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By partaking in Sandals Foundation-endorsed activities, your clients can have a richer experience in the Caribbean, as Katherine Lawrey finds on a trip to Jamaica with Sandals Resorts, staying at Sandals Ochi Beach
Is the moon made of cheese?”
“Can we fly to the moon in a cardboard rocket?”
“Can we go today?”
It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. Conversations with seven-year-olds are wonderfully whimsical.
This one is taking place in Jamaica… where I’m sat like a giant on a miniature bench, reading to a group of six school children. They jostle for position around me, all chatting at once. The book is a simple story about building a rocket using various shapes, yet it inspires our conversation about the moon. We also get stuck into some colouring and a reading comprehension together, and the hour flies by.
This is the Sandals Foundation Reading Road Trip, an optional extra for guests at Sandals, Beaches and Grand Pineapple Resorts in Jamaica, Antigua, the Turks and Caicos Islands, St Lucia and Exuma in the Bahamas. It’s a reading skills programme, but it’s also a cultural exchange that facilitates interaction between local children and overseas guests.
“It’s an hour of fun,” explains Karen Zacca, Sandals Foundation projects coordinator. ‘If the kids are more interested in talking to you [than reading], that’s great. It’s an opportunity to get out of your hotel, see Jamaica live and direct and give something back by opening the children’s eyes to the world.”
More than 8,000 guest volunteers have taken part in the Reading Road Trip since its inception in 2011, benefiting about 4,000 children. Zacca explains: “We work with [just] 16 schools so we can track results and record improvements. The people involved are a key reason why we select certain locations. If staff are doing their best with limited resources, imagine what they could do with a bit more support.”
Ocho Rios Primary is the partner school for Sandals Ochi Beach and the reading sessions take place on a Thursday morning. There’s a $25 charge, which goes directly towards buying books or funding teachers.
The Reading Road Trip is an easy way to introduce clients to the Sandals Foundation, which does much important work throughout the Caribbean. It’s a non-profit organisation investing in sustainable projects in three areas: education, environment and community.
Our visit to the primary coincides with one from Great Shape! Inc, a non-profit that matches volunteers and skills with communities in need. Sandals helps fund Great Shape’s work, and today they are teaching the children the importance of good dental health. Rural Jamaica has one dentist per 100,000 people so the comical sight of a volunteer dressed as a giant tooth is a light-hearted way to deliver a serious message.
My own teeth are soon put to work, on the Foundation’s quest to preserve the Caribbean’s natural environment. Lionfish are becoming a huge problem in the region. They are an invasive species, introduced to the Western hemisphere as an aquarium fish. They ended up in the ocean by accident and have spread like wildfire across the Caribbean because they have no natural predators. They eat up to 30 times their stomach volume and gobble everything in their path – crustaceans and fish.
“The only way to control the lionfish population is by eating them, and that has to be us,” explains Jonathan Hernould, environmental officer at the Sandals Foundation. Because they have venomous spines, people tend to shy away from preparing lionfish. But they are a very tasty white fish, as I discover when Salvo, a chef at Beaches Ocho Rios, cooks lionfish three ways, the Red Stripe beer tempura lionfish and chips with tartar sauce a particular winner. “We’re running workshops in Jamaica, the Bahamas and St Lucia, showing fishermen how to clean the fish properly, remove the venomous spines, and teach them a safe way to prepare the fish. We also run a lionfish dive excursion in Grenada, with the specific purpose of catching as many as possible,” says Hernould.
He shows me the Boscobel Marine Sanctuary at Beaches Ocho Rios, which the Sandals Foundation manages. Wardens patrol the area to ensure no fishing takes place within its waters and a snorkel tour encourages guests to explore the sanctuary.
“Coral coverage in the Caribbean has dropped 90% in the last 30 years,” says Hernould. “We take coral from our nursery and replant it to encourage growth in other areas. We also employ local fishermen as wardens, they learn a new way of thinking and spread the word within their communities.”
The sanctuary typifies the Sandals Foundation’s approach: “We identify a worthy project; we bring awareness to the community; and we involve our guests,” says Zacca.
There’s another way guests can become involved when staying in Ocho Rios – and it's a life-affirming experience that tugs on the old heartstrings. We gather on Gibraltar Beach, a hotspot for hawksbill turtles in Jamaica, with warden Melvyn Tennant. He monitors every single nest that is laid on this beach. Back in 2004 when he first took on the challenge, locals used to dig up the nests and kill the adult turtles – the meat was a part of their staple diet, and eggs were touted as a natural Viagra.
Great strides have been made with education (Jamaicans don’t like their manhood insulted, he laughs) and relocation of vulnerable nests to safer locations. Once hatched, he supervises the release of two/three-day-old baby turtles, and nurtures those that are not quite ready in a Sandals-funded incubator. Last year 193 nests were successfully defended and 21,212 babies were released into the sea to take their chances in the ocean.
He leads us along the beach, burrows into the sand, and like magic, the hatchlings appear. They are smaller than the palm of my hand. We wash the sand off, one by one, in the sea, so Tennant can verify their robustness. He gathers them all in a bucket, and tips it over, and we watch spellbound, as 170 miniature turtles fan out across the sand and scurry towards the water. We can’t know what challenges they face ahead but in that moment I feel an attachment to each and everyone and say a little prayer for them all.
