Day 8: Foundation, rocks, and ice-cream. Yum!

This morning, Tom showed us how he makes a foundation mold. It was really neat! He took a single sheet of wax foundation as the template. He built a special wooden frame to hold the foundation in place that was clamped down tight. Then, he mixed and poured concrete over it. I got to mix some of the concrete! I had never done that before and Tom showed us how to get the right consistency. The farm uses concrete for various purposes and they keep it around. Once the concrete had dried, he put it into the oven to bake it. The wax melts and the foundation imprints into the concrete. His design is two sides of concrete with a hinge so that new foundation can be pressed into it. Pretty neat!
Template holder:

 Cody placing the wax foundation carefully on one side (it has to line up):

 Mixing concrete:

 Pouring the concrete in and pushing it into the template by hand:

I didn't get to see the baking of the concrete becuase I was at the beach helping to move rocks. Hard, hard work. We moved tons of rocks of all sizes all the way from pebbles to giant boulders. Kwao used a pole to move and hold the really big boulders. We did it in order to clean up the beach and make it more enjoyable. It was pretty rocky before and hard to sit down on the beach and be comfortable. So far so good but it will need more work.
Me picking up rocks at the beach:

I left in the middle of work in order to visit Annotto Bay. There were others that were going for ice-cream and invited me becuase I had never been. The ice-cream was delicious and we visited the supermarket as well. Fun, fun, fun.
Pictures from the drive:

Day 3: Visit to the farm and the most amazing dessert

 We visited the other property they have across Robins Bay. It was a bit of a drive across the worst road in the world. I'll get a picture of it. It was built in 1975 by the government ....and NEVER repaired. You can see some remains of asphalt but barely. Jamaica has the most road per square mile in the world (though in rough conditions). The farm was devastated in 2004 by Hurricane Irene and has not been returned to its original, operating state. There used to be lots of fruit trees, but it is overgrown now. We climbed through the jungle in order to find and pick mangoes to bring back. Apparently, there are 20 different mango types on the farm alone. The ones we picked are long mangoes which are delicious, juicy, and less stringy to me.

Last night, Agape made a delicious dessert! These are coconut chocolate bites. They are cooked with ginger and honey in a skillet over the stove. The chocolate is actually just the seed ground and roasted. Agape said that in the U.S. she would use wax paper, but here she picked a giant banana leaf for them to cool off on. Quite the treat! We all sat around the table chatting and waiting for them to cool. I got to lick to spoon.