Looking For Elephants And Fighting The Odds
Sports columnist Ed Willes blogs about a variety of subjects, some sports-related, some not.
TAMALE, GHANA – My new best friend Kakra Ankobiah, who’s everybody’s new best friend come to think of it, tells me, forget it, you’re not going to see any elephants this trip.
And I believe him. If Ankobiah really wanted to pull my chain, he’d tell me the same story he used to tell people in London, Ont., when he was asked the inevitable questions about his homeland. Elephants? Lions? Rhinos? Absolutely. The place is lousy with them. Just drive down any road in Ghana and you’ll see them all.
“It was quicker that way and it’s what they wanted to hear,” says Ankobiah, the project assistant for Right To Play in Tamale, Ghana’s second city. “If I tried to explain what life was really like here, I’d be talking all day.”
Not that he couldn’t do that. Ankobiah is a character and on a trip which has produced its share of characters, he stands out like a diamond on a black-velvet cloth. After spending a day watching him and his colleagues interact with the kids of northern Ghana, Canadian skeleton slider Mellisa Hollingsworth grabbed him, hugged him and started bawling in a scene that would have broken Donald Trump’s heart.
He can also tell a story. A few years back, before Right To Play started up in Tamale, Ankobiah was attached to an AIDS organization in London and this is how he described his first day in Canada.
“It was 20 C when I left Accra and that was cold,” he says. “Then we got to London and was -35 (editor’s note – not likely but you get the point). I got to my room, turned up the heat, turned on the electric blanket and slept in all my clothes. But before I went to bed I wrote down my name, my address and my bank account number and I put it on the desk because I was convinced I was going to die that night.”
He pauses.
“I still have that note.”
So the guy’s pretty funny. He also has the charisma of a black Elvis and he, project co-ordinator Habib Kipo and the Right To Play team make magic in the north of Ghana. Yesterday, the contingent of Canadian Olympians from Right to Play – Hollingsworth, aerialist Steve Omischl, alpine skiier Emily Brydon and speedskater Clara Hughes along with RTP Canadian director Warren Spires and your humble agent – took a 90-minute flight to Tamale, spent a day at a city school then drove 160 kilometres to the back of beyond and the town of Bolgatanga which was like stepping into an alternate universe.
Maybe we didn’t see any elephants but what we did see will stick like Velcro.
With a population of 300,000, Tamale is Ghana’s second-largest city but it’s also as different from Accra as night is to day. There is a city centre, complete with the ubiquitous overgrown soccer stadium and a some modern buildings. But move away from that town’s core and the more lasting impression concerns the surreal level of poverty. Developed real-estate tends to consist of mud hats with thatched roofs. We passed a river where a group of women were doing their laundry. Further down the road, another group of women were cooking in a massive, communal pot.
Garbage was everywhere.
Against this backdrop, one of the most serious public health problems in the region isn’t, as is the perception, AIDS but rather bolproducing potable drinking water.
At the Tamale school, we ran into Alison Naftalin, a lawyer from London who’s in her second tour of duty in Tamale. Naftalin’s original project was training older Tamale students to work in daycares but after watching the town’s people use the water supply for bathing, swimming and lord-knows-what else, she’s also trying to fix that. The biggest problem concerns the Guinea worm, a parasite which grows to the length of, well, a worm and is more difficult to extract than an unwanted relative.
“It’s so easy to break the (worm’s life) cycle,” Naftalin says. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
In a couple of months, she’s going back to London to try to raise some funds. If you’re reading this and want to help . . . I’m not saying, I’m just saying.
Still, Tamale is West Van compared to our second stop, Bolgatanga or Bolga as it’s known to the locals. If the rain forest near Accra is the Africa of your dreams, then Bolga is the Africa of your nightmares. It’s remote, desolate, dry, dirty and there are two visible signs of activity in the area: subsistence-level farming and hanging around the hut. It’s also not unusual for a man to have three or four wives with 18 to 20 children and if those kids can’t contribute to the family’s welfare, they are forgotten.
Undaunted, Right To Play does its work. The senior volunteer leader in Bolga said one of the biggest challenges facing his team is gathering the kids in, for wont of a better term, the playground because the concept of time doesn’t exist here the way we know it in North America. Thus, if you say the program starts at 2:30 it has limited relevance because so few of the homes have clocks. But when they do arrive, the kids receive the same full-on Right To Play treatment we’ve seen at every stop on this tour and, as we’ve come to know, that’s something special.
Yesterday, the kids had just started warming up when one of the leaders pulled up on his scooter, jumped off and jumped in the circle without missing a beat. The Canadians, for their part, learned a new game designed specifically for the Bolga area called The Mosquito Clap which teaches kids the proper way to kill mosquitoes. Pretty funny, right? It’s just not as funny when you consider the number of people who die from malaria in this region.
Right To Play has now been in the north for less than a year and they believe they’re making a difference. Again, it’s hard to quantify that difference, particularly in Bolga where the barriers are staggering and if you needed further perspective on that subject, it was provided by Lansah Musah, an impressive young journalist from this area.
Musah, who’s as serious as a traffic cop, dropped by to chat with the only Canadian sportswriter in Bolga on this day and asked the stranger his impression of Ghanian politics. Couldn’t we talk about the Canucks, I said, but we conversed for a good half hour about a variety of subjects specific to this area. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked him the question that had been gnawing at me since our arrival. Realistically, what chance do these kids have to get ahead? How many of them are going to make a better life for themselves?
Musah thought for a moment then said, “Maybe a third of them.”
But you also sense everyone here, from the magical Ankobiah, to Naftalin to the volunteer leaders to the Canadian athletes understands the odds they’re facing and they still believe they can beat this thing; that through the sheer power of their commitment and love they can make these lives better.
Go ahead. Tell them they’re wrong.
On the drive back to Tamale yesterday evening, we passed a number of towns that looked a lot like Bolga before we hit a stretch of road that travelled alongside an African plain. I had my iPod on and was staring out the window as the sun set when Peter Gabriel’s anthem to slain apartheid activist Steven Biko came through the headphones. I listened to it, then passed the iPod back to my other new best friend, Tanko Azzika, from the Accra RTP office and said, “You’ve got to listen to this.”
He sat very still. He listened. Then he passed it back and said, “Nice.”
So, all things considered, was this day.
