Rob Schulman writes about Jamaican influences and its trajectory on the Costa Rican coast. Schuman writes: “Around there, Belafonte shares the stage with Jamaican superstar Bob Marley, as does calypso with that island’s reggae, ska, rocksteady and nyabinghi music.”

The idea was to build a railroad across the steaming jungles of Costa Rica linking the country’s inland capital at San Jose to its main eastern port at Limon. The 95-mile-long project was aimed at making it quicker to carry coffee — Costa Rica’s principal export — from the plantations to the port vs. the decades-old system of moving the goods by ox carts plodding over horrid dirt roads.

Work on the railroad, originally expected to take five or so years, got underway in 1869. The first train rolled out 21 years later.

Some were surprised the project got finished at all, given its inept planning, contractor bankruptcies, financing frauds, rampant…

In Jamaica, Junior McDonald is all for those making a living from the sea teaching their children more than the business of rod and reel, boat and net, but he calls for transferable skills, in recognition of the changing environment. Here are excerpts:

[. . .] “The economy has changed so much. The cost of living, the cost of equipment to go out to sea have gone up,” McDonald said. [. . .] Despite this, though, McDonald said people are not giving up fishing because “they see no alternatives”.

“That is why I propose among the fishermen and children of fishermen, we can identify those who can be equipped with alternative, transferable skills, in recognition of the changing environment. I will always be an advocate for that, because I believe in education,” McDonald said.

A member of the Old Harbour Bay Fisherman’s Co-operative, McDonald insisted: “There needs to be an…