The Power Of Love
Sports columnist Ed Willes blogs about a variety of subjects, some sports-related, some not.
ACCRA – It would be difficult, of course, to maintain a sense of professional detachment here under any circumstances but it’s virtually impossible when you’re playing a game with Ghanian schoolchildren where the goal is to see how many of their hands can you hold in your own.
Just for the record, my personal best was six and I’m pretty sure we could have made it to seven but one of the little urchins was too busy giggling to give this solemn task his full concentration. Emily Brydon – one of the four-member contingent of Canadian winter athletes here this week with Right To Play – claims she bettered that mark but I’m filing an official protest with the Ghanian Schoolchildren Handholding Competition Tribunal because she didn’t follow the rules.
“I have big hands but I ran out of room,” says the alpine skiier from Fernie, B.C. “I finally had to tell them they could share fingers.”
See, she even admits it.
Day 3 of Right To Play’s Tour de Ghana has come and gone and it seems the trip has taken on a certain familiarity. We visit a school. We meet the kids and their volunteer leaders. The athletes play with them on a field which isn’t a field so much as it’s a barren expanse of dirt, rocks and potholes. And the Canadians – Brydon is joined here by speedskater Clara Hughes, aerialist Steve Omischl and skeleton’s Mellisa Hollingsworth – are blown away by the pure, white energy created by the kids and their teachers. Hughes experienced something like this a couple of years ago when, shortly after she won gold in the women’s 5,000 metres at the Turin Olympics, she travelled to Ethiopia with crosscountry skiier Beckie Scott and others. But that experience hasn’t exactly jaded her for this one and she’ll tell you there’s something about being caught in the gravitational pull of all that love that never gets old.
“You see those thousand eyes looking up at you shining and sparkling,” says Hughes. “They have no idea who I am. None. They just know I’ve come from a country far away and that people care. I think that makes them feel important.
“They have a lot going against them and it’s a world that is so, so harsh. But when you give kids a sense of self and a sense of values, they can go anywhere.”
And that’s any of them. Actually, there was one new wrinkle thrown at us today. After visiting one of the few Catholic schools in Accra – site of the now famous hand-holding Olympics – we ventured a couple of hours out in the country to The Three Kings School For The Mentally Handicapped (attention political correctness police, that’s the sign on the main building).
I can tell you I’ve done a couple of difficult things in my career – interviewing Todd Bertuzzi after a loss, interviewing Todd Bertuzzi after a win – but nothing or no one could have prepared any of us for what we saw at that school. It was beautiful and ugly; sad and euphoric; disturbing and uplifting. But in the end it was again about the energy created by the kids, their leaders and those thousand sparkling eyes.
“Afterwards, I thanked the coach,” said Hughes. “You can just see how much he cares about these kids. When someone is loved it’s a pretty powerful thing.”
And it had to be powerful to rise above those surroundings.
Without putting too fine an edge on things, The Three Kings School looked like the prison compound in Cool Hand Luke without the barbed wire. The communal showers had no roof. The classrooms we saw were open air and had no lights. The kids did their games demonstration and afterwards their leader took us out back where they are trying to construct a proper field – you know, with grass – and a playground. Tanko Azzika, one of the permanent employees of the Ghanian Right To Play office, estimated it would cost about six thousand bucks to fix up the field and the playground but also said it could come in cheaper than that.
“We just want something that’s safe for the kids,” Azzika says.
We mention that in case your school or office or family is looking for a worthy project to support.
Sorry, there’s that objectivity thing again.
Moving on, the other revealing aspect of this trip has been the attitude towards girls we’ve encountered. Right To Play has adopted the radical notions that girl should be involved in their programs and this policy speaks directly to the Canadian women athletes who are here. At a meeting at the Ghanian ministry of education on Monday, deputy minister O.B. Amoah spoke proudly about the country’s girls U-15 soccer team which qualified for a big international tournament in Switzerland. FIFA, you must know, found a way to screw up this feelgood story by refusing to allow the Ghanian girls to wear their specially made team jerseys – their sponsor is Puma, the tournament was sponsored by Adidas – but you sense that, a few years ago, Amoah wouldn’t have been talking about a girls team of anything in Ghana.
“It takes hundreds of years to change people’s attitudes but when things work, little by little, their mentality shifts and I think that’s what we’re seeing in Ghana,” said Hughes. “It just tells me these girls are going to set the stage for the next generation.”
Omischl also had his own clarifying moment on this subject. At the close of one of the play sessions, someone brought out a soccer bowl which the Ghanian boys proceeded to handle the way a magician handles a deck of cards. While everyone oohed and ahhed at the display, a little girl watched on, too shy to take part. Omischl noticed this, took the ball and, because he’s Canadian, almost beat it square before he turned it over the little girl along with the message, sure I suck but I tried and it was fun. Thus inspired, the little girl began dribbling the ball and while she too was awful, her classmates gave her a loud and sustained ovation for her efforts.
Maybe you had to be there. Maybe you didn’t but this trip is filled with hundreds of moments like that every day.
That brings us to the end of this blog. Tomorrow we catch an early flight to Tamale in the north of Ghana but, owing to the challenges of this country’s telecommunication system, I will be unable to post from there. Besides, I have to complete my Western Conference playoff preview for The Province’s regular paper and I can’t wait to file my predictions from sub-Saharan Africa.
We’ll talk soon. Go Habs.
