Chasing Waterfalls and Treasure

It's just after 7.30 on Sunday morning and I've already been awake for over an hour, courtesy of some of the kids deciding to head for an early morning game of basketball right outside my window, adding to barking dogs, heat and apocalyptic rainfall in the list of things designed to keep me from my sleep.

Anyway, I shouldn't complain - I have a cup of strong Jamaican coffee to hand, and I've just been wished 'Happy Father's Day' by Miss Carol. If I'm feeling a little more tired than usual this morning, it is probably because my Saturday evening's entertainment consisted of an hour-long game of three-a-side football. I can't remember the last time I ran so much, the surprising thing being that I DID actually keep up with the Duracell bunny-like boys who all put me to total shame in the fitness stakes. Still, it seriously wiped me out, so much so that I was in bed for 10pm. Oh how my life has changed in a short two weeks.

So what's the news this week? Well it's been much hotter for one thing and I'm now starting to develop the beginnings of a pretty impressive tan. In terms of school duties, the week has been dominated by cricket, partly because I've discovered that having the kids outside rather than as a captive audience confined in an enclosed space makes it much more difficult to round them up, especially as it's after school and there are only a few teachers about to tell them they have to - those who don't want to play sports simply drift off and do their own thing. Cricket, then, is just the easiest option, because it guarantees a hardcore of at least 12 to 14 boys, some days more, turning up.



Britney works the camera

There's also the fact that the first 'proper' coaching session  I ran on Tuesday went really well, when I put a large group of older boys through some bowling drills (for all their enthusiasm, far too many of them don't understand the concept of not chucking the ball), followed by a 'proper' match, with two teams, captains, field placings, rules and everything. It ended up being a pretty exciting and entertaining game - the team batting second just about managed to scrape home to the 56 they needed for victory thanks to four byes in the last over, and it drew a pretty sizeable crowd of staff and other pupils. Even the principal commented on it the next day, asking me if I'd be doing the same again that day, so I guess I'm partly duty bound not to change a winning formula.

And anyway, it's not like I haven't tried to diversify a bit in getting the girls involved. On Wednesday I was all set to run a Volleyball session with them, having seen how many got involved in a knock about game during the weekend. Come 3.15pm, I told maybe three or four older girls about what was going on, and then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. By 4.00pm I decided enough was enough and sacked it off to go and play cricket with the group of boys who had spent the last half and hour pestering me to get a game on. It seems that whereas the boys straight after school will immediately get changed and are ready for action within five minutes, the girls need a good hour to do whatever it is girls need to do before venturing into the outside world. I've thus learnt that the best time for volleyball is after supper.

The school welcomed a group of visitors from Texas this week, from a deaf church called the New Life Deaf Fellowship (I hope I've remembered that right as some of them might end up reading this). As a mixed deaf and hearing group, with some of them trained American Sign Language teachers, spending time with them has helped me with communication, both in terms of having a ready group of interpreters at hand and also improving my own sign language. It also gave me more to do during the days. On Wednesday and Thursday, while some of the group ran teacher training workshops, the rest were left to occupy a school full of kids for a morning, which I got to help with. Needless to say, eight adults, none of them teachers (and in the kids' minds definitely lacking the authority of teachers) in charge of 100-odd pupils presented one or two challenges, but on the whole I really enjoyed it. I'm not entirely sure why but I seemed to get the role of telling the kids off when the general low-level boisterousness went just a little too far - maybe a week of trying to get the kids to do what I want purely through body language and undefined threats had given me good preparation.



Damien and his pink visor

 I ended up helping out with the younger kids doing drawing and other arty stuff on both days. During the first one of these sessions, I found Damien, who at a guess is seven or eight and easily one of the most competitive kids in the whole school, taking winning at whatever sport he's playing so seriously that it occasionally spills over into open aggression no matter how much bigger his opponent might be, decorating his folder with hearts and the words 'Love I you Kal'. I asked him what 'Kal' was and he pointed to me - on further enquiry, I worked out that he was trying to spell my name, but had got confused between 'K' and 'P', which in American Sign Language have similar hand shapes. I was so touched that I couldn't bring myself to correct him on his grammar. The next day he was happily decorating a pink sun visor in a similar fashion. Kids are ace.

On Friday the American team took a day off to go and see some of the island's sights and, with the planned sports day I was going to run postponed because some of the younger kids having a trip of their own, I blagged on to it. The plan was to visit YS Falls in the neighbouring St Elizabeth parish, one of Jamaica's many stunning waterfall beauty spots and a pretty big tourist attraction. As a bonus, it was decided to also make time for a trip down to Treasure Beach on the south coast, meaning I got to see the two places I wanted to see while based in Mandeville in one go, without the hassles of route taxis and, thanks to the generosity of the school and the Americans, the day cost me nowt. Thanks guys!

Just to prove I've been to a waterfall

I was made up just being able to take in more of the island's scenery on the drive over to YS. Leaving Mandeville, we descended down the steep descent out of the Manchester highlands via Shooter's Hill, heading down into a gorgeous valley penned in across the way by the Santa Cruz mountains. One of the things that strikes me most about the countryside out here is how similar it is to parts of the UK - this wide vale could have easily been in the Peak District or Yorkshire Dales, especially at a distance because of how green everything is. The big difference is when you get close up. Yes, out in what is very much farming country, Jamaica has cleared, fenced-in grazing land interspersed with solitary trees and clumps of shrubs, as well as rolling plains of crops, that look much the same as the UK. But surrounding all of this, hemming it so close that it looks like it's in the process of reclaiming what human beings and their beasts have so rudely been obliterating in the past few hundred years, is thick, impenetrable forest-cum-jungle that is far more wild and interesting than anything I've ever seen before - it's not like you could just go for a casual walk through the trees here, not without a pretty damn good machete in your hand anyway. Most of it covers the high hilltops, where in Britain you'd just see open moorland. It really is amazingly beautiful, and I it's what home would look like if you turned up the thermomenter by five or six degrees and left the countryside alone for 50 years.

The Texans taking a dip



After a stop for patties at the bustling town of Santa Cruz, we headed to YS Falls via the Bamboo Avenue, a straight corridor-like road canopied by, you've guessed it, huge bamboo trees, which skirts the northern egde of the Great Morass, a 10-square mile swamp land surrounding the Black River, Jamaica's longest, and a favourite haunt of crocodiles. YS, set in a former plantation, is set quite a way off the beaten path along a really beaten-up old road (pretty common over here). Even once you've reached the car park, you have to get on a carriage drawn by a tractor which takes you over what looks like the grounds of a typical English country mansion. But following the river up into a wooded cravass, you suddenly start to see palm trees before, right ahead of you, the river is lifted up the gorge in a series of stepped terraces, the milky water rushing down in a raging torrent all the more forceful because of the recent rains (which meant the top two terraces were out of bounds for swimming).

Just to prove I've been to the beach

After two weeks working here it felt a bitstrange to be surrounded by tourists (i.e. white people) again, a fair group of them reminding me of what I didn't miss about England with their grating cockney accents and crap tattoos, union jacks and British bulldogs included. But hey, YS is beautiful, and it was great to finally get a swim, especially fighting the current and trying to stay stood upright under the falls.

Although it is perhaps a little over ten miles as the crow flies from YS to Treasure Beach, the drive down takes a good hour, mainly because the road down is like an extended version of the pitted one-track axle-mangler that takes you from the main road to the Falls, not to be negotiated above ten miles an hour for considerable stretches. But again, I loved the scenerey, right through the middle of full-on hill-billy country, with the Santa Cruz mountains rising up sharply to the left and rugged farm land all around. Passing through the various villages also attracted some attention, the highlight being a group of school children shouting 'Hi, whities!' as our van crawled past. They don't do PC in JA.

Treasure Beach is even sleepier than the guide books make it out to be, which is hardly suprising considering how remote it is. But rather that than the swarming all-inclusive resorts to the north. The bar we headed to, Jack Sprat, is a bit of an island institution, with it's own beach and a reputation for seriously good seafood, although I was a bit disappointed that the 'record shop' didn't have any records, just a lot of over-priced T-shirts. Although the strip of sand on the bar's beach is extremely narrow and the water full of rocks, I could have spent all day in the warm Caribbean water, with the sun falling slowly in the sky to the right towards dusk. Just to cap off a great day in style, I treated myself to two luxuries I haven't indulged in for over 18 months - pizza WITH cheese, and ice cream (seeing as Jodie, Miss Cilda's daughter, had ordered me to try the Devon Stout ice cream as one of the thee things I had to do while in Jamaica, I didn't really feel in a position to say no). Oh, and I had my first beer since getting over here as well, a Dragon Stout, just to go with the ice cream. Yes, you read that right - ONE beer in TWO weeks.

I was feeling in such a good mood, especially as Josh, the American group's leader, very kindly insisted on paying for my meal, that I decided to buy some tat off the old Rasta sat on the beach, even though he point blank refused to haggle in a very un-Jamaican way and I could probably have bought the necklace I settled on as a present to Daisy for about 50p back home. The third and final leg of the journey was probably the best of the lot - with the sun sinking behind us, we climbed up the southern slopes of the Santa Cruz range just above where they plunge into the sea, winding round a series of switch-back bends through somnolent farming hamlets and villages which clearly attract people with a bit of cash to spend, judging by the size and extravagance of some of the houses - hardly surprising given the view they have over the Caribbean. I know I keep banging on about it but the physical beauty of Jamaica really is something to be seen.

As I was taking all this in it got me thinking about how sharp this beauty contrasts to what is undoubtedy (and the people here know it better than anyone) a pretty ugly side to life on the island. On Wednesday, the talk all round the achool was about 11 prisoners breaking out of Mandeville jail the night before. Three had been recaptured almost immeditately, but one, a taxi driver who was being held for murdering his girlfriend pending trial, had somehow got hold of a gun, and ended up being shot dead by police at dawn on the road just down the hill from CCCD.

I guess as much as anything it was a reminder that the stories you hear aren't fantasy, bad things do happen here and it pays to be careful. But I'm not going to moralise about it - I've known rapes, gun murders and machete attacks happen close to homes I've had in Leeds in areas where I wouldn't think twice about walking around on my own at night. More than anything I think it's sad because in my short time here I've found the people I've met to be incredibly warm, kind and proud of who they are and where they come from - they don't deserve the reputation that the statistics and the news headlines have given Jamaica, because this place is not some helpless backwater or basketcase, nor is it somewhere where people should feel scared to visit unless it is to be locked away in some pre-fabricated fantasy protected by the high security fences and armed guards of the resorts. That said, violence is a problem, and I think the causes of it bewilder most people. I hope for their sake it's a problem they can solve together.