RISE & CLIMB: THE GENERAL COLIN POWELL CHALLENGE COURSE IS OPEN

Treasure Beach Forum: TB Runnin's: RISE & CLIMB: THE GENERAL COLIN POWELL CHALLENGE COURSE IS OPEN
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By BREDS on Thursday, October 03, 2013 - 05:30 am: Edit Post

The General Colin Powell Challenge Course is now open at the Sports Park.


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By BREDS on Thursday, October 03, 2013 - 04:39 pm: Edit Post

In the Observer

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Colin-Powell-Challenge-Course-targets-at-ris k-youth_15182763


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By axel on Friday, October 04, 2013 - 11:43 am: Edit Post

Congratulation to BREDS, and Jason Henzell, for the continuesly work to bring the Sportspark to success!
Wonderful for all young locals and Tourist, another attraction,
To Treasurebeach.Well done!


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By Zed on Monday, October 07, 2013 - 11:35 am: Edit Post

In commemoration of the new Rise & Climb Challenge Course, here's some light anecdotal lore about its Namesake:

Colin Powell...grew up in New York but his ROOTS are in the West Indies:

Ask Colin Powell's cousin Muriel Meggie how the son of humble Jamaican immigrants rose to top and she has a ready answer.

"Jamaicans are not afraid to lick (hit) the child if he be rude or out of order," says Muriel, wearing the mischievous grin of someone who got a lick or two in her day, "a child has got to know his place, when to play and when to work."

She was standing by the tin-roofed boy-hood home of Luther Powell, Colin's father, at Top Hill-Saint Bess, looking out from the red dirt yard over the sloping hills of this southern Jamaican farming community.
"We're proud people, maybe not rich but we've got dignity, and dignified people--they know how to behave," she says.

She doesn't know whether the general and US President George W. Bush's Secretary of State got any licks, but the message is clear:
During Powell's New York childhood, the values of hardworking rural West Indians left their mark.

At the time of Colin's appointments, there was evident pride locally over the rise of "our big man up north," in the words of Reuben Powell, along with the rest of the Island.

The Jamaican Observer had commented that Powell's background and Jamaican roots "may cause him to view the world through different prisms than the mainstream of the Republican Party."

Powell is one of countless children of Caribbean migrants who left their sun-drenched homelands for North America and Europe, looking for a better life.

In his book, My American Dream, Powell wrote:
"I look at my aunts and uncles, their children and their chidren's children, and I see three generations of constructive, productive, self-reliant members of society."

Slavery in the British Caribbean colonies ended a generation earlier than in North America, and after emancipation "West Indians were left more or less on their own," he wrote. They had schools, good jobs and "they did not have their individual dignity beat down for three hundred years, the fate of so many black American slaves and their ancestors."

Coming from countries where blacks are the majority has given Caribbean immigrants greater self-confidence about getting ahead through hard work, says Selwyn Ryan, a political science at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.

"We grew up feeling that there were no insurmountable barriers. Even though there were constraints in Caribbean society, there was always the perception that one could do well, given they had an education and were persistent." (Ryan)

Luther Powell left Top Hill in the early 1920's, around the same time that Colin Powell's mother, Ariel, left her small western Jamaican town. The two met and married in New York City, where Powell was born in 1937.

Many of the adults in his family hadn't lived in Jamaica for decades but the Island Culture pulsed through his youth and stayed with him.

As a child, Chrismas dinner was curried goat, a Caribbean specialty, he wrote in his book. Afterward came dancing to calypso and Appleton rum--"in my family, to serve anything else was considered an affront."

When Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calypso tunes drifted from his Pentagon office. But his aides "did not get the pidgin lyrics and missed missed most of the innuendo. But then, you do not hear much calypso music in the Pentagon's E-Ring."

When Powell returned to Jamaica in 1992, at the invitation of then-Prime Minister Michael Manley and again for a Barbara Walters TV interview in 1994, he walked down the narrow, rutted trail and through fields of knee-high guinea grass and stood in the shade of a guongo tree in the yard of his father's four-room house.
He and his wife, Alma, paid their respects to his grandparents, who are buried on the property, and met relatives whom he recognized because they resembled him.
On the visit, among the newest generation of Powells was then-5-year-old Christopher, whose creased eyes and stern mouth make him look just like the general.
Asked by a reporter what he thought of George Bush's choice for Secretary of State, Christopher replied:
"Auntie told me he run America!"

(from Matthew Rosenberg's AP Report)