Finally, I can say something about the floorball project I came here to work for. I gave it a month so I wouldn't have to report anything negative but it is still difficult. It's more than a month since I arrived and I certainly had a good time getting to know my new home and its surroundings. I also had 3 trainings with my club so far. I love my club! It is organized by a community center in a little village outside Spanish Town. The community is small and strong. There are always people by the community center and they play a lot of sports. The community center is really important, I think, to give young people something other to do than roaming the streets and getting involved with gangs and drugs. So my trainings were always fun. The kids are really enthusiastic but it was still possible to control them and making them do the exercises I prepared and they did really well! They learn very fast and you can just tell that they all play a lot of sports because it all comes really natural to them. I know if they continue they can make the Jamaican national team soon.

On the other hand, there is not really any commitment or any team spirit. We do not really have a team, it's more the community that provides the players - so in that sense there is still a team spirit - but there are different players every week and it's more who happens to be present when I come for the training plays. Only very few boys come out specifically for the training. So we've decided we have to get their phone numbers and will have to send them invitations for the training a few hours before, so they come. That is of course, somewhat different than what I am used to but was partly expected, so I am not too worried. I also think that after a few more trainings those who really like it will keep coming back.

Besides that I helped at some trainings that other volunteers were giving. This is generally fun and easy for me, as I am not responsible, so don't need to worry about anything. In general, the trainings that are organized in organized groups (like schools or the like) have a lot of people where usually about half the group is interested. The trainings that are more voluntary (like with my club) you have fewer people and numbers may change a lot between trainings but at least then everybody is really interested (otherwise they wouldn't come or they just go home). That's mainly the difficulty we have to deal with. Next to that, the other main difficulty is the lack of sticks and balls (we only have 10 sticks and 5 balls for trainings), the lack of proper gyms to play in (we mainly play outdoors or in auditoriums on asphalt or concrete).

Apart from that there are problems at a higher level: the official league was supposed to start on the last weekend of October, but now it is November and still we do not know which teams will play in the league, when they will play and where and which format the league will have. Now, of course you need to be prepared for these things in a country like this, but most of us feel like the Floorball Association could do a better job in organizing these things. And it will have to, if it wants floorball to become an established sport in Jamaica because it is losing credibility very fast also amongst Jamaicans. Seeing that they've planned to have this league since the beginning of the year, there really isn't any excuse why it is not organized yet.

Of course, there are things that one has to deal with, that cannot have been foreseen: one of the teams got involved in gang violence (which is one of the bigger problems in Jamaica, as far as violence is concerned), so some of its members are hiding and the team won't be able to play in the league. This is very unfortunate because the sport is there mainly to stop the kids from getting involved with gangs. It is also true that there are only about 3 possible locations where competition games could be played, as there are almost no proper gyms in Jamaica (sports are played outdoors in this country), so it is hard to get them. However, seeing that this problem is known, we would have hoped that the gyms would be reserved for our league games moths ahead so we wouldn't have to worry about that. Of course, money is a problem too…

As for the floorball itself, the rules they play by on this half of the world seem to be closer to those of ice-hockey, which doesn't really make the sport very safe. We will have to see how we deal with that, seeing that the goal of the Floorball Association in getting us here, was to make sure that they play by the same rules as we do in Europe. Of course it might have been a good idea to get referees too then, but maybe they will in the future.

For the rest, well, I was supposed to teach German in a school here. After one month I don't have a school yet, so that is somewhat frustrating. I was also supposed to have a job to earn money to cover my expenses, and quite obviously this is not possible (because of work visa regulations). And obviously I had hoped there would be more floorball trainings and more language teaching. Currently I really only have "work" on Saturdays. So six days of the week I am trying hard to find something to do, other than to write the paper I was planning to write in the spring (if I write it now then I will have nothing to do in spring so would only postpone my problem). So all in all at this moment I am not happy with how the project goes, but I am working on a solution for that.

On the positive side, we finally had a first tournament - planned a s a kick-off event for the season - this Sunday. Pictures are on Facebook - they are not exciting enough to also upload them here, sorry, but internet is not the fastest here and uploading photos is a little bit boring. My team came with six players (which is rather daring but that saved us from the trouble of having to fight over who gets to play how long and who has to sub for whom), so made my job a lot easier actually. Seeing that they barely had any training at all, they played extremely well and managed to win their first match (against another completely new team) by 1:0. They were very happy, but they really deserved that win too! You could tell they all had a lot of experience playing football which helped them a lot. They then lost the second match by 1:0 against a team that was also new but had two experienced players in it, so it was okay to lose. Even though I think a tie would have been a fairer outcome of the match because we were playing just as well as the other team, but that's okay.

We also had a women's match before the men's final was played. This was rather important to show that there is potential to have also a women's league. Again though, I think that the JFA could do better working to establish also a women's league. Currently I feel like I am the only one who's doing anything for that matter. But the girls are very motivated so they will still make it, even without support from the JFA.

The winners of the tournament were the Kingston Patriots - expectedly one of the clubs that have been training a while. But the tournament also showed them that in the future they will face more challenge than they did in the past. The new teams are coming and they are very motivated! Once we can overcome the problems of attendance at trainings and travel issues, I am sure the new teams will be strong in no time. And I am sure those problems will solve themselves, once there is a league with regular matches, because the boys love the competition and they will be more motivated to come to the trainings when they know that there is a match soon coming up. This will also mean a lot of new potential players for the national team, so Canada and America: brace yourselves - it will not be as easy as it was to beat Jamaica in the WC-Quals!