Rose Naliaka, the only female professional golfer in Kenya, works with the students of the Naliaka Golf Academy in Nairobi, Kenya.

Tracking down inexpensive golf clubs in Kenya is like trying to find a 70-degree Central Oregon day in December — it’s nearly impossible.

But Rose Naliaka, the only female professional golfer in her native Kenya, needs equipment to teach 30 underprivileged Kenyan girls the game she loves.

So it is easy to understand why Naliaka was so grateful when she received some 15 full sets of clubs — a total of about 330 pounds of golf equipment — all donated by members of Awbrey Glen Golf Club in Bend.

How did golf clubs find their way from Bend to a small golf academy in an African country 9,000 miles away?

Naliaka, 54, does not have a concentration of friends in Central Oregon to help her fledgling academy. But she does have at least one very good friend.

In August, Lee Ann Ross, who lived in Kenya before moving to Bend in 2001, solicited her fellow members at Awbrey Glen for their old clubs. And Awbrey Glen’s membership met the challenge.

“We have limited new golf clubs available in a few shops but they are very expensive,” Naliaka, who lives in Nairobi, the capital and largest city in Kenya, said last week by e-mail. “When I receive a gift of golf equipment such as the one I received from Lee Ann and members of Awbrey Glen Golf Club, I really appreciate it. For us, it does not matter whether the golf clubs conform. All we need is golf clubs to knock the golf balls.”

Friends made

After a 25-year career working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the 58-year-old Ross decided to retire.

Ross, who from the time she was a child lived at various times in the U.S., in Africa, and in Asia, lived in Kenya from 1979 to 1982 and again from 1995 to 2000.

One of her last assignments for USAID was serving as the deputy director in Kenya, and her duties included distributing aid for the Kenyan victims of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

It was important work, to be sure. But Ross thought it was time to head back to the U.S., to a mountain town with plenty of her favorite activities: skiing and golf.

“It was like, ‘Let’s see, retire to Bend or keep doing this,” Ross reflected last week. “I don’t know, which one would you choose?”

During Ross’ time in Nairobi, she met Naliaka, who was working as an administrative assistant in the British Broadcast Co.’s Kenyan office.

Ross has been a golf nut: she learned the game as a child in South Korea. And both Ross and Naliaka would play in regular club games around Nairobi, which has 10 golf courses, mostly products of Kenya’s time as a British colony.

Naliaka’s prowess on the golf course caught Ross’ eye, and the two became fast friends.

“She was just so cool,” Ross recalled. “She was very unassuming.”

On the course

Ross occasionally teamed up with Naliaka in club tournaments, but the two often played against one other.

Ross, a pretty good player in her own right who once thought of playing professionally, did not often fare well even though Naliaka was playing with a skeleton set of clubs.

“I don’t know how Rose got so good,” Ross said. “She didn’t have any professional coaching, because there isn’t any in Kenya.”

Naliaka, who boasts a plus-2 handicap and was named Kenya’s lady golfer of the year 15 times between 1988 and 2004, learned the game at 26 years old when a friend won a vanity case in a golf tournament.

“To me, the vanity case was the most beautiful and handy piece of equipment I had ever seen, but it was very expensive,” Naliaka said. “It did not take her much longer to convince me (to take up the game).”

She taught herself the game without the aid of formal golf lessons, she said. Like many golfers, the sport quickly turned into her passion.

Eventually Naliaka, who never married, became one of the best amateur players in Africa, and she later played on a professional women’s golf tour in South Africa.

So successful was Naliaka that the golf resume listing her victories (mostly in amateur tournaments) and awards from 1985 to 2004 spans two pages of single-spaced type.

The academy

When Ross left Kenya, she left Naliaka two junior sets of golf clubs that once belonged to her children. The gift was the start of Naliaka’s next passion.

In 2006, Naliaka began the Naliaka Golf Academy as a way to give back to economically challenged girls in Kenya. Those two junior sets from Ross, Naliaka said, were used to teach the more than two dozen girls in the academy.

“Golf is my passion and I enjoy nothing more than passing on to the young girls the experience and life skills that the game of golf has taught me,” Naliaka said. “I saw an opportunity to work with girls from economically challenged homes because they have the talent but above all, they need to learn at an early age life skills that they would then transfer from golf to every day life.”

Naliaka has had Ross backing her the whole time.

When Ross or her husband, Herb, would travel back to Kenya for friendly visits they would fill a bag loaded with up to 74 pounds of clubs, the most an airline would allow a passenger to carry. Once, Herb Ross ran into Naliaka by chance in Nairobi’s airport and surprised her with more than 70 pounds of clubs, Naliaka recalled.

But when Lee Ann Ross’ friend moved from the U.S. to Kenya, she saw an opportunity to ship back to Africa more than the weight-limited stash of clubs with which she usually traveled.

Generosity

On a Friday afternoon in August, Ross set an e-mail to Awbrey Glen members in hopes of generating donations to the Naliaka Golf Academy. By Monday, Awbrey Glen members had shown their generosity — and Ross had collected 330 pounds of clubs.

Most of the donated clubs were the neglected variety that gather dust in any golfer’s garage. And most of them, Ross said, were left anonymously.

“There were some really good sets of clubs,” Ross recalled. “There were Callaways, Titleists. Some were truly old (clubs), but most of them were pretty nice. If I didn’t like (my clubs), I could have played with a bunch of those clubs.”

In Kenya, Naliaka could have not been more thankful.

And now, for the first time, each girl in the academy has her own set of clubs.

Once available only to the rich and white in Kenya, golf has become much more popular and accessible, Naliaka said. Still, few Kenyan women play the game, and that is something Naliaka wants to change.

The girls in the academy use public transportation each Saturday to meet with Naliaka, she said. And already Naliaka is beginning to see progress with the girls, and thanks to other donations, she was able to take four academy girls to St. Andrews in Scotland, the mecca of golf, for an international junior tournament.

Her hope is to one day coach at least one girl to the Ladies Professional Golf Association and the highest level of women’s golf competition in the world. But, Naliaka admitted, that is not the point of the academy.

“All I am doing is (trying) to give back to the society for the wonderful time I have had playing the great game of golf,” Naliaka said. “My wish is to educate as many girls as possible through the game of golf and hopefully make a change in their future lives. Even if they don’t make excellent golfers, they would have learned life skills that will guide them into a successful future.”

On the web:

www.naliakagolf.com