Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Bicycles for Africa being shipped to people in need
US boy’s dream of helping less fortunate hits the road with donated cycles he sends to Africa and other countries
IN 2005, WINSTON Duncan was travelling with his mother in southern Africa when he saw an old woman and a young boy walking down a road together.
He thought of his grandmother, who used an oxygen tank, and wondered how he could help the woman and others he had seen enduring long walks in Africa.
Duncan, who lived in Arlington, Virginia, and his solution was to give them bicycles. Unlike most 10-year-olds with crazy ideas, he did it.
With his mother, he started Wheels to Africa, an organisation that for the past 14 years has taken bicycles donated by residents of the Washington metropolitan area and shipped them to people in need.
Most of the 8 000 bicycles have been shipped to countries in Africa.
Last week, Duncan, now 24, his mother, Dixie Duncan, volunteers, and 400 bicycles went to Puerto Rico.
More than a year after it was devastated by Hurricane Maria, the island suffers from infrastructure and transportation problems, said Dixie.
“They are American citizens, and
I felt we needed to do what we could to help.”
Wheels to Africa teamed with a Puerto Rican organisation, the JJ Barea Foundation, to organise recipients among schools, orphanages and others.
The bicycles included high-end racing models, which went to teenagers interested in pursuing serious cycling.
As a child, Brian Babilonia, 24, a cyclist who represented Puerto Rico at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, did not have enough money to buy a bicycle.
“I was one of them. At the beginning I didn’t have any gear. People helped me with a helmet and parts so I could make my own bike. A few people donated the frame, the wheels.”
One pressing issue in Puerto Rico is promoting education of bicycle safety among riders drivers.
Babilonia said: “People in Puerto Rico are not experienced with bicycles and not very aware of them. The cars think they are the owners of the road.”
Local activists are pushing for more bicycle lanes and posting fliers reminding drivers to leave three feet of space for cyclists, he said.
Alex Wolz, a Wheels to Africa board member who grew up with Duncan and joined the trip, was struck by how happy the children were to receive the bicycles.
“One little boy said, ‘Oh, I want a red bike.’ I picked a red bike off the pile and I brought it over and he just looked at the bike and his jaw dropped,” Wolz said.
Harry Valentin, school director of Ines Maria Mendoza School in Caimito, a rural part of San Juan, said the bicycles given to about 95 of his students will help them get to school more easily.
Duncan, recently graduated from Bard College and is in Virginia working at a political consulting firm. He has collected about 8 000 bicycles from donors in the Washington area.
Recalling his initial trip to Africa, he said: “I was astounded to see the poverty. I’d never seen anything like it. Meeting a kid with holes in his shoes, who had walked four to five miles to get to school, made me realise how much they appreciate education.”
Duncan now encourages children in Washington to get involved with the organisation, and some have joined him on trips. – The Washington Post