_    Last week Quiet Creek Corner shared how the people of Harmons, Jamaica have been taken advantage of by the bauxite mining company.  This community continues to wait for drinking water and be exposed to dangerous, open pits.   Harmons appears to Americans as a distant place with a problem that would never to occur in the United States, but the Jamaican situation is quite similar to ours.   Could the extraction of a natural resource, with water issues, be replicated in Penn’s Woods?
    During the twentieth century, shallow natural gas companies began leasing land from landowners across Pennsylvania. Leasing landowners received a few dollars an acre per year and renewed leases every five years. When the companies drilled for shallow natural gas the landowner reaped royalties and free gas.  The shallow gas drilling has caused little to no permanent damage to the land or water. This win-win situation went on without major conflict until a scientist discovered something much deeper a few years ago.
About a mile underneath the land surface, specifically in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio, is a sedimentary rock called Marcellus Shale. This shale contains trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.  Some gas companies renewed leases with landowners; companies considered shallow and deep gas to be the same with no change in the leasing funds.   In contrast, other gas companies paid a hundred dollars per acre which easily persuaded some landowners to lease for this higher price. Some landowners, although, held out and leased their land for three thousand dollars an acre. These landowners who waited are called “Shalellioners”.
    Shallow gas extraction technique is no longer effective in deep gas reservoirs; hydraulic fracturing is now prescribed.  This process involves drilling a mile vertically and then horizontally into the deep gas layer.  Various layers of casing and grout occur on the drill hole. When the well is secure, a rod goes downward into the horizontal part of the drilling shaft sending explosives to fracture the shale with millions of gallons of water (pumped out of local rivers), sand and toxic chemicals.  This mixture is forced into every little crack in the shale to keep it open for the natural gas to flow back to the surface.
    Some of this flowback water (now laden with natural occurring radioactive elements) is pumped out of the well where it is reused in another hydraulic fracturing process, sent to deep injection wells, or evaporated out of holding reservoirs on the drill site.   The majority of the flowback water is left in the shale strata and could eventually migrate into layers above, contaminating water to private and public wells and springs.
Now documented, deep gas companies are experiencing problems. Some water wells taste unpleasant and are deemed undrinkable. Livestock die from accidentally spilled hydraulic fracturing water.  Methane gas is found in people’s faucet heads; so much that they can light them on fire. Streams supplying high grade trout fishing areas in the vicinity of Marcellus Shale gas wells are found to be bubbling with methane causing fish kills.
     On average, a deep gas well nets a profit of ten million dollars.  Currently, the landowner is taxed on his/her deep gas leases and royalties.
Deep gas wells are being drilled as you read this. Be aware of what is going on around you, have your water tested immediately, continue testing your water for conductivity, and know your regional contact at PA Department of Environmental Resources, if problems arise.
    Contact your local officials with questions; here are a few to begin the discourse.   During drought periods are rivers vulnerable to the millions of gallons of water removed for hydraulic fracturing? Over time, will gas well grout and casing disintegrate becoming a conduit for polluted water to migrate into drinking water supplies? Could this contaminated ground water eventually reach the streams, rivers, lakes, and ponds? Shouldn’t the deep gas companies be taxed on their profit? Could truck drivers, who are supposed to take the flow back to deep injection wells open the back valves of their trucks and let the contaminated water spill onto the road?  Could they nonchalantly water the roads so to “keep the dust down”?   How will the gas transmission infrastructure, where 52 inch diameter pipes must be laid to distribute the Marcellus Shale gas, impact residents?
Isn’t water the life source of Pennsylvania?  It certainly is here in Harmons, Jamaica and the residents are still waiting for a consistent supply.  Let’s learn from history.

Pop cans, food covering, and airplane wings all contain one main ingredient, aluminum.  Anything that needs to be lightweight, hard and flexible is made from this metal. Where does aluminum come from? How has this metal impacted the community of Harmons?  It can be explained with one natural resource: bauxite.  

Deep in the heart of Jamaica, the soil is red and has more clay than silt or sand. It is similar to Georgia clay or Virginia soil but there are some differences.  The biggest difference is the presence of bauxite, an aluminum hydroxide, which is extracted to make aluminum. 

Only found in a few countries, bauxite is highly sought after. Jamaica is ranked fourth in bauxite production after Guinea (1st), Australia (2nd) and Vietnam (3rd).  Even in Jamaica, it is hard to find a high concentration of it in the red clay.  Here, in Harmons, Jamaica (where we are serving God) there are some of the richest bauxite veins in all of Jamaica. 

It all started in the 1970’s, when a mining company came and tested the soil of Harmons. When finding the soil high in bauxite, they proceeded to buy as much of the valley as they could from the local people. These people (well below the poverty line) were farmers and when they were offered very little money they sold almost immediately thinking that they were making a fortune. The bauxite company promised to build drinking water tanks at each end of Harmons and relocate people whose land they had bought.

No mining took place in Harmons until a new generation was born.  Approximately four years ago, the bauxite company started mining. This generation of farmers was forced to relocate as the bauxite company tore through the land their parents had sold for almost nothing.  

The mining created acre upon acre of red muddy canyons through the valley of Harmons.  When the global economy fell in 2008, the mining slowly dwindled to what it is today, a trickle of trucks taking the red soil from a few strip mines in the neighborhood.  None of the land has been reclaimed and none of the promised water tanks placed in Harmons. Countless people go without water for weeks, collecting off their roofs or carrying water from a government reservoir. A few houses of relocated residents were built, but the vast majority live in tin shacks.

Next time you take a drink out of a can, fly on an airplane or cover your food, remember Harmons, Jamaica.  The landscape is barren, people are void of a consistent source of water, and homes are unsafe shacks. 

As consumers of this natural resource, aren’t we responsible to do something?  Please consider writing our federal senators, Honorable Toomey and Casey, at www.toomey.gov and www.casey.gov about the aluminum industry.   

_      When we think of Jamaica, we think of white sand beaches, palm trees and Bob Marley. There is a lot more to this country than cruise ships and honeymoons; it houses a diverse and historically-rich population.

    Jamaica’s first inhabitants were believed to be a peaceful people called the Arawaks.  Theoretically, they wandered out of Siberia, across the Bering Strait slowly and spreading southward.

 Arawaks were simple and generous. When Columbus arrived in 1494 on his second voyage, they believed the Spaniards were gods and gave them the little gold they had.  They ate little; Ferdinand, Columbus’ son, wrote that that what Spaniards ate in one day would last an Arawak twenty.

    The Arawaks died out quickly due to the Spanish sport of killing them and also do to contiguous European diseases, mainly smallpox, for which they had no resistance.  Eventually the Spanish took control of Jamaica and made it a center of trade from plantations. They made it very profitable and so it was not a surprise when the English attacked the weakly defended island and took control in 1654.

    As the slave trade in the Greater Antilles grew, Jamaica became a dumping ground for troublesome slaves. Some of these slaves escaped into the cockpit area which is located in the central western part of the island. Its terrain includes rocky crags, cliffs and caves being extremely hard to navigate. These deserting slaves were called Maroons.

    The Maroons were hostile to outsiders and would frequently attack and burn large plantations.

The slaves developed their native language called patois (pronounced paw-twa) so they could talk without the plantation owners.  This Jamaican Creole was a dialect of slurred and abbreviated African, Spanish, and English. 

After years of complaints, England sent its army to dispose of the Maroons. The English were familiar with fighting in open fields, in straight lines and with laws of war. They marched up through the cliffs beating drums and wearing bright red coats expecting meet the Maroons in the open and face to face.

Two words describe Maroon war tactics: ambush and camouflage. They surrounded the English and quickly defeated them. In 1838 the slaves were emancipated and in 1962 Jamaica gained its independence from England.

Through peace and strife, many people reside in Jamaica.  Beautifully adorn in dark chocolate and flamboyant dialect, they are community-based, mischievous, hardworking, rebellious if taunted, and strong hearted.  That is why the national motto “Out of many people, one”              

A small fruit about the size of a toddler’s fist dangles 25 feet above the ground as Shane (a new Jamaican friend) and Ashton gently dislodge it.  Reddening in the morning sun, this tropical fruit tree has pinnate evergreen leaves that spread out in 6 to 10 elliptical leaflets.  The pear shaped pod is not any tropical fruit; ackee is the heart of Jamaican cuisine. 

            Although native to Africa, it has naturalized and become rich in Jamaica’s culture.  Most likely imported here in the 1700s along with the slave trade, ackee was taken to England and named Blighia sapida by the discoverer Captain William Bligh. 

            The fleshy fruit is only edible when the pod’s bottom splits open revealing the dark black shiny seeds.  The seed and orange insides are removed leaving the yellow arils.  The arils are then boiled, changing the water twice.  As a stir-fry with scallions, tomatoes, and calilou or as a main dish with salt fish, this island staple resembles scrambled eggs in appearance, tastes buttery, and has a firm melon texture.

            Canned ackee is a major Caribbean export especially to the USA, although the fresh fruit is much better.  Referred to as vegetable brains, ackee is a complex carbohydrate rich in linoleic acids essential to human health.  In total, 22 diseases have been recognized to be healed with ackee. Dental decay, fever, malaria, internal hemorrhage, dysentery, burns, eyes inflammation, yellow fever, constipation, cutaneous infections, whitlow and head lice are the most common. All parts (bark, seeds, roots, leaves) are involved in the composition of drugs. The bark is useful in the treatment of 13 different diseases followed in decreasing order by leaves, roots and seeds.  This type of knowledge is kept mostly by old people and traditional healers in the communities and varied sometimes from one ethnic group to the other.

            That night we dined on an ackee stir-fry.  First I boiled four cups of ackee twice in water and rinsed it in between boilings.  I sauteed two tablespoons of butter with three tablespoons of scallions and a fresh chopped tomato.  Next I added the drained ackee into the stir-fry. 

            What a wonderful way to celebrate Jamaica Day, our friends, and new foods! 

_ Last week we grew in Faith.  She is a woman with a body mass index (BMI) of 15, so rarely found in the states, especially after having ten children.  Six of her offspring are at home and four more are out surviving as young adults. As do many single-mothers, Faith shares many talents and traits:  perseverance, love of family, and a dedication to her Creator.   

We met her through a local pastor who invited us to help rebuild her dilapidated shack.  As a squatter, she ended up there after her husband was unable to fulfill his fatherly responsibilities. 

With a few chapters under our belts of When Helping Hurts:  How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, we were ready to minister.  The book states so often Americans damage their efforts thinking they know what is best for fixing the resource-lacking.  Instead authors, Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, reveal one should consider developing relationships. 

Making people feel valued can help much more than providing for physical needs.  Although there was no doubt the necessities of a bathing room with a drain and cement floor, a privacy fence for dressing, and cooking areas (open air and encased with corrugated tin) were much more important than a hug from a “whitey visiting 2000 miles away.”

With the need to connect our family to hers, my mom considered one of Faith’s strengths -- cooking local, whole foods for a large gathering.  Mom established the perfect moment to ask Faith.  It happened when we all were collecting limestone pebbles to fill the shower and cook area footers.  Here Faith willingly accepted the invitation to teach us how to create a typical Jamaican meal from scratch. Dictating a list of ingredients, she shared and I frantically jotted down in my journal:  chicken, brown rice, red peas (kidney beans), thyme, coconut, pimento leaf, cinnamon bark, scotch bonnet peppers (habaneros), salt and pepper. 

The following Thursday laden with cloth bags full of Faith’s nutritional needs, my mom and I walked a short hike to her 20 square foot lean-to.  The roof was leaking from the recent downpour (Jamaica’s annual rainfall is 77”), but the rain tank for washing was overflowing.   The outhouse and bathing areas were now donned in curtains.  In the midst of little, we were greeted with plenty -- cheers and broad smiles of seven of the emotionally happiest, but materially poorest people we had ever known.  My mom and I looked at one another and nodded in agreement; we were attempting to diminish our own “poverty of others” – a phrase is defined by Corbett and Fikkert as self centeredness. 

After a full day of scrubbing clothes by hand and hanging them to dry, Faith still made time to start two fires with homemade charcoal – one for peas and rice and another for the chicken.  Her older daughters, Evanna and Channakay put the peas on to boil, while I joined Faith in preparing the chickens into perfectly portioned pieces where nothing was wasted.  We didn’t actually cut the chicken, instead we hit their joints and they snapped open.  With olive oil, Evanna fried the protein while laughing with my mom who attempted to speak Jamaican Creole.

 I learned how to crack and drain a coconut on a rock.  By then my dad had arrived with three other friends and he volunteered to grate the coconut; my mom taught me that beneficial saturated fats (coconut) are used to season the complex carbohydrates (beans and rice) high in fiber.  There was richness in “whole foods” cooking and creating the Vassell and Orner union.

Ashton played a makeshift game of cricket/baseball with Faith’s younger children (Ashley, Asley, Kimberly and Sheldon).  As the evening’s darkness set in, they decided not to lose the ball in the bush and circled around the rest of us at the fires.  Hymn singing rose up intermixed with the smells of a slowly cooked, traditional Jamaican meal. 

After four and one half hours of food preparation, Faith dished up thirteen heaping plates of the best tasting food any of us Orner’s had experienced.  Famished under the star-lit sky and ready to devour our meal, I noticed at once that Faith was foodless.  Soon our plates matched hers in size and you couldn’t tell we had even shared any with Faith, a self-less woman deserving of basic essentials.       

Our faith in Faith flowed with admiration and respect that night.  What a model of “community” -- rich in love, knowledge and hospitality for her friends, family and deity.