He rates as high as Angelina Jolie. Came from a poor background, an immigrant, fought to become one of Canada's favorite Olympian son when he won gold for wrestling and now he's gone back to Nigeria to open a school for his hometown.
Almost cried when I read his story. Damn these hormones of mine.
[H2]A mighty fighter: Olympian Daniel Igali[/H2] [H4]He wrestled his way to Canada, to a gold medal -- and to build a school for his home village[/H4]
T his is a story about transcendence, grace and the shape of angels. It is a uniquely Canadian story that starts and ends in the village of Eniwari (population 6,000) in the Niger Delta with a whole world in between.
Food is precious in Eniwari. Water is drawn from the same river that the sewage runs into. There is no electricity. No telephone.
For years, the grass-roofed, one-room school has leaked so dreadfully that in the rainy season it floods and children go for weeks without classes. When it's not raining, they sit on the floor. There are few books or pencils. Only the big kids and the strong kids have stools. Often they get the stools by wrestling them away from little ones. Wrestling is a part of traditional Ijaw tribal culture.
Families are large because many of the men have multiple wives. And like communities all across Africa, AIDS has come to Eniwari even though the only way into the village is an eight-hour trip upriver by boat. But few people know much about AIDS or how it is spread. For that reason, the medical staff at the local hospital don't tell patients their diagnosis, fearing the uneducated villagers will shun their own family members, leaving them to die alone among strangers.
Eniwari is one of the poorest villages in Nigeria.
It should not be. The Niger Delta is oil-rich and Nigeria is the world's eighth-largest oil exporter. What fuels the poverty is greed, corruption and political turmoil. And poverty has ignited an increasingly militant movement backed by villagers demanding a share of the wealth.
Rebel attacks on pipelines and hostage-takings have already cut production by a third this year. Just last week, two different groups promised to step up attacks by mid-August. They've promised more vandalism of export and production facilities and they've promised to abduct more foreign hostages.
What sets Eniwari apart from other far-off places that suffer from poverty, AIDS and civil unrest is one of its sons -- a wrestler named Baraladei Igali. Canadians know him as Daniel and what they know of the small but mighty fighter is not so much for how he won Olympic gold in 2000, but how he celebrated that win.
He wrapped himself in a Canadian flag, then placed it reverentially on the mat, danced around it and finally knelt to kiss it. He cried as he sang O Canada and thought of the children in Eniwari. And as the anthem played, he vowed to build them a school.
"It became almost an obsession," he says. "School should be one of the safest environments for kids. They should be excited about going to school. And I wanted to give people hope."
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Daniel Igali literally wrestled his way out of the tiny village even though there never seemed to be enough food for him, his 20 siblings or any of the other village kids. An egg was a luxury that had to be shared.
The scrawny boy loved to wrestle, scrabbling first with his friends in the dust and getting caned for having ripped his clothes again. But eventually he began winning local competitions. He went north to train and in 1990 won the national championship. But for athletes in Nigeria, there were no athletic scholarships to universities. Athletes trained. Full stop
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