This year, Deep Creek Middle School students chose to tackle a bigger issue when planning their Junkanoo theme. Graduating students in grade 9 brainstormed a number of creative and colourful ideas, but finally settled on the title, “Save our Seas.” The idea was inspired by Grade 9 Destinee Outten’s up-cycled fashion design: a plastic bag skirt fastened by a colourful band of Capri Sun juice bags. We decided to run with the idea by combining traditional Junkanoo materials like crepe paper, glue, cardboard, wire  and glitter with reusable materials, like beach plastic, plastic bags and Capri Sun containers. Ultimately, the students would be wearing an environmental awareness campaign.

The grade 7 girls evolved into Plastic Pollution Princesses, adorned with plastic tutus, hot pink sashes and purple crowns. The grade 8 and 9 girls transformed into Bahamian sea species: turtles, sharks, jellies, sea stars and eagle rays. The drummers wore the nation’s colors of gold, blue and black, as Bahamian sea kings.

Our free dancers wore costumes that were meant to raise awareness of overfishing practices. One of our dancers wore a “Responsible Fishing” shoulder piece, with images of spiny-tailed lobsters and closed fishing dates. One free dancer wore a massive conch costume; another wore a spectacular invasive lion fish piece.

Overall, the night was a huge success. The kids invested an incredible amount of energy and enthusiasm into their performance!

The second we arrived everybody had the same idea, food, Food, FOOD! The four stands had long lines within seconds while everyone bought drinks, conch fritters, cupcakes, pigs feet and much more.

After most of us were satisfied we began to here the loud rum of Junkanoo music so we turned to see the brightly colored costumes. The elementary school had won a Junkanoo competition and was preforming for the festival.

All we could see was the radiant colors and lights moving around in a blur with the kids smiling and dancing their hearts out. After the amazing performance, other people went up and sang songs that we knew!

Everyone was laughing and dancing. One local girl, around the age of nine, decided all the girls needed to dance with a boy so she was setting up pairs left and right. After several of the boys learned how to spin and dip their partners, John S. called us all into a circle, we counted off, and left our second saturday night activity.

So far, we’ve been spending a lot of time being exposed to many of the research groups at CEI, such as the aquaponics, aquaculture, patch reef, lionfish, and shark teams. It’s nice to have the ability to “scope out” the different aspects of each group before we decide which one interests us most; after we pick a team, we will choose a mentor who will help us with our Independent Student Project that we’ll complete by the end of our semester.

In our first week here, we all received our Open Water SCUBA Certifications, and we’re going to be starting our Advanced Open Water training next week. At first, diving was really strange to me…it’s a whole new world, and I’m still getting used to it! But, because I’m interested in lionfish research, it was neat to see my first in-the-wild lionfish on our last dive before receiving our certifications.

In addition to diving and working with the research groups, we also helped Deep Creek Middle School students prepare for the Junior Junkanoo last week. It was cool to see how all of the hard work put into their presentation finally came together on the day of the Junkanoo! The kids did a really great job.

We stay really busy here, but are really enjoying our time here thus far. This is such a unique opportunity, and I’m looking forward to all the activities planned for the next six weeks!