Don't Waste Your Pain

I am back in Jamaica. My time in Trinidad was well spent……somewhat like a veeeeery looooooong weekend. It was good to be back in my childhood home and to spend time lyming (hanging out), and reminiscing with my siblings and parents. It was interesting to observe and get to know the next generation - my nieces, nephews, great nephews and great niece, even just a tiny bit.

One of the favourite parts of my visit was indulging in the many different kinds of ‘Trini’ food. Food is a very important and interesting part of our culture. While there are some similarities across the Caribbean, there are many differences in what we call some of our vegetables and fruits, as well as how we prepare and eat them. This is influenced, of course, by our colonial ancestors predominantly from Europe, Africa, India and China.

Take for example ‘doubles’ or ‘barah’ with the main ingredient being channa (chick peas). It is sold at many roadside spots throughout Trinidad. In the video below my family was at our favourite doubles spot in Curepe (North-Eastern Trinidad). Click Here

Trinidadians curry everything – every meat kind, vegetables, legumes, and even fruits. We cook almost everything in a spicy/peppery version, and for those who don’t cook with pepper, there is always a bottle of flavourful, home-made pepper sauce, or kuchela (grated green mango cooked in a special Indian spice called masala), to serve on the side.

A must-have when I visit Trinidad, and to take back to Jamaica is ‘buss-up-shut’ or paratha roti, and dhal puri roti. Roti is veeeery popular in Trinidad and is usually served with curried meat (chicken, goat, duck) and or dhal and amchar and/or curried mango. In the photos below you see on the left curried chicken, curried potato (aloo) and channa (chick peas) and curried mango served with paratha roti. In the middle and to the right is dhal puri.

This is me thoroughly enjoying a nice hot, wrapped dhalpuri.

Now, just as a visit to Trinidad would not be complete without roti, it would also be incomplete without having some callaloo with ‘pig tail’, or crabs or simply flavourfully vegetarian. Coo-coo and Callaloo is the national dish of Trinidad & Tobago. Coo-coo is made from cornmeal, and callaloo from dasheen leaves, ochres and coconut milk as seen in the photo below. Below this photo to the left is a picture of coo-coo and to the right is my plate of callaloo served with pelau (pronounced pay-lahw), which is another popular ‘Trini’ dish; coleslaw & boiled ripe plantain - all prepared by my mother.

For breakfast Trinidadians’ answer for Jamaican fried dumplings is roast or fried bake and sada roti, which we have with a range of things including bodi. In the pictures below you see a bunch of bodi before preparation for cooking as well at my plate of curried bodi served with white rice and complimented with kuchela and curried mango. We also have bake with cooked up saltfish (buljol), stewed pumpkin, fried aloo (potato), bhaji (Jamaican call this callaloo) or baigan (pronounced bye-gan) choka (roasted melongene or egg plant). The top two photos below captured my father roasting the melongene (left), and then the final baigan choka, which I had with the ‘roast’ bake seen in the bottom photos below.

I simply must mention how efficient my mother is in the kitchen. She loves to cook (unlike me) and so one day I had a special visitor who did not eat meat, rice, or white flour. My mother quickly ‘whipped up’ some caraille (pronounced Kah-rye-lee) - seen in the photos below - which is called ceracee (pronounced sirr-see by Jamaicans).

She coupled this with some dhal, a soup-like dish (made from yellow split peas and seasoned with Indian spices including geerah), some kuchela, and curried mango. While the rest of us had this with white rice, she prepared some boiled green bananas for our guest, and we all washed our meal down with some homemade (of course) tamarind juice. In the picture below we see dhal and white rice with some bhaji and sliced tomatoes.

Well, you must know that a Caribbean staple is soup of all kinds. In Trinidad, our popular soups are cow foot/heel, pigeon peas, and corn soup. During this visit, I had all three (oh joy, oh delight). My mother specially cooked a big pot of rich pigeon (gungo) peas soup seen in the photo below. The peas were lovingly provided by my eldest sister. Mummy treated me to her scrumptious cow heel soup as well.

I had corn soup (below left and center) however, from the roadside vendors at the Lady Hochoy Highway Lookout, where I also got some chicken foot souse (below right).

You might have figured out by now, that indulging in ‘street food is a favorite ‘Trini’ (Caribbean) thing LOL. My youngest sister and I are demonstrating here that we are “Trini to de bone”:

I must not forget our indigenous sweetbread, the specialty of another of my sisters, who baked some, especially for me. Sweetbread is Trinidad’s answer to Jamaica’s spicy Easter bun. One of the main differences is that one of the main ingredients of sweetbread is grated coconut while none is in the spiced bun. Jamaicans have something similar made with grated coconut called toto, but minus the fruits.

By way of fruits and drinks, in addition to tamarind juice, I had many a tall, cool glass of mauby (pronounced “more-bee”, and made with the bark of a special tree, enhanced with aromatic spices and essence), and grapefruit juice from the grapefruit tree on the property. I ate oranges every day picked right off the trees on the property as well. And oooooh, I had many a cup of homemade soursop ice-cream. Delightful. Lactose intolerance had to take a back seat for that one.

The list of foods is endless and has already taken up almost the entire blog. Suffice it to say, almost every day I had the delight of feasting my palate on a different tasty morsel. This meant there was a lot of cooking, most of which was done by my mother (thankfully, as I have NOT inherited the love for cooking from her, nor her speed and efficiency in the kitchen).

With all that cooking, you would expect there would be a lot of waste – fruit and vegetable peelings, seeds, eggshells, and leftover cooked food.

Not in this house!!! NOTHING IS WASTED. You would think that trash – skin, peelings, seeds, leftover food is only good for the trash and should be discarded. Not so. Excess food is frozen for later use, and waste is re-used, re-purposed or recycled. Leftover cooked food is fed to the dogs Jazzy and Sheba, and if it is too much for them on any one day, it is frozen and re-cooked and ‘served’ to them at a later date. Orange peel is dried and used for tea. Almost every tree leaf (cinnamon, bay, mango, soursop, caraili, etc., etc., etc.) is used either to flavor dishes or drinks or drawn and had as tea for medicinal or health-boosting purposes.

I have written in a previous blog about my mother’s garden. She is an avid gardener mainly of ornamental plants but also vegetables and herbs. Well, gardens thrive on compost, so everything organic is saved and used as compost for the garden. Even ripe banana skin is saved, blended, and used as a form of fertilizer and insect repellent.

In the photos above, sweet peppers (far left) and cabbages (middle) are growing in soil rich with compost, and dried coconut husks are providing the right environment for orchids (far right).

Even non-biodegradable objects are re-used and re-purposed. In the middle photograph above, cabbages are growing in hanging cut plastic bottles. Disposable cups are used to set seedlings. Plastic water bottles are collected and then taken to the relevant places for recycling.

In the photos below we see where larger plastic bottles are cut, painted, and re-purposed as lovely, cute flower pots - a ‘cat’ flower pot on the left and two ‘pig’ pots on the right. You can also see an old boot transformed into a flower pot.

What is normally considered useless or even a nuisance or burdensome by most people, serve a very important purpose in this home and is NOT wasted.

So too with pain. We experience hard things in life that cause us pain – physical and emotional. We experience so much pain in life due to for example sickness, illness, rejection, abuse, disappointment, failure, loss of money, home, and even life. Physical pain is an indication of something wrong in our body and is an opportunity to discover the source and correct it. Instead, we want to avoid pain. When we feel pain, we just want to get rid of it. Think about what would happen if when we feel pain in our bodies, we just address the pain and not the source? If the root cause is not corrected, that could result in more serious illness, more pain and eventually death.

Pain, whether physical or emotional, does not have to be wasted. The word says in Hebrews 12:11 that “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

If we don’t learn or grow from it, we experience the same pain over and over again. Just as with organic waste, if we don’t diagnose or ‘dispose’ of our pain properly or re-use, or re-purpose it, it becomes an offensive ‘stench’ in our lives. The areas of our lives that need to grow and thrive from those painful experiences, are deprived and stunted. The people who could benefit from our lessons, do not.

As long as we are alive, pain is inevitable, but it does not have to go to waste. Our pain has purpose. The bible tells us:

“… when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.” James 1:2-4

Sure, it was painful when after 11 years at my organization, it was restructured and my position made redundant. I learned from that pain though. It got me out of complacency and I pursued and acquired my Master’s Degree. The next time the position I was serving in was made redundant due to the company being dissolved because I did not waste the pain of the first redundancy, I was able to secure a managerial position even before the doors to the company closed. I had become both experienced and qualified.

Will you waste your pain, or will you turn your pain into gain? WEEKEND RESET TIP: Using your journal, reflect on a major painful experience and ask yourself what lesson(s) or opportunity(ies) you can glean from it. If you find yourself stuck in the past, unable to get over your painful experiences – bitter, unforgiving, fearful, and stagnant, don’t waste another moment. Reach out to me – by email, or schedule a FREE call with me HERE. Let us discuss my course ‘Recharge & Reset: Maximize Your Potential, Fulfil Your Purpose’ to see if it is for you.