plant a piece a red peas a Red Sally Lan

Mary Jane an Pidgen cum eat it aff sah

Cum out a mi yaad  mi  nebba call yu yah

Fa yu house rent money no dun pay fah.

Smith, a St. Elizabeth farmer in his own right, also explained that it is not unusual to plant peas and corn together as red peas has an excessive amount of valuable minerals mainly- magnesium, calcium, sodium, potassium and iron, hence the trash is used to fertilize the corn which matures later. Corn and gungo are also planted together, as St. Elizabeth has always suffered from chronic water shortage, so the trash from the corn which matures earlier, is used to mulch the gungo.

Anyway, if this was the aspect of farming that was being referred to in the song Sammy Dead, the lyrics would be; an dem bear till dem kill poor Sammy, for the plural of it is dem!

Talk Jamaica • A podcast on Anchor

Talk Jamaican: our culture - YouTube

(268) JAMAICA'S cultural music - YouTube

Are the Amish changing?

The first time I ever heard of the Amish and saw some in operation, was some twenty years ago when I was visiting Belize in Central America. It was then a Belizean took me to visit the commune where these “strange” people, who rejected all progress operated.

I was told they had leased their settlement from the government and operated a self-sufficient and self-governing commune, where the Belizean government only got involved waswhen a murder was committed there.

They were strict about their dress, only wearing their traditional black and white outfights, refused to use rubber or plastic, made most of what they used etc. 

 A distressing problem for the local people I was told, was that their buggies with the metal wheels were damaging their roads.

The next time I saw any other Amish was at the farmer’s market in Philly where some sold their products. This was about two years ago and I recall how amused I was when one accepted a credit card, considering how I heard about them rejecting anything modern so of course electronic.

Clothes drying in the sun. They can now wear other solid colors

One of the many confusions I had up to recently, was in thinking that Amish and Mennonites were the same but when I googled it, I was informed “Theologically, the Amish and Mennonites have many similarities. Both are Anabaptist denominations and share ideals of

The chain at the back our guide called the "seat belts!"

pacifism. The Amish believed that mainstream Anabaptist churches were too liberal and that Christians should live separate from the outside world. The Amish practice a severe form of social shunning towards people who violate the church's guidelines. The most noticeable difference between the Amish and Mennonites is that Mennonites generally do not shun technology or contemporary society. Even Old Order Mennonites, who live more similarly to the Amish, allow modern conveniences like electricity in their homes.”

My most recent visit to an Amish establishment was in Lancaster County, Philadelphia.

This trip of four fun-loving ladies from Florida, was organized and led by champion hiker and leader Jenifer Weise in mid-August 2019. This trip made me realize how far this sect has come. (Anyway, I have been made to understand that they are not as dogmatic as I had heard but what they do in each commune depends on how far their leader is prepared to let them go.)

Men don't seem to use the pedals!

We actually visited the town of Intercourse, (the name does not imply what I and other outsiders would think. Also, to get there we passed through a place called "Gay Man town", but I jump to no conclusions about that either!) which is 85% Amish, who at last count was 7,200. According to a guide Rachael, it is the 2nd largest Amish settlement in the USA.

In Intercourse, I got a much better understanding about the sect.

Its a touristy town

While most of the town of Intercourse is just an everyday tourist town, we took the opportunity to go on a buggy ride and visit a farm, a very enlightening experience indeed.

Our guide Rachael was excellent, answering our questions forthrightly. For example, I wanted to know it the Amish practiced birth control as I heard they loved to have lots of children to work their farms. She however explained that it is something many probably practice, but it is just not discussed! Further, I wanted to know if they paid taxes to the regular government and used services like police and hospitals or were like those in Belize they didn’t and was told categorically, yes. However, in sickness, they tend to try home remedies before seeking outside assistance.

A 6 horse power plough at work (the guide's humor!)

What I learnt too was that they are far more unconventional than I thought as the plain black and white clothes are not mandatory as they can make their clothes from any solid color. Also, some work outside the homes and farms in professions where modern mechanical equipment is used, whereas they can own the equipment, they must employ non-Amish or English (as they call them), to actually use the equipment. Some also own motor vehicles but they put them in others people’s names and get a driver as they are not allowed to drive. Some even have indoor plumbing but not showers or baths! I also noted that these at Intercourse had no problem using plastic, rubber and even mechanical equipment powered by propane.

At the farm we visited where they did dairy, horse raring and grew acres of corn and soya

, we observed both mechanical equipment and a horse drawn plough which, since it had six horses pulling it, our guide quipped that it had six horse power. 

For farm work, they seem to alternate between using horses and mules, which they breed themselves. Those were some mighty steeds I saw at the farm we visited and according to our guide, the two horses that draw tourists in the buggies, can do that work for up to fifteen years. They also appeared to be quite healthy and extremely intelligent.

From some strange activity I saw,  I got the impression that male bicycle riders do not use the pedals or sit on the seats, but females do. Instead the men  and boys seem to treat the bicycle as some kind of a pushmobile in that they run beside is pushing on one pedal and will only get on when coasting!

A model Amish farm

From my own observations though, I gather that they are extremely wealthy people who are mostly large farmers living in huge houses. But they should be wealthy shouldn’t they, if they are  not big consumers like the rest of the society, shunning even electricity and making most of what they need?

Their wealth seems to be ploughed back into vast expanses of land where they farm, use mechanical equipment and even refrigeration, also powered by propane run generators, to keep their products fresh.

A beautifully laid out plantation

While the Amish there seem to be moving quite rapidly toward modernization, what was alarming to learn was how little they still value education, since the children must leave school to go and work by age fifteen What a waste of human resources.

However, our very informed tour guide Rachel did explain that they are able to go into professions where they assist the community, like firefighting and the medical services. I guess that too is progress.

OTHER PHOTOS TAKEN AT THE AMISH ESTABLISHMENT