Forget the credit crunch..I've seen real poverty in Africa

THE cockroaches scuttled up and down the walls of the hospital – it was dirty, stiflingly hot and, as the only white man ever to walk through its doors, Kevin Anderson was certainly something of a medical phenomenon.

He lay on a hospital bed quivering, dehydrated and aching, as curious nurses gathered around, drawn not so much by the strange illness that had gripped the visiting Scot but by the sight of his lily white backside.

The former Scottish basketball internationalist was in the last week of a life-changing trip volunteering at schools in Ghana. Already he had delivered sports gear to children who had never seen a basketball hoop, handing over City of Edinburgh team strips and helping inspire orphanage bosses to organise a multi-sports league.

And now he was lying in a hospital three hours' drive from the country's capital, Accra, wondering what strange tropical bug he might have caught and whether the two injections hospital staff were about to administer to each buttock were going to help.

That alone was a bizarre enough climax to his journey to one of Africa's poorest nations – after all, he'd already celebrated Christmas Day in a tin hut dining on meagre rations of rice and chicken, made the stand for a basketball hoop from a tree and been harangued by a woman who wanted to bear him a baby in return for taking her home to Scotland. Yet there was still more to come.

For there, on a television screen just visible over the shoulders of the hospital staff, was the vision of Celtic's John Hartson scoring a goal in an Old Firm clash.

"It was a bit weird," says Kevin, 27, now back home in his parents' Lillyhill Terrace home in Meadowbank. "No-one could speak English and although I could manage a few words of Twi, the local language, it was a struggle to be understood.

"I was in reception filling in forms when I heard what sounded like a football match on television.

"I looked up and there was John Hartson scoring for Celtic against Rangers in some kind of 'greatest moments in Scottish football' programme. So it doesn't get much stranger than that."

And as it turned out, the hospital staff had the perfect antidote to whatever tropical bug he'd encountered.

"It happened incredibly quickly, one minute I was having dinner on the beach, the next I was in pain, everywhere," remembers Kevin.

"My shins were sore, then my ankles, back and shoulders. I couldn't bend, my back felt like it was curling up, I had no strength in my fingers. I was vomiting.

"We got to hospital at 5am the next morning. The nurses were all wondering who this white guy was. They said, 'we'll give you an injection', so I held out my arm. Then they said, 'no, on to your back'. Next thing there were nine or ten nurses in the room, gathered around to have a look at my white cheeks. I was in so much pain by then that I couldn't have cared less."

Kevin ended up on a drip for four days as his body rallied against whatever bug had invaded his system. He arrived home on Saturday – armed with a stash of tablets from the Ghanaian hospital – and was immediately told to take a blood test for analysis at Edinburgh's Tropical Diseases Unit.

"The doctors are still not sure," he explains. "It might have been a severe case of food poisoning or I've been bitten by something."

Kevin headed to Ghana in early December after suddenly finding himself a victim of the credit crunch. Made redundant from his specialised job creating 3D graphics for an architects' firm, he struggled to pay his mortgage and moved home with his parents while he leased out his flat.

By coincidence, it was also a turning point in his sporting career: having captained Edinburgh Kings basketball squad to a Scottish League and Cup double in both of the past two seasons and won honours with Scotland, he'd already decided it was time to move on.

He had been considering spending a fortnight's leave from work volunteering abroad. Now with no job and no sports commitments, Kevin decided to commit himself to a much longer spell working with volunteer organisation United Playground at a Ghana project.

It meant spending Christmas and New Year in a foreign country, where credit crunch woes are overshadowed by finding enough food and clean water to survive, but Kevin quickly found himself overwhelmed by the reaction from the pitifully poor Ghanaian people.

"Everyone was so happy," he recalls. "These people have very little, yet enjoy life so much. It put a lot of what we have here and what we worry about into perspective."

His first stop was in Konko, around three and a half hours from Accra, where he spent early mornings helping with the farming duties, later teaching in the orphanage school and late afternoons coaching the excited children in football and introducing them for the first time to basketball.

"There wasn't anywhere to play basketball, so we went into the forest with a machete and cut down a tree. Then we dug a 3ftt deep hole with a piece of bamboo and a saucepan lid and stuck up the net and hoop I'd brought," says Kevin. "I'd taken over City of Edinburgh basketball strips too – and the children could not believe that they had real strips to wear."

Having introduced them to basketball, they introduced him to their style of football – using the only "ball" they could.

"They'd make a football by stuffing a plastic bag with grass and kicking it around," recalls Kevin. "It made you realise how much children at home take things for granted."

A few weeks later he arrived at Cape Coast for a break before the second leg of his trip at a nearby orphanage. There he stumbled across a group of lads playing basketball for a local side. Soon he found himself hosting a basketball "masterclass" and appearing as guest speaker at the local university.

"I gave them some strips too," says Kevin. "Since then a few of them have e-mailed asking if there are any vacancies for professional basketball players in Edinburgh."

But there were emotionally draining moments too, such as the time Kevin listened to a six-year-old girl tell him how her mother had died from Aids, her father had left and that she was afraid she was going to die too.

And the time he had to convince a local woman that he couldn't take her home to Scotland despite her offers to bear him a child.

Perhaps the hardest, however, was when he visited Ghana's most exclusive hotel to use the pool for a wash up before his flight home.

"There was this lavish, expensive hotel in Ghana, the Golden Tulip, with tourists sitting around the pool, sunbathing, and just a few streets away were people living in shanty town slums," he sighs.

Now home, Kevin is back to earth with a bump, joining the increasing numbers of jobless hunting for work.

"I don't have a job and I've got no redundancy money left." he says. "But I've seen what real poverty is and how these people still love life – even though they have so little.

"And I know there's more to life than worrying about work."

Visit www.unitedplayground.com for United Playground projects

GHANA DEPENDENT ON INTERNATIONAL AID

WELL endowed with natural resources, including gold, timber and cocoa, Ghana has twice the wealth of some of its West African neighbours, but remains dependent on international aid.

Almost a third of its population is living in poverty and inflation is running at around 25 per cent.

Most Ghanaians have access to primary and secondary education. There is a shortage of places in post-secondary education, with just one in nine secondary graduates finding a university place.