South Florida Children

We’ve been in Jamaica for two weeks now and we took our first major trip outside of Negril this weekend. We took the kids to Reggae Sumfest in Montego Bay on Friday evening. Sumfest is a week long concert event which peaked on Fridays event named Evolution. It was a night time concert that did not really get started until 9PM. We got there early and the kids rocked on until about 11PM or so when they dropped out on sleeping bags in front off a few thousand people and slept through most of the rest of the evening.

Traveling to Mobay and watching a concert with the kids was an experience for us all but I think they both got quite a bit from it. There were lots of kids at the show and they played around in a big circle for a long time. It was nice for kids from all over the world to converge at a reggae show and play together. At one point there were 6 countries represented with black, white, mulatto and asian children running around having fun. The only ones that noticed race or color were the parents. The kids don’t care. Well at least not yet.

There have been many lessons here in Jamaica for the kids. There are great differences between what we can provide for our children and what kids from the area live on. I don’t think it matters much to my kids yet but their lives are significantly different from their playmates on the beaches of Negril. Many of the kids are street kids with little or no education and poor living conditions. My kids play DVD movies and online video games on the family laptop for fun and many of these kids have never seen one. We’ve taken to holding computer classes for a couple of the kids near our hotel and we’re teaching some basic stuff about Windows and the Internet. Parents have to pay for school here and it’s hard for many families to afford to send them to school so many don’t attend year round. It’s summer break now and many of the kids in the area hang at a local bar for something to do during the day. I’ve seen 5 year olds shoot pool from a milk crate with some seedy looking characters at 11PM. Sadly you cn see many of them will follow in the foot steps of these unsavory role models and I don’t see bright futures for all of them.