Kenyan fisherman beats polio, poverty to paddle with elite

BY OLLIE WILLIAMS, BBC SPORT

William Araka is a long way from home - and he looks it.

A beacon of colourful Kenyan attire adrift in a sea of tracksuited athletes, he sits down and drops his crutches to the floor - crutches to replace the large, wooden pole with which he supported his withered right leg when he first arrived.

Araka, who says he is about 40 years old, is Kenya’s lone paracanoeist at the sport’s world championships in Duisburg, Germany.

At home, he is a fisherman. Fishing is a career forced upon him by polio, which he says “attacked” him as a five-year-old.

“I cannot do a lot of work,” Araka tells the BBC. “If I can get sitting work, work where I just sit and do, that I can do.” His brother gave him the fishing job a decade ago as it let him sit down in a boat. There are not many fish - often barely enough for a meal - so it is no living to speak of.

“We are so poor,” Araka murmurs, more in wonder than resentment, as the world’s finest glide past in carbon-foam kayaks.

But his job does provide months of daily paddling on Kenya’s vast Lake Victoria, in the rural Budalangi district hundreds of miles from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, in his wooden boat. And that has given Araka a talent.

When he decided to enter a race at his local canoe club, Margaret Mukami was there to watch. She had just trained as a classifier, an official who places disabled athletes in the correct class to ensure they race alongside those with similar abilities.

Mukami headed out to Budalangi as part of her job and saw something special in Araka.

“They told me about him there,” she says. “They have an annual competition and he beat the guy who we thought was better. So we said we’d try to get him to the world championships.”

Mukami says a 2010 survey found that 6% of Kenyans have a form of disability. It often leads to intense poverty and near-total reliance on family. Araka has four children and a wife to support, and must ask friends to help him pay for food and school fees.