The African Adventure Begins
Sports columnist Ed Willes blogs about a variety of subjects, some sports-related, some not.
ACCRA – The intrepid Canadian crew with Right To Play — Clara Hughes, Emily Brydon, Steve Omischl and Mellisa Hollingsworth — survived its first day in Ghana and now looks forward to the challenges of its mission in the field.
At least, we think it’s one day we just survived because lost in the 10-hour flight from JFK in New York to the Ghanian capital is any conventional sense of the passing of time. Oh, we know we boarded our flight, luxuriated in, depending on who you talked to, between 30 minutes and two hours of sleep, then landed in this strange and exotic place where your sleep-deprived brain tries to process scenes of indescribable beauty and incomprehensible poverty. But have we been here a day? A week? A month? It’s hard to say, just as its hard to describe precisely what we have just seen.
It’s 4 a.m., as this is being typed. Where to begin?
It isn’t the random snapshots taking from this country which leaves the deepest impression. Rather its the cumulative effect of everything which jars the senses. This sprawling metropolis on the west coast of Africa is a little too much to wrap up in a nice, neat package, especially after just 12 hours of viewing. But we can tell you any place which features roughly 381,648 goats; a restaurant called the God is Good Chop House located just down the street from the Hands for Christ Barber Shop; roadside entrepreneurs who vend both headstones and coffins from their tin-shack emporiums; and a heat-humidity index which would melt iron ore, deserves further investigation.
Our tour started – and we’ll ignore the opening scene where 10 self-appointed airport redcaps tried to help with our bags, then acted peeved when they weren’t tipped – with an interesting two-hour drive through the bewildering street scenes of Accra to the Kukum National Park where we walked along a kilometre-long suspension bridge on top of a rain forest. This is the Africa of your dreams; wild, dense, primitive and while we didn’t see any elephants or ring-tailed lemurs for that matter, Clara and Emily did see a scorpion the size of a CFL football. Our guide Doris also revealed the bark of the mahogony tree makes for an effective alternative to Viagara. You can’t find that information just anywhere.
After lunch at a remarkable ocean-side resort – here’s another thing about this place, the beaches of Ghana are comparable to any in the world – we geared up for a tour of a fortress built by the Portuguese in the latter part of the 15th century to facilitate the slave trade. There are happier places than St. George’s Castle and it isn’t the most comfortable place to be for a white European, particulary when you walk through the tiny portal where Africans were taken in chains to the slave ships – the point of no return. But there was also something powerful about having the history told by a native Ghanian to a group which consisted largely of native Ghanians.
Canadian governor general Michaelle Jean recently took the tour and reportedly spent most of the hour in tears.
The castle has also been named a world-heritage site. From there, it was another two-hour haul back to our splendid hotel and this time the ride back was enlivened by the highlight of the day – our first exposure to Ghanian sports talk radio. This country is crazy for soccer and the topic du jour seemed to revolve around some fine point of the English premiership. At least we think that was the point of discussion but the show’s rhythm was disrupted by a series of callers who commited the ultimate phone-in faux pas: They left their radio on during their call.
HOST: We have George from Accra on Line 1.
RADIO: SQUEALLLLLLLLLL
HOST: George, turn your radio down. We’ll come back to you. David on Line 2. Go ahead David.
RADIO: SQUEALLLLLLLLLL HOST: David, turn your radio down.
It makes you wonder if there’s an equivalent to The Pauser or Maple-Leaf Dave in Ghana. As it is, the country just hosted the African Cup of Nations; the national team finished third by beating out Cote D’Ivoire in the bronze-medal game; and Chelsea’s Michael Essien is a national hero. Essien is also a Right To Play athlete-ambassador and brought his club team here some 10 months ago when then Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho conducted a coaching clinic at El-wak Stadium and supervised training sessions for three youth teams. It was like Elvis came to town.
Tomorrow our group begins the very serious work of Right To Play and while the Canadian Winter Olympians don’t enjoy that level of notoriety here, their commitment to the cause is just as strong.
We will file again this evening. In the meantime, we will leave you with this gem from Clara Hughes. There have been plenty of jokes about winter sports programs in Ghana and Hughes revealed one of the most popular reality-based TV shows in The Netherlands concerned a renowned Dutch speedskating coach taking three Kenyan distance runners and training them for the oval. The show then followed the ups and downs of this exercise leading up to a big race where the Kenyans actually performed commendably, proving anything really is possible through sports.
