A TRIP TO HELP OUT IN A COMIC RELIEF PROJECT MEANS THAT RICHARD GETS TO MEET THE UGANDAN KNIGHTS OF THE ROAD, THE BODA BODA RIDERS...

“BODA BODA RIDERS WILL DELIVER ANYTHING: PASSENGERS, CROPS, BUNDLES OF WOOD AND EVEN BABIES”

I’ve been working in Africa. Not unusual – I generally wash up there with a flm crew a few times each year. What made it diferent this time was that I was involved – albeit in a tiny way – in something worthwhile. You may have seen recently the work of Operation Health for Comic Relief, a project centred in the rural village of Iyolwa in eastern Uganda.

Essentially, it boils down to rebuilding a vital clinic that serves 20,000 people, equipping it with lifesaving kit and enhancing the local health workers’ training to provide essential care. We’re not talking a cutting-edge hospital here, we’re talking about improving the current set-up of a bare shell that has no running water or electricity but does have a surplus of rats, bats and cockroaches.

A team of dedicated and skilled locals have been working long and hard (with some celebrity visitors to help along the way) to knock down the old relic and build the new clinic, and their work will be appreciated by generations of pregnant mothers, sick children, injured adults and the elderly. My contribution was minimal. I’m trained in neither medicine nor construction but was able, at least, to help with the delivery and assembly of a temporary clinic while the new one was built. I also spent a lot of time with local Boda Boda riders. On their Indian- made, small-capacity Bajaj motorbikes, they are at diferent times taxi drivers, truckers, messengers and, often, ambulance drivers.

The roads across the district are, at best, basic. These mostly unpaved, dusty tracks, pitted with root holes and ridges, connect outlying villages and trading centres. Along these dusty arteries foods a constant stream of people on foot, sometimes bicycles but very, very rarely cars. Mostly, though, if fast transport is needed or the distance is too great to manage on foot under the searing sun, it’s the Boda Boda riders and their 100cc, single-cylinder bikes who do the moving. They will deliver anything: passengers, crops on market day, bundles of wood, and even babies. And I don’t mean deliver a baby as in just take him or her somewhere, I mean deliver as in be there at the birth.

My guide through the intricacies of a Boda Boda rider’s life was a young bloke called, conveniently enough, Richard. He told me that he often takes pregnant mothers to the current health centre where, without power or water, the local medics assist. On more than one occasion, though, the mother, having waited until the last minute to make the trip to the clinic as she can’t aford to travel there and back more than once, even on the cheapest form of transport available, has set of on the back of Richard’s bike while already well in labour and it has become obvious that she wasn’t going to fnish the journey before the baby fnished its. Richard has stopped the bike and helped where he could as the baby was born by the side of the road.

They’re good riders, and all those that I met are good people too. They talked a lot of how they would never “pass by” if they came across someone, by the side of the road in any kind of distress. They stop and help where they can, for free, because, yes, they are kind, but also because despite covering a large area, theirs is a tight community. Word gets around very quickly that they have a ‘hard heart’ if they pass by and the next time they are looking for a paying passenger they will fnd that, suddenly, there are none. But these are working men, they get paid to do what they do when they can, and there are times when there just isn’t a kind-hearted Samaritan on a tiny motorcycle happening by and people very much in need struggle to raise the money for an essential, sometimes life-saving journey to get help.

I rode out with Richard to an outlying village to pick up a heavily pregnant woman and her husband. We carried them back along the dusty track to the medical centre. The woman was clearly unwell; she had been complaining of pain and fever – she had malaria and a heart condition. The couple had waited as long as they could before travelling to the clinic because of the expense of getting there. With treatment and medical attention she recovered and, though clearly exhausted, looked far, far better in a couple of hours. The journey cost them about 80p.

We talked about plans for a communal savings fund from which those in need can draw the money to pay for a bike in an emergency. It’s not what we might think of as an ambulance, but it works and it really can be, and often is, the diference between life and death. Simple as that.

I have ridden bikes for 29 years. At 16, I dreamed of trading my moped for something bigger, better and faster, and I did indeed trade up through the ranks of bikes to what I considered, until recently, to be the top of pile. But no bike I have ever ridden, no piece of Italian exotica or carbon fbre and titanium bejewelled German-engineering excellence will ever be the equal of the humble, simple, cheap to run, easy to fx Indian Bajaj bikes I rode beside Richard and his friends in Iyolwa. I don’t think I will ever look at biking in the same way again.

To follow the progress of Operation Health for Comic Relief or make a donation, visit www.rednoseday.com/operationhealth.