Day 33--In port at Tema, Ghana

25 September. In port at Tema, Ghana

Today, Bob Chapel, Jim Cooper, and I were joined by a student from Minnesota, Brett, for 18 holes of golf at what Golf Digest touts as “the best course in Ghana.” As Jim said, that’s like identifying the best hockey player in Equador.

Jim’s comparison was spot on. The course, Achimota, was built by the British colonialists in 1934, and I can picture the Brit golfers, in their tam-o-shanters and pantaloon pants, sitting in the clubhouse drinking bitter after a round on a beautifully maintained golf course. That picture is no more.

The Achimota layout isn’t bad. It has a few hills, a couple of water holes, and very nice vistas of the surrounding Ghanaian towns. But the course, the clubhouse, everything, is the worst maintained I’ve seen. The tee boxes were alternating patches of green grass and red clay. The fairways were all clay, pocked by tufts of dry grass. The greens were, indeed, green, though, again, blotched by many bare spots. And they obviously hadn’t been cut in several days. “Fuzzy” would be a too-kind description. And the layout crossed several very busy streets, where our caddies had to serve as traffic cops in order for us to get from one green to the next tee.

Golf-course living doesn’t have the same meaning in Ghana as it does in much of the rest of the world. The course was lined with the shacks built of old wood, cardboard, cut branches, and corrugated metal that comprise the homes of millions of Ghanaians.

And it rained. On about the 14th tee, a thunderstorm rolled in, with heavy winds and a downpour. The caddies knew several families living in the homes lining the golf course, so they found an opening in a chain link fence, and we scurried to a metal lean-to attached to one of the homes. We stood there on the clay, under the leaking roof, drenched, studying up close the living conditions in which so many of the people live their entire lives. Like the bus ride, it was immersion—literally, in this case—in a very alien culture.

After finishing the round—unforgettable for the sights, though forgettable, certainly, for the quality of golf (including my own play)—we rode back to the ship through the traffic of Accra and onto the only 4-lane road in Ghana, the Accra-to-Tema motorway. Enroute, as I watched Accra go by, I wondered what it is in the West African culture that makes what we call “preventive maintenance” such an unknown concept. These are some of the friendliest people I’ve met. They’re certainly industrious, working from dawn well into the night to build their roads, to sell goods, to travel from place to place. In the case of Ghana, the economy is strong and getting stronger (they’ve discovered oil off the coast), the political system is stable, and, according to what we’ve seen and heard, the middle class is growing. But they don’t seem to place a priority on maintaining their roads, their buildings, their parks, their infrastructure. The condition of Achimota was dramatic evidence. Granted, maintaining a golf course shouldn’t be a high priority for a developing country that needs so much more. But when so little—some water and a lawn mower—would make such a big difference, one has to wonder “why don’t they?” Certainly one of the reasons is that this is what they know. That proverb—until you leave your home, don’t praise your mother’s cooking—holds. And it goes both ways: to those who have never left home, and to us onboard this ship.

Tomorrow we cross the equator. Neptune Day.