Ainle Ó Cairealláin

We went to see, I went into the Laji Center, which is where the gym is now.

It's a community center that provides a whole host of kind of services and cultural things for the camp in terms of music, Palestinian dance.

There's a community health unit.

There's a garden on the roof.

They've got a playground, a soccer pitch, a women's unit and a media unit, amongst other things, a library.

and whenever I went in there first I had really had this like strong feeling of familiarity that's then back to growing up and around the culture land and as I mentioned earlier a lot of parallels and similarities but still a lot of differences but there was something that drew me in kind of like a magnet and I became friends with

Salah Ajarma who was the director of the centre at the time and then one night we were just speaking about the conditions in the camp and so on and I had nearly mentioned Justin Passon did you ever think about opening a gym and I was running a gym in Cork as you know at the time so it just kind of stemmed from that we just on a whim decided let's give it a go I drew out a wee sketch on a napkin

about kind of how the gym might be planned out did a quick calculation budget in my head thought it was going to cost around 10,000 euros and take about three months to get the whole thing set up like that was eight years ago now and it took much bigger investment and time and energy and money as well over the years to get it up and running but yeah

Today, like we've got hundreds of people coming into the gym every week with a boxing club in there.

It's also home to the circus school that Lazio Centre have with about, I think, 250 women coming in every week.

The majority of the people who come to the gym are women actually.

And we've got a team of six coaches there, two male coaches, three female coaches, the boxing coach.

Yeah.

And it's open from like seven in the morning until midnight every night now.

So it really is kind of a hub for people to come to.

That's something that we set out to do from the outset and something that kind of was follow on from the gym that we had in Cork that it wasn't just somewhere that people would come to be as you might kind of think in your head in terms of a modern gym a lot of times people come in with headphones on or they're looking at a screen with their head down do the training session in and out without speaking to anybody.

There's nothing wrong with that.

It suits a lot of people and even I do it myself sometimes I just want to go and do a wee training session and get the head shard and go home again but

here we're looking to do something different that brings people together that's available for accessible for people of a whole wide range of abilities and that brings people together ultimately it's it's the bringing people together thing is what makes it work that's that's the magic behind it you know bringing people together to everyone has got the opportunity to be training to

at their own level for doing something that suits them and that they enjoy doing because the first thing you need to do when you're trying to build this kind of thing is like give people something they enjoy rather than it being a burden it's the easiest way to to keep to stay engaged with something if you're if you love doing it