In July 2011 I found myself in a rather
sticky situation. It was 1.00 in the morning, pouring with rain and I was six
hours drive from nearest city. I stood on the side of the road in a village I
didn’t know the name of, bargaining with a taxi driver who barely spoke English
to take us to a backpackers’ accommodation I had no idea how to get to whilst
simultaneously convince two crying Irish girls who I had just met that we were
somehow going to get out of there. Sound like your idea of an adventure?
After I was named the Lions’ Youth of the
Year for 2010, I was told that part of my prize was a trip to the UK to a Lions’
Youth exchange camp. Unfortunately due to the timing of my university exams I
couldn’t take part. In lieu of this, the Youth of the Year coordinators
graciously helped to fund a position I had been offered in Accra, Ghana.
I was accepted into a charity called
“United Through Sport Ghana”, who bring athletes in from Europe, Australia and
the U.S.A to coach local teams in their chosen sport. I was selected, along with
a Scottish National League player, Carrie, to coach hockey for the four weeks of
my stay. Whilst the idea of coaching my sport in a foreign country was a little
daunting, this sort of opportunity was not likely to come along again.
Whilst in Ghana I had many placements, not
all of which were hockey based. Teaching orphans to read and write in a shanty
town was possibly one of the most confronting things I have ever had to do. In
my last week in Ghana I was asked to teach a seven year old girl who had never
spoken a word. Her parents had died when she was younger and she was bought to
the orphanage. Teaching her was both incredibly frustrating and rewarding.
Knowing that my few days of effort would help to turn somebody’s life around was
a feeling that came often during my trip, and one that can’t be explained.
In the hockey side of my trip, the reason
that I was there, I was placed as an assistant to the Ghanaian national coach;
under him I was given the reigns of both the youth development squad and the
national women goalkeepers. It was out of this coaching that I got some of the
greatest moments of my time away. Seeing a young goalkeeper step into the
national team for the first time in her career and play like a champion made me
proud to be her coach. Seeing my youth boys struggling with a skill for hours
each day until they perfected it, made my coaching worthwhile. If Australian
kids put as much time and effort into their sport and education as Ghanian
children, we would live in a very different country.
Of course the trip wasn’t all sunshine and
butterflies. After the first week the realities of living in the developing
world started to show. In a school I was working in I regularly saw children
beaten until they bled, for something as trivial as being five minutes late for
class. I would regularly walk past children sifting through piles of burning
rubbish for food and know there was little I could do to help them. Many of you
may already know that I was hospitalised after I returned with a life
threatening case of Malaria. Luckily I survived, but any images I had about life
in the third world were drastically changed during my trip.
Despite all the struggles, my time away was
one of the best experiences of my life. I saw things I would never have got the
opportunity to otherwise see, and have experienced a small taste of life in
Africa. Working with Hockey Ghana was rewarding, challenging and enormously fun
– and that link is something I hope to foster in the future. I would like to
thank NAB and Lions’ Australia for the opportunity and your generosity; Youth of
the Year is something you can be proud of.
