This year’s 13th Annual Festival Noel was a night that one should not have missed for many reasons. The main reason would definitely have to be the huge variety of delicious food that was prepared and served by all the participating restaurants. Grand Bahama’s top restaurants were out in full force and ready to delight the hundreds of attendees with special dishes that they prepared as they all competed for the title of Chef Noel 2007.

Restaurants competing this year were the Harbour Room, The Ferry House, The Grouper Grill, China Beach, Sabor, and Joe Ret Catering. The competition was fierce, but in the end it was new restaurant and first time competitor Sabor, located at the Pelican Bay hotel, that took the title.
Under the direction of Chef Worly Volundarson, this team of chefs won over the attendees with zest and pizzazz and let’s face it, their stomachs too. Wowing the crowd with their cooking and dancing skills, attendees lined up wanting more and more of what Sabor had to offer. “I think it’s great and absolutely wonderful that we won” says Chef Worly of Sabor, “my team and I are all so very pleased with the way things turned out”. When asked what it was that he thought tipped the scales in their favor, Chef Worly stated, “It was the fact that we prepared everything from scratch while were out there. We brought everything and prepped right there basically we had the entire kitchen set up right on site. Everything was really fresh!”

Karin Sanchez, Chairman for the Grand Bahama Regional Branch of The Bahamas National Trust was absolutely thrilled about the way everything turned out and commented that “I was just so amazed with the presentation of Chef Worly and his team, not only when it came to the food but their set up was simply fantastic”. She went on to add, “all the restaurants this year were tremendous. We had so many compliments on the variety and quantity of food this year. Our sincere thanks to each restaurant and their teams.”

The winner of this year’s competition receives a month long blitz of their restaurant on Cool 96 FM radio, a year’s worth of free advertisements in the Bahama Buy & Sell, five one hundred dollar gift certificates from Bristol Wines and Spirits, who were also the main sponsors of the event, and five embroidered chef uniforms with “Chef Noel Winners 2007” compliments of The Uniform Place.

With a new winner claiming the title of Chef Noel, there is a new target to beat during next year’s competition. But until then, Sabor reigns as the newly emerged Chef Noel winners for 2007 at the 13th Annual Festival Noel.

BIMINI, January 31, 2008 – As growth of employment slows in the Bahamas, Bimini Bay Resort and Marina has a different outlook that focuses on doubling its current staff this year and putting much effort into hospitality training; techniques will include schooling staff in culinary classes, customer service and self development courses among others, and seeking qualified professional individuals for positions in different specialty areas.

According to the Annual Labor Force and Household Survey, The unemployment rate in Grand Bahama increased from 8.3 percent to 8.8 percent in 2007; but in contrast, Bimini Bay Resort has a staff directory of nearly 200 Bahamians, most coming from Nassau and Freeport, and has plans to hire at least another 100 over the next year.

“I was looking for work for a long time before I found Bimini Bay Resort and I have never learned so much in my life,” states current wedding coordinator Nathalie Rutherford. It’s a tough economy out there right now but Bimini is seeing better days. We have a lot of tourists and I have a large workload. I couldn’t be happier with my current position.”

Averaging about 10 new hires a month, the resort plans to fill positions ranging from front desk managers to security officers, teaching them to hold successful and stable positions in the hospitality industry and allowing them to train with the finest. To date, Johnson & Wales University has been commissioned by the resort to hold a two-week training session in the beginning of 2008 with future courses to be implemented into a regular training curriculum for employees.

In regards to tourism, the Minister for Finance, Zhivargo Laing, states, “the growth rate for the Bahamian economy had indeed slowed in 2007 to 3.1 percent, down from 3.4 percent in 2006.” Laing continues, ”Arrivals to The Bahamas were reduced by 3.8 percent to 3.93 million in the first 10 months of the year in contrast to the 0.5 percent expansion in the previous year, as all of the major markets – New Providence, Grand Bahama and the Family Islands – registered declines.

Bimini Bay Resort and Marina has experienced just the opposite. Published tourism numbers in 2007 for the Out Islands indicate that air arrivals to the island of Bimini are up by 32 percent compared to air arrivals in Abaco, Andros, Cat Cay, Cat Island and Exuma – all which are down when compared to 2006 numbers, reported from the Bahamas Hotel Association. And, more local Biminites are opening stores on the island as the economy continues to boom.

What should we remember on Martin Luther King Day? In his "I Have a Dream" speech Dr. King said: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

This statement means that in judging other men, skin color should be ignored--that it should not be a factor in evaluating their competence or moral stature. It follows that skin color should not be a factor in taking actions toward other people, e.g., hiring and admitting to universities.

What has happened in the years following King's murder is the opposite of the "I Have a Dream" quote above. Colorblindness now has been replaced with color preference in the form of affirmative action.

No amount of rationalizing can disguise the fact that affirmative action involves implicit or explicit racial quotas, i.e., racism.

Consider the realm of work as a case in point. Taking jobs away from one group in order to compensate a second group to correct injustices caused by a third group who mistreated a fourth group at an earlier point in history (e.g., 1860) is absurd on the face of it and does not promote justice; rather, it does the opposite. It promotes racism. You cannot cure racism with more racism. Singling out one group for special favors (through affirmative action) ignores the fact that people are individuals--not interchangeable ciphers in an amorphous collective.

Consider a more concrete, though fictional, example. Suppose that since its creation in 1936, the XYZ Corporation refused to hire redheaded men due to a quirky bias on the part of its founder. The founder now dies, and an enlightened board of directors decides that something "positive" needs to be done to compensate for past injustices and announces that, henceforth, redheads will be hired on a preferential basis. Observe that: (1) this does not help the real victims--the previously excluded redheads; (2) the newly favored redheads have not been victims of discrimination in hiring, yet unfairly benefit from it; and (3) the non-redheads who are now excluded from jobs due to the redhead preference did not cause the previous discrimination and are now unfairly made victims of it. The proper solution, of course, is simply to stop discriminating based on irrelevant factors. Although redheaded bias is not a social problem, the principle remains the same when you replace hair color with skin color.

The traditional solution to the problem of racism is colorblindness, or, from the other side of that coin, individual awareness. For example, in the job sphere there are only three essential things an employer needs to know about an individual applicant: (l) Does the person have the relevant ability and knowledge (or the capacity to learn readily)? (2) Is the person willing to exert the needed effort? and (3) Does the person have good character, e.g., honesty, integrity?

The rational alternative to racial diversity, focusing on the collective, is to focus on the individual and to treat each individual according to his own merits. This principle should apply in every sphere of life--from business, to education, to law enforcement, to politics. Americans have always abhorred the concept of royalty, that is, granting status and privilege (and, conversely, inferiority and debasement) based on one's hereditary caste, because it contradicts the principle that what counts are the self-made characteristics possessed by each individual. Americans should abhor racism, in any form, for the same reason.

On Martin Luther King Day--and every day--we should focus on the proper antidote to racism and the proper alternative to racial thinking: individualism. We need to teach our children and all our citizens to look beyond the superficialities of skin color and to judge people on what really matters, namely, "the content of their character." -- Edwin Locke

Edwin A. Locke is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute. He is author of The Prime Movers. Copyright (c) 2005 Ayn Rand(r) Institute. All rights reserved.