Out of West Africa: "Heroes get remembered, but legends never die..."

Sunday, August 16, 2009

"Heroes get remembered, but legends never die..."

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past couple of weeks--I got back from meetings and data gathering in Kumasi last Tuesday (I'll write the Kumasi-specific post after this one) and dived right into the maelstrom that is interviewer training, a process which took the full week. In short: training 75 interviewers to understand a 65-page English-language survey, with correct, uniform translations into Twi, is not an easy task. Training will get its own post after the Kumasi post. In any case, I finally have a day off, and am spending the afternoon listening to jazz and blues at one of my favourite restaurants in Accra (it has wireless, too!), finishing off a plate of spaghetti bolognaise, to be chased soon after by chocolate mousse and espresso. Glorious.

A couple weekends ago, I had the opportunity to join David and the baseball NGOs to see Ghana's premier little-league team practice. This team is actually in Cote d'Ivoire this weekend for a national-level tournament, possibly some kind of West Africa Little-League World Series. Having grown up with youth soccer, I am a huge fan of youth sports, and it was great just watching these kids have a good time. Two of my favourite movies as a kid, which I would still watch without hesitation today, were The Sandlot and Little Giants, movies that I feel every American-raised kid must see. Or something. "You're killing me, Smalls!"

The coaches, who were members of Ghana's national baseball team, were very dedicated and worked the kids hard to develop their skills, while also ensuring that they had fun. This team had been built up by Ghanaians, which I had found especially encouraging, and it seemed like the number of kids wanting to play far exceeded the spots available on the roster--but that seems like it will change as more teams get added in Tema (for some reason, Tema is baseball central in Ghana). Even just driving around the city, we noticed quite a few fields with backstops, and another group of kids playing baseball.

I, for one, have not dedicated a lot of thought yet to the role of sports in development--though this is one of David's areas of keen interest. For me, I think it's an interesting intersection to explore from the social-capital angle: can youth team sports generate lasting, positive externalities in terms of the ability to form social networks and cooperate through difficult times? does baseball do a better job at this than other sports like, say, soccer? how do more individualistic team sports, like baseball (where players have more uniform chances of scoring) affect mentalities related to creativity and daring relative to more group-oriented sports? I just had an interesting conversation with my colleague, Noah, about baseball statistics: he argues, and I am inclined to agree with him, that baseball players can be "greedy" in their individual statistics in that another successfully stolen base, another home run, another strikeout (for the pitcher) helps the team, whereas attempting to score more in, say, basketball and soccer could be detrimental to the team (i.e. you should have passed it to the open guy, etc.). (I guess being more "selfish" in baseball could be risky to the team if you increase your likelihood of injury--capital depreciation, eh?) Given the dominance of soccer here in West Africa, it might be difficult to assess the impact of baseball on youth cooperation, but I think some cool cooperation-based field experiments--perhaps tracking these kids over time--might be possible on this front.

Anyways, I am theorizing too much for this blog post. Here are the fun pictures. All shots on the D60 with the prime 35. Yes, that means I was close in on the action--nothing like having the camera in one hand and a baseball glove in the other (for self/camera-defense from wayward foul tips!).