After a real hard day yesterday at training we all awoke this morning at around 6am to a birthday!! That’s right Jonathon Gale from the MLD team is turning sweet 16 today! It’s great he can get to spend his birthday in such a great place!
After an extremley spicy breakfast with lots of usage of hot sauce from me and Danny, we all trundled into Bevan’s bus to go along to the training ground. We found out that Bevan our tour guide is a father of 7!!! with one on the way… We met a guy yesterday with 10 kids. It’s probably safe to say that Jamaican families are fairly big by the looks of it!
We arrived at the content gardens sports club, Ocho Rios for day two of the training. The VI team led by Beth once again got stuck in with some batting practice. They all looked extremly good with the bat and they all seem to be working very hard to get the most out of their cricketing expereince. Our Mixed Physical team worked very hard again! Ruzivo took one of the great catches abd celebrated in great fashion around the ground… As for our team training we got stuck into running between the wickets with full pads on and helmets! After doing this in pairs for 20 minutes each we had players dropping like flies. With respect to them it isnt each sprinting in that sun with all that gear on but in true fashion to all the great young men they are they kept going like troppers. I was massively impressed by the way they got stuck in with not much moaning. There is a truely great team feel between both team and as i said the mixed physical team at the end of sessions “We are all brothers for 10 days”. Brothers look after each other, support each other and want each other to do well and this is exactly how the boys are behaving. We have little 11 year old Ronnie Jackson and 21 year old captain Lee Walker and all the ages between this they all have each others back! I was looking upon them chatting in the bus on the way back and thought how awesome is this! Young people with a disability who some might say have been dealt a bad hand in life living the dream in Jamaica, something most mainstream people would do.
After training we hit the Ocho Rios shopping centre. The Mixed Physical team went to ‘Juicy Patties’. Patties are huge in Jamaica and we all got stuck in with beef ones, vegetable ones and cheese ones. The young people loved it and again it’s another great thing to see them trying foods of other cultures.
After this it then lashed it down with some real heavy rain! This was great but at the time we was in the market hageling for a jamaica football for the pool. We got her down to $1000 with is about £8. It sounds expensive but the people here are a lot less well off than us so a little bit more for something less is no problem.
After being drenched we went back and had a splash around in the pool. We played chicken where we puch each other off shoulders in two on two bouts… I lost 8 times out of 8 and am hitting the gym later!!!
As for now it’s 645pm and we are about to have dinner and then celebrate Johnny ‘Chris’ Gales birthday in true Jamaican fashion!!! Good Times!
One Love
Adam Hall
C4C Development Manager