Rhea Campbell: Journey Of The Corn Curl Wrapper

Rhea Campbell of The Ursuline Convent School won an Honorable Mention in Ages 9-13 in the recent Canada-Barbados Environmental Essay Contest. Here is her excellent essay…

Journey Of The Corn Curl Wrapper

The bell rang signalling the end of break. While Jenny and Kurt were walking back to class, she noticed that Kurt threw his corn curl wrapper on the ground without a second thought. Jenny scolded him about the harm the wrapper could cause; but Kurt just shrugged it off and continued walking to the classroom.

Now Kurt lived next door to his school. All that afternoon the wind was high: one gust blew the wrapper over the fence and into his mother’s garden bed of exotic Heliconia seedlings. A few days later, while Kurt’s mother was tending to her young plants, she noticed that a small bunch of seedling had withered. When she took a closer look, she saw the base of the stems smothered by a corn curl wrapper. On removing the wrapper, she realized the trapped heat had caused a scorching effect on the tiny stems. In her haste to save the little plants she forgot to discard the corn curl wrapper properly.

Lessons from GEMS Hotels & Resorts Limited: Government is always bad at business, corrupt Government is worse.

Hotels & Resorts Limited product is so bad, the Barbados Government is having difficulty exiting the business

by Nevermind Kurt (with Clive & Marcus)

Barbadians have no idea how much money they poured into the doomed-to-fail-from-the-start attempt to nationalize the hotel industry known as “GEMS”, Hotels & Resorts Limited. When you include the “free” air subsidies and “free” marketing support from the Barbados Tourism Authority it is surely a billion dollars poured down that hole and probably much, much more.

Not to forget that all the while the other hotels on the island were having to compete with a heavily subsidized nationally-owned chain. And Owen Arthur wondered why no investors wanted to build new facilities! To compete against government subsidized hotels? Cha! What… you think foreign investors are crazy?

Corruption, Foreign Bank Accounts, ZERO Accountability

Then there was the matter of the supply chain for GEMS Hotels. For many years everything for all the hotels ran through central suppliers. Yup, sourced out of Miami and New York probably through a few little “handling” companies that took 5% of everything and forwarded the profits to the owners’ foreign bank accounts.

The goods never went through Miami though: only the invoices and payments.