'I have to have a greater purpose': Grove's Emmanuel Crawford escaped child slavery en route to football stardom
Cameron JourdanOklahoman
GROVE — Emmanuel Crawford didn’t want to get back into the boat.
As a child slave, he didn’t have a choice.
Working mostly on his hands and knees as a toddler, Crawford often bailed water out of a leaky, wooden fishing canoe with a coffee can. Then he was forced into the brown, murky water of Lake Volta, underneath the canoe, to untangle fishing nets from submerged tree branches.
After working dawn to dusk, it was back to a thatched hut where he struggled to sleep on the floor. The next morning — every morning — it was back on the boat.
Crawford, now a standout football player at Grove, was sold into slavery by his birth parents when he was about 3. They were living in Ghana and were unable to provide for Crawford and likely themselves. For more than two years, he worked in the fishing trade on Ghana’s Lake Volta with other enslaved children.
“The older I get, I start to remember a little bit more,” said Crawford, now 16. “I think God protects me, just giving me little memories.”
Now 6,000 miles and more than a decade away from that life, Crawford is making new memories.
His stellar season at running back has helped lead Grove, in far northeastern Oklahoma, into the playoffs as one of the favorites to win a state championship. His dominant season has helped him become a popular name throughout the Oklahoma high school football community.
Yet his journey from being rescued off Lake Volta in late 2009 to emergence as high school football star is something Crawford didn’t imagine in his wildest dreams.
“I have to have a greater purpose,” he said, “than just football or school.”
Meeting Emmanuel Crawford in Ghana
Something about Emmanuel stood out to Pam and Randy Cope.Co-founders of the Touch A Life Foundation, the Copes have assisted in saving more than 100 Ghanaian children from slavery, many of them from the child trafficking on Lake Volta.
Ghana is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about 21% of children ages 5 to 17 forced to work in child labor, according to UNICEF. There are an estimated 20,000 children working on Lake Volta for slave masters, though the Ghanaian government is working to eliminate the crisis.
In late 2009, Randy, along with Ghanaian negotiator George Achibra, found Emmanuel during rescue efforts on the lake. After what Emmanuel remembers as a difficult negotiating process, Randy was able to purchase Emmanuel, one of the youngest and sickest kids, from his owner.
It was the first time Emmanuel had seen anyone with white skin.
He was skeptical about getting into their boat until Randy handed him three suckers.
Emmanuel doesn’t remember what flavor those suckers were, but it didn’t matter.
He'd never had candy before.
“I was like, ‘All right, I’m in. I’ll go with you,’” he said.
Touch A Life preferred to keep rescued children in Ghana. Let them grow up and be educated in their home country.
With Emmanuel, the Copes believed he was destined for a life somewhere else.
Their former dentists in Grove, Audrey and Stan Crawford, had expressed interest in adoption. They had five children, four boys and a girl, but when the Copes told them about Emmanuel, Audrey went on the Touch A Life website and watched a video of Emmanuel.
“I immediately asked Pam what I needed to do to adopt him," Audrey said.
After being rescued, Emmanuel was put in an orphanage as the adoption process began. That involved months of paperwork, traveling, and finding his birth parents to approve the adoption, which Emmanuel said they agreed to.
For international adoptions, the birth parents have to be deceased or terminate rights for the process to be approved.
The Crawfords met Emmanuel in January 2010. They flew to Ghana and went to visit him at the orphanage. It wasn’t long before he curled up in Audrey’s lap and fell asleep.
“It was the first thing that felt like home,” Emmanuel said. “It was like, ‘OK, I can finally trust another human being.’”
During another trip to Ghana, the Crawfords picked up Emmanuel from the orphanage and took him back to their hotel. He caught a glimpse of a swimming pool.
He had never seen one. He sped through his meal to jump in.
He went from swimming under a canoe in lake water to getting sick from eating too much before jumping into a pool.
After the Crawfords took six round-trip flights from the United States to Ghana, the adoption was approved.
Emmanuel came home Sept. 17, 2010.
Coming to America
Emmanuel couldn’t take his eyes off the screen.It was his first time on a plane, but Emmanuel wasn't interested in the landscape below. He didn’t even know the plane had taken off. He was fixated, playing games on the chair-back screen in front of him.
The flight was only the beginning of the many firsts Emmanuel experienced once arriving in the United States.
All things that seemed unimaginable when he was on Lake Volta.
Audrey, who went on her own when the adoption was approved, and Emmanuel dealt with tornadoes in New York City after clearing customs.
Chaos was rampant. Nearly every door in the terminal was open. Flights were canceled.
“It was the most bizarre afternoon,” Audrey said.
After leaving New York, they flew into Arkansas. Before driving home, they stopped at Freddy’s, where Emmanuel had his first hamburger.
“There wasn’t anything left on anyone’s plate because I ate everything,” Emmanuel said.
Early on once home, he would eat everything he could and as much as he could. Coming from a situation where he sometimes didn’t know when his next meal would come, he was conditioned to eat when food was available.
Stan and Audrey bought items in bulk. It took them a while to convince Emmanuel there would always be food, even as he cleared out boxes of granola bars, bushels of fruit and other snacks in one day.
The outdoors is also something Emmanuel fell in love with. He recalls the first time seeing snow, he didn’t know what it was. He asked Audrey, who told him before bundling him up and sending him outside.
It didn’t take long for him to build a snowman and have snowball fights with his brothers.
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