Local heroes

A spe­cial kind of gym­nas­tics meet: Bis­han Sports Hall, 27 August 2005. (photo by mrbrown)

All of youse who came and helped out at last Saturday’s class, thank you and well done. I’m sure the par­ents of the spe­cial needs chil­dren are just as thank­ful, and you’ve seen for your­self the faces of the kids at the class. Innit grand?

There were 25 peo­ple who emailed, sms’d or sim­ply turned up to help. I’ll be putting your names on a list of vol­un­teers to call upon when help is needed.

But first, here’s an update on what we’re plan­ning to do:

As you know, the 61 chil­dren who enjoyed last Saturday’s class did so because all of you helped to man­age this ses­sion which was on the brink of com­plete chaos. It is not a con­ducive envi­ron­ment. Ide­ally, a class in that arena should have a max­i­mum of twenty chil­dren, one head coach and two helpers.

We’re expect­ing more calls from more par­ents of spe­cial needs chil­dren, so if we were to con­tinue run­ning just the one ses­sion, we’d see about 100 kids or so in one class. We need five sep­a­rate ses­sions. Five hours. Our com­pany can­not afford to give five free hours.

We intend to work with the Sin­ga­pore Sports Coun­cil for a solu­tion. And I’ll keep you posted as to the outcome.

In the mean­time, you’re all cham­pi­ons. Thanks again for helping.

Surf stop: mrbrown’s Flickr set of Above & Beyond’s Spe­cial Olympics Gym­nas­tics class

iTunes is play­ing an ille­gal copy of Shame from the album “Bad Love” by Randy New­man of which I have the orig­i­nal CD.