Pacific Rim

I’m hating and loving Ghana.

Hating them, because they knocked the U.S. out of the World Cup Saturday, and deflated this balloon we suddenly mad soccer fans had filled up with hope over the last two and half weeks. The dreamy, euphoric world we inhabited after Landon Donovan’s last-ditch rebound score on Wednesday feels a long way away. The team’s giddy pile up afterward, his open weeping, the flag-draped crazies roaming the streets of Portland at game’s end, waiting for me to honk at them — all fading quickly into history. The cut knuckle I opened up twice on low basement ceilings after U.S. goals is scabbing over.  When Donovan took to staring 1000-yards into the distance from the bench after the Ghana loss Saturday, we all stared dejectedly back. I haven’t felt this hung over from the sting of defeat since high school.

But there was a pinch of solace in seeing an African team go forward on African soil. As Rob Hughes wrote, they played fearlessly, optimistically and way beyond their years, just what the continent needed with its other five teams watching from the sidelines.

It was Hayley who coached me to see it as unalloyed victory. “I love that Ghana won,” she said. “They’re lovers in that country. The friendliest people in the world towards foreigners. And that’s where it all started.”

In the summer of 1999, she volunteered with a plucky band of nurses in the small city of Ho in northern Ghana. Her first trip outside the West, she weighed babies, stocked supplies, and filled in records for the ladies as they traveled around to clinics and village meetings. She fell for the women’s courage — they struck for higher wages that summer. She swooned for their dancing and warble-infusing singing with which they’d warm up family planning meetings. (They invited her to chicken dance once)

She slipped into the slow embrace of the sun dipped maize fields she crossed on the way to work every mornin,g of the long hellos, the Jesus-Rests-Here shoe shops in the townships, the barefoot seven-year old who taught her to drum on newly stretched calfskin, the covered pickups which she packed in with 20 other fragrant bodies, and the way everyone wanted to chat about “Moanika Lewinsky.”   The seed of a worldly, pro-poor advocate was planted in Hayley that summer. How could they be blissful and driven amongst all that poverty

A picture of the nurses landed on the cover page of her senior thesis the next year, about the emerging African feminist voice in literature.

And the rest of the pictures came with in an album toted by Hayley to our first official non-date the following year: a mac-and-cheese party with a bunch of other folks at the house I was living in in Trenton, NJ. As Hay walked us through the impeccably labeled and placed photos and their attached tales, I was buzzing with comments and jokes, beset again with some of the Africa fever I’d gotten from extended stays in a then-peaceful and thriving Zimbabwe in ’84 and ’94. I may have even warbled myself.

She would have none of it. She headed straight on through that thick stack of photo paper and all the unseen anecdotes in the folds. At the time I was put off by it. Why was she ignoring my fabulous sense of humor?  All the same, I was drawn to her even more. I think it’s because she had a story to tell, of a place that had moved her. And she wasn’t going to be thrown off by me.

Africa was our first tie. Eventually we could talk about it sans awkwardness. Not only of a place far away, but one that pulled life into a new sort of light, where we saw all that we had and also the beauty of things stripped to their essence. The next year we were steady pen pals while she was in Uganda, working with children on the fringes of a bush war. I’d never been in a war, but at least I’d been a mzungu, a bobbing pale face in a dark sea.

The Lake region’s wars put a bloody stain on that gleaming Ghanaian Africa for Hay. The Zimbabwe I knew, the one that supported the strong, mixed-race government school that taught me my times tables and cursive, crumbled under the weight of  Mugabe’s cynical rule.

But nothing could erase the big heartedness Hay felt that summer in Ho, a life force that ebbs and flows from the Gold Coast to the Swahili Coast, and from the Horn to the Highveld of South Africa. There was no doubt who she was rooting for, without the slightest tug of patriotism, in the game in Rustenberg Saturday. “They are this island of peace, the heart of the Pan Africa movement.” When the Black Stars ran their flag around the stadium after the draining finish, I confess I loved seeing their smiles. “For Africa,” the players called out. That irrepressible African smile buoys the world and coaxes you to shake off whatever is weighing you down, even if it is a crushing defeat.