Hurling with the Ethiopians

At a time when the pressures being placed on inter-county GAA players and their time has never been greater, the edifying story of Limerick hurler Gavin O’Mahony’s decision to pack away his hurl at the start of the 2012 season and lend his support to a charity project in Ethiopia is one that deserves to be told.

O’Mahony, 24, and four other inter-county hurlers – his Kilmallock and Limerick team-mate Graeme Mulcahy, John Conlon and Philip Brennan from Clare and Dublin’s Niall Corcoran – returned from an 11-day trip to the East African country last Monday, where they used their profile to help Playing for Life, the 2011 GAA Charity of the Year which was established by RTÉ Sports Presenter Tracy Piggott, to help build a community sports facility and teach Gaelic Games to the local community.

O’Mahony, who captained Limerick to the Allianz League Division II title last year, was contacted by Seamus Hayes of Playing for Life last July and asked to lend his support. “Seamus is the kind of guy that you don’t turn away! He does Trojan work with the charity and he’s a real character,” says the Kilmallock man.

O’Mahony soon roped his club-mate and Limerick colleague Mulcahy into joining him on the trip, which was scheduled for the middle of pre-season training. New Limerick manager John Allen gave the pair his blessing and furnished them with a training programme for the duration of their stay in Ethiopia.

After a mammoth fund-raising effort that involved running quiz nights and green and white days in local schools, the pair raised over €9,000 between them.

“With the two of us being from the same town it was always going to be difficult, but as it turned out we got a lot of help from schools around the county and the clubs gave us a lot of support. We raised over just over €9,000," O'Mahony continues.

“People were brilliant. People were coming from all angles with money, people you would never imagine would have it to give.

“There are an awful lot of charities around, but the fact that people can put a face to myself and Graeme made it that little bit easier.”

They left Ireland, accompanied by a team of volunteers from Wexford, on Sunday, January 22 and flew to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, took another flight to Mek’ele in the north of the country and then spent six hours driving to their destination, Addrigat, on the Eritrean border.

It was there that the group teamed up with Support Africa, an Irish-funded charity that sets up schools and nurseries for disadvantaged kids. The facilities allow single mothers to drop off their kids in the morning, where they will be fed and vaccinated. The mothers are educated and given financial help to rent their own homes with a view to buying them in the long-term.

One of the main reasons for the trip was to build a community sports facility at a local school, which over 2,000 children will have access to each day. Working in the school allowed O’Mahony and the other GAA players to impart some of their skills to the local community and to bring Gaelic Games to the people of Ethiopia. Remarkably, a game that is uncannily similar to hurling, karsa, is popular in the region and inevitably a game between the locals and the visitors was organised. Thousands turned out to watch the unusual spectacle.

Unlike hurling, the stick used to play karsa has no defined shape and rather than a sliotar they use a rubber ball the size of a golf ball made from car tyres.

“They play village against village. There is no set number of players. The game we played in, the pitch was four kilometers long and you pick a direction. The only rule is that once you win possession they give you a chance to hit it.

“We covered five or six kilometers so fitness wasn’t an issue when we came home.

“It was hard to know what to expect because helmets didn’t feature out there. It was 50-50, some of them had English but some of them hadn’t a word of English. But they were really helpful and they played it in good sport.

“You couldn’t help but enjoy yourself because every person we met, young and old, was really welcoming. The hardships they are suffering at the moment is ridiculous. It’s cruel, but they don’t bat an eyelid, they have a smile on their faces and they just get on with it. It would inspire you to be honest.”

The trip also brought the group to the towns of Aksum and Lalibela further south. Ethiopia, its landscape and remarkably resilient people left an imprint on all involved.

“It was absolutely brilliant. It’s very hard to know what to expect. The country itself is such a beautiful place. It’s like paradise over there. They have the tourism structures in place to be one of the top destinations in the world.

“But the people, the whole lot, even the group we travelled over with rose to the occasion. The locals took us on board and were very welcoming. You come back and you wouldn’t have any complaints about going to training or going to work. I was just glad of the opportunity to have the experience.

“When you go out there and see where the money is going – we all see the ads on television – you can see how it can keep them going. You are literally talking that a couple of euro can keep a family alive. When you see it first hand you really appreciate the work charities are doing.”

Given the constraints on his time and the fund-raising efforts required, it could be a while before O’Mahony gets to return to Ethiopia, but he is determined to lend any help he can to Playing for Life and the incredible work they do.

In the meantime, he landed home last Friday and was under orders to be in Sixmilebridge the next day for the Waterford Crystal Cup match against a Clare side featuring another man who was on the trip, John Conlon. He and Mulcahy were brought on as subs for Limerick that day and started the replay, which Limerick lost, on Wednesday night.

It was nice to step away from the carousel for a while, but as O’Mahony says: ‘You’d be glad to get back to it straight away.” He wouldn’t have it any other way.