Instead, what came was an invitation to visit the local Special Olympics competitions in Dar. “Mr. Madai [chairman of Special Olympics Tanzania] came to my office one day and asked me to come to see this special sports event. I knew nothing about this,” Macha said, with a bellowing laugh. “I told him I would come to the event, but I had no idea what he was talking about. You see, you must understand that these children were…” Macha’s voice trailed off when recounting his assumptions. “Let me say it this way. These children—I didn’t know about them. I thought they were not, let’s say…” Again he struggled for the words. “I thought they were useless.
“But when I arrived at this track event in Dar and I saw the children and they were running about and doing their races, I thought to myself, Oh, my God! Can you believe what I’m seeing? I mean it. I said, Oh, my God! and I spoke to the almighty right there to say: This must be your work, my God! Maybe I can’t say it right in English, but I must tell you that I saw God calling at me on that day and telling me, ‘This is your work.’ From that day, I told Madai that I would be with him for the rest of my life.”
Often people ask me how Special Olympics has been so successful in growing to reach millions of people in more than 170 countries around the world. It’s simple. Special Olympics grows because people like Frank give themselves to the athletes. They volunteer, willingly and without force, to give their time and their hearts to something that is captured in words such as “Oh my God!”
Volunteers like Frank Macha are a massive and often untapped force for social change for one enormous reason: when they feel the moment of belief, they follow it, and fall in love with pursuing it, and commit to it. Frank Macha unlocked his own grit, saw his goal, and gave himself to it. We say that volunteers “believe” in their causes and “believe” in their capacity to make a difference, and I’ve seen enough to know that’s true. But I also know that believing is something that lives not in the head but rather in the soul. The word “believe” probably comes from the Old English belyfan, or “to hold dear,” “to love.” We almost always associate “believing” with something religious or spiritual, and maybe that’s appropriate since the most central religious and spiritual experience is being in love. But the root of the word also helps explain the meaning of volunteering: when you’re a believer like Frank, you’ve fallen in love with people such as Ramadhani and given yourself, not just your time or your money. Frank gave himself to the athletes of Special Olympics like a person who falls in love. That’s what a “volunteer” does: a volunteer does something for love, not money. And when you act from your heart, there are few obstacles that can stop you. Believing is itself a form of grit: it’s giving yourself completely to a destination, or a person, or both. That’s Frank Macha.
Frank didn’t just feel the belief; he traveled all over the country, running workshops and recruiting volunteers. And one of those people he recruited was Nellie Mollel, a coach who attended one of Frank’s first training sessions near Arusha. Inspired by Frank, Nellie went to the special school that Ramadhani attended and suggested that a Special Olympics program was needed at the school. And, following Frank, she volunteered her services to be a coach. Ramadhani was one of her first athletes.
He was thirteen years old at the time. She trained him to run a hundred-meter race. He never missed a practice; his running kept improving. And that wasn’t all. “Ramadhani became more and more clean and tidy after he started to run with the coach,” recalled his mother. “I laughed with him and told him, ‘Ramadhani, you are becoming a sportsman now!’ He smiled when I said these words to him.” For the first time, she was feeling proud of her son. For the first time, he was feeling proud of himself.
Not long after my arrival in Arusha, it was time for the invitational 10K race and all the runners from the neighboring countries showed up on time for the start. Another group of athletes—those from Arusha, including Ramadhani—also showed up and were awaiting the chance to run in their events: a 100-meter and 400-meter race scheduled to be run after the 10K. The stadium we were using filled with spectators (in part because the streets of Arusha were cluttered with the unemployed and those with no place to go). I saw Ramadhani approach the starting line for the 10K, but then I heard his coach tell him, “No, Ramadhani. This race is too long for you. And you have no shoes on your feet. You cannot run this race. We have a shorter race for you later.”
But Ramadhani swatted the coach away. And when the gun sounded, Ramadhani set off with the other runners, one lap around the track, then out into the jagged streets of Arusha. I watched as the coach went over to Frank Macha to express her concern about Ramadhani. I heard Macha assure her a van was trailing the racers and it would pick up Ramadhani when he tired. She turned to an expressionless, diminutive man, dressed in a sport coat that hung from his shoulders, several sizes too large. This, I came to learn, was Ramadhani’s father. The coach explained what was happening. The father nodded.
For more than thirty minutes, as the runners raced through the town, there was no activity in the stadium. Then the lead runner, Joseph Mateuzu from Zimbabwe, entered, rounded the track, and finished to cheers in a time of thirty-four minutes. Amazing! One by one, the runners returned. The limit time was one hour. Anyone not finished by then would be picked up by the van.
As the hour approached, most of the runners had made it back and crossed the finish line. A lull returned to the crowd. Then—at fifty-nine minutes, just one minute to go—the final runner charged into the stadium. Ramadhani. He was the only runner left for the crowds to cheer. He rounded the outer half of the track, then came around the back stretch, turned down the final hundred meters. Down that final stretch he ran, and the crowd began to cheer. He ran, head high, chest out, his feet bare, and with all the energy God gave him he crossed the finish line of the 10K in last place before a cheering crowd and a standing ovation. There was some confusion on the track, as no one could quite believe Ramadhani had made it, but there he stood, panting heavily, with that smile his mother saw when she called him a “sportsman.”
Frank Macha ran over to me. “Tim, I am so proud. I am so proud.”
And I looked over to the side of the track. Ramadhani’s father stood frozen. Tears streamed down his face as he regarded his son with pride.
Ramadhani might not fit the perfect scientific definition of grit—effort combined with a razor-sharp focus on goals. He might not score highly on the subtests that measure it—after all, he isn’t even verbal and the measures wouldn’t be accurate in assessing him. But that one element of grit that often goes unnoticed—the capacity to persevere for a goal even when failure or disappointment might occur—there, Ramadhani would have something to say. Because on that day he amazed us all, less by what he did than by who he was; less by his skill and his speed than by his spirit and his relentless effort; less by his time in the race and more by his bravery in pursuit of the goal. His father wept with pride for his boy who had nothing: no real education, no real job, no real breaks in life. But his boy finished a race that no one thought he could. He was the gift. He was the grit.
Frank Macha, man of faith, cried, too, on that day. “Glory be to God,” he said. He didn’t need anything more than Ramadhani to prove it.
FOURTEEN
The Heart off Guard
No matter how inspiring people such as Lizzy and Ramadhani are, I’m always left to wonder why I can feel so alive around them and then, a minute later, feel like the light has gone off. Is it possible, I wonder, for people like them to change a whole society? Is it possible for a whole nation to experience the massive energy of grit and heart that they embody, and change? Or are the lessons of the heart always bound to be personal and individual moments where two or three feel it but the rest don’t? Is it possible to bring a whole country awake to the beauty of every person, or just myself?
I got my answer in 2003. In that year, the Special Olympics World Summer Games moved outside the United States for the first time, and Irelan
d became the first other country to host the huge event.
Led by Mary Davis, a thirty-year Special Olympics volunteer, Ireland mounted a nationwide campaign to raise the money and volunteers and energy to host the world. Though Ireland is smaller than Massachusetts and has an economy that’s tiny by comparison with its European neighbors, Mary convinced the prime minister, Bertie Ahearn, and the president, Mary McAleese, to join together and commit the entirety of the government to the cause of the games. Mary rallied the villages and towns across the country to the ideals of Special Olympics like a boxer determined to punch way above her weight. The music entrepreneur Ossie Kilkenny called on politicians and artists. The young business maverick Denis O’Brien agreed to chair the board. Volunteer applications poured in by the thousands as schools, universities, churches, and sports clubs committed to staffing the games. Irish companies vied for the chance to be sponsors as the Bank of Ireland launched a nationwide fund-raising drive with donation boxes at their 310 branches. O’Brien’s Sandwich Shops pledged contributions for every purchase of their triple decker sandwich. The most powerful sport organization in the country even made an unprecedented offer: the Gaelic Athletic Association, proprietor of the fabled Croke Park Stadium, in which only Gaelic sport had ever been allowed, offered it as the venue for the Opening Ceremony.
In 2003, however, there was another Irish story playing out—one with a long and bloody narrative: “the troubles.” Ireland was—and remains—a country with a painful history of being divided between north and south. Ireland’s is a story of centuries of violence and separation along religious and cultural lines, which resulted in the nation being split between the Republic of Ireland in the south and the British government controlling Northern Ireland. In the twentieth century, decades of random killings and paramilitary attacks and state-led police operations and mob flare-ups had left the people—north and south—simmering in hate and soaked in pain. The pro-British Unionist leader the Reverend Ian Paisley referred to Catholics as rabbits and vermin, while the leader of the underground Irish Republican Army, Gerry Adams, was often accused of being responsible for bomb attacks. The British government was responsible for security in the north and maintained it through the feared tactics of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which was suspected of targeting Catholics for extralegal investigation and even torture. Even though Catholics and Protestants—unionists and republicans—lived in the same cities and towns in the north, and had for centuries, the fear and loathing that separated them was all but absolute. Political or peaceful solutions were out of reach.
But for two decades, both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland had participated in local and national Special Olympics activities together, so when the Special Olympics World Games athletes arrived in Ireland and fanned out across the island to stay in host towns for a few days before the start of the event, all towns were included. The United States, long a strong supporter of the republican position in the conflict, was chosen to visit Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland and the center of unionist power. So more than five hundred American Special Olympics athletes arrived on June 16, and they went first to Stormont, the capital buildings of Northern Ireland’s United Kingdom government. They met their hosts, then fanned out across the north for a few days of host town welcomes and celebrations prior to their trip to republican Dublin.
On the fourth day, having visited historic sites such as the King’s Hall and been given a reception by the lord mayor of Belfast, the entire U.S. delegation came together again to head south to Dublin. There was time for one last picture. They gathered on the steps of Stormont, where for the first time in history the commissioner of the Garda Siochana, the Republic of Ireland’s top law enforcement officer, and the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland stood together, each in full uniform. Something had begun to change. Not just on those steps but across the land. Stories began to emerge of a country cracked open by the presence of the athletes of Special Olympics. Gerry Adams later told me, “The arrival of Special Olympics athletes was an historic moment in the history of Ireland. From the King’s Hall to Croke Park, they had a non-sectarian appeal. They took us out of ourselves and showed us how to rise above conviction. We applauded them spontaneously on the streets across the nation. We applauded because we needed them more than they could have possibly known.”
In historic Croke Park, the opening ceremony kicked off the games and seventy-five thousand people never seemed so joyful. A thousand Riverdancers performed, filling the stadium with the percussive rhythm of national pride. President Mary McAleese declared, “Céad míle fáilte [One hundred thousand welcomes] … We have long been looking forward to this day … Ireland is famous for its welcomes, but never in the history of our country has there been a bigger or better welcome for anyone than the welcome prepared for the world’s best special athletes.” War in Afghanistan had been raging, yet six young athletes from a Kabul orphanage marched into the stadium to the loudest cheers imaginable. Muhammad Ali, Jamie Lee Curtis, Pierce Brosnan, and Ronan Tynan joined the celebration. And, fittingly, my mother, who had accompanied her brother President Kennedy to Ireland almost precisely forty years earlier, spoke for the last time to an Opening Ceremony audience.
As she spoke, she was surrounded by the twelve Special Olympics “Global Messengers,” and she stayed onstage as the world’s most famous rock and roll band, U2, launched into their legendary song “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Midway through, Bono disappeared backstage, reemerging with Nelson Mandela. Continuing to sing, Bono proclaimed Mandela “the president of everywhere and everyone who loves and fights for freedom … and freedom is what tonight is all about. Freedom from anything that holds you back,” and together with the athletes and my mother, Mandela stood and waved to the crowd. When the song ended, he helped punctuate the ceremony with his own resounding message: “The Special Olympics give telling testimony to the indestructibility of the human spirit and of our capacity to overcome hardships and obstacles. You, the athletes, are ambassadors of the greatness of humankind.” Moments later, the torch arrived, having traveled from Athens, across Europe, and across Ireland. The runners were preceded into the stadium by an honor guard of uniformed officers of the Republic of Ireland, the Garda. But the Garda were not alone. They were accompanied by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, whose officers marched in Croke Park for the first time. Together, the two forces saluted the flame of hope, and together they were cheered. There were tears to go around.
* * *
The Nobel Prize–winning poet Seamus Heaney was born and raised in Northern Ireland. He knew how intractable societies, with their traditions and biases and histories, can be. But in his play The Cure at Troy, Heaney saw the possibility of change:
History says, don’t hope,
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Heaney did not venture an explanation for what can trigger those transcendent moments when hope and history rhyme—what combination of longing and healing, bravery and pain come together to create a breakthrough where despair yields to justice. But I suspect he would have agreed that it requires someone or something that can pierce the assumption that conflict is inevitable, and inspire us to want to live at peace. And I think he would have also agreed that such a breakthrough comes when someone does something disarming enough to make a whole nation see itself and its “enemies” differently. We’re all waiting for the once-in-a-lifetime moment when the world changes and we realize that we’re all in it together. We’re all hoping that the fun that lasts and the grit that makes it possible and the inspiration of those who believe in both—that all those will become the way we live, not an exception to the way we live. But how?
No one—Bono, or Muhammad Ali, or even Nelson Mandela—could have answered that question more definitively than D
onal Page, a young man whose road to the games was as unlikely as anyone could imagine. Donal was born in County Galway, the sixth of the eight children of Sean and Mary Page. Sean is a dairy farmer. He’s up most mornings at five and works the day through. There is never a day when the animals don’t need care.
Donal was born on October 6, 1984, and was a happy baby, “the happiest of all the eight that we had,” remembers Sean. But on the morning of Good Friday, 1985, when Sean woke up to check on the livestock, he found little Donal feverish and sick-looking. He called to his wife and checked Donal’s temperature, and all of a sudden, the baby became unresponsive. Good Friday is a holiday in Ireland, so the parents knew that most medical offices would be closed. But by 7:00 a.m., they were so worried that they drove their little baby to the doctor’s home. On the way, Mary, holding the baby in her arms, began to cry. “He’s dead, Sean.”
By the time they reached the doctor, Donal had begun to breathe again and the doctor sent them straightaway to the children’s hospital, but he held out little hope. When they arrived, the emergency medical team filled them with despair: “We’ll do what we can, but he’ll surely not last more than a few hours.” As the hours ticked by, Donal improved a bit but didn’t regain consciousness. He had convulsions every few hours. But he lived through the day, and miracle of miracles, by Saturday, he started to improve. “He baffled them,” said Sean. “They didn’t know what to make of him, but he was doing better so I went to church for Holy Saturday to do my devotions. When I returned to the hospital, things had gone wrong again. They told me he was dying and to call the priest, so the priest came and we had him confirmed right there in the hospital. He was convulsing and limp and there was nothing in him. But somehow he survived until Easter morning. It was then that he had his worst convulsion, and the doctor told me for sure, ‘He’s gone this time.’”
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