Mistakes

I will no longer be posting on this site – as I am not formally involved in the world of development and bicycles anymore.

I am still informally involved – through riding and supporting a team of young cyclists. This venture is proving to have a direct impact on changing adolescent behaviour – as it incorporates a holistic development approach. For more information, email me

Working Towards A Dream

To be a competitive cyclist is tough. It requires hours and hours of sitting on a bicycle seat, training through all kinds of weather, climbing up steep hills (over and over again), covering more than 70 km in a day and preparing mental strategies.

And that’s just to get into the competitive scene.

Jafet is a 17-year-old with big cycling dreams. However, without proper equipment he wouldn’t be able to complete that dream. Thanks to donors from Huron County, Canada, he has a starter bicycle to help him train and take the first pedal strokes of turning his dream into reality.

In the first two weeks of owning the bike, he’s trained relentlessly. In one morning, he and some friends crossed 150 km of terrain as they get set to prepare for the upcoming road racing series.

It seems like he’s on his way.

Huron County’s Bikes Arrive in Namibia

They call it African time – meaning that things happen when they’re meant to and that you have to be patient.

For those of us who grew up in the west, where things can come almost instantly, African time means waiting. And that your patience is tested.

Last week, African time ended and wait was over.

CONTAINER REACHES OKATANA
Finally, the container of donated second-hand bicycles from Huron County, Canada, reached its destination in Okatana, Namibia.

Smiles stretched across the faces of the first to crack the container doors open. They marveled at the bikes that towered above their heads.

CONTAINER TO ASSIST HOME-BASED CARE VOLUNTEERS
The container of bicycles will be transformed into a bicycle sale and repair centre. Proceeds generated from this bicycle workshop will benefit a group of Home-Based Care Volunteers. The volunteers regularly visit People Living with HIV/AIDS and offer support to people who are in bad health and facing the economic constraints of severe poverty. The volunteers also assist children who are living with a parent suffering from HIV/AIDS-related diseases or whose parent has died due to the disease.

CONTAINER TO PROVIDE JOBS
The project will also directly benefit five volunteers who were previously unemployed, as jobs and skills training will be provided. Aside from the income generated for their support group, the volunteers working in the shop will earn a salary and parts will be purchased to replace the ones that are used so the project can become a sustainable small business.

BICYCLES TO BETTER THE COMMUNITY
The entire area of Okatana will now have access to sustainable and economical transportation options. In this area of Namibia, which is generally flat and sandy, the bicycles will benefit those who, at one time, had no choice but to walk long distances to do daily chores – like collect firewood for cooking or water for drinking.

Other bicycles will be donated to children and other needy community members. In the months to come, you will meet some of the beneficiaries of these bicycles on this blog. Stay tuned.

Then the Floods Came…

In March and April of 2009, northern western Namibia was flooded. The area saw mass evacuation as rising waters crept into people’s homes, schools and businesses.

In Okatana, the new home of 300+ Huron County bicycles, much of the community was underwater. Subsistence farmers lost everything – a year’s harvest washed away. However, for many, the destruction also presented an unexpected crop – fish.

After the rain ceased, thousands and thousands of people turned to the water for food. Men & Children who could not go to school or work due to the water levels spent the day catching catfish. Women cleaned and sold extra fish along the side of the road.

What’s amazing is the fish were caught in an area that is normally dry, sandy and dusty. The fish provided food that was dried and stored for the months to come. It will not replace the maize and mahango that was swept away, but it does provide some relief.

Fixing the Future

Moreen, one of 6 mechanics as King's Daughters Bicycle Empowerment Centre

Women in blue overalls and grease-stained hands smile widely as they greet a customer carrying a broken bicycle.

This is precisely why they came to work this morning: to assist customers in need of bicycle repairs and to sell quality, second-hand bicycles at affordable prices.

Quickly noticing a loose pedal, Moreen Gaweses – a mother of two, grabs a wrench and begins to tighten.

“Time by time fixing bikes gets easier,” she says. “At first I didn’t know how to service bicycles. But after the training, I learnt. And as we’ve opened, I’ve learnt more.”

Located at CCN in Katutura, the King’s Daughters Bicycle Empowerment Centre opened in March to provide six women a chance to start over.

BEFORE
Three years ago, a pregnant commercial sex worker approached the Council of Churches in Namibia (CCN). Sick of her life on the streets, she and five other sex workers, sought help to get out of Namibia’s sex trade.

At the same time, Esme Kisting was also searching for recovery. A mother of two, Esme had recently lost her husband who was killed in a car crash. Unable to cope with the pressure from work, Esme quit her job in mid-level management at a bank.  She too turned to the church to strengthen her faith.

In the mysterious ways of the universe, the group of six women and Esme would become linked.

“It was God’s hand in action. He has a bigger plan for your life, one you can’t imagine,” Esme says.

Offering spiritual guidance, CCN asked the Pentecostal Protestant Church to lead the group. The Pentecostal Protestant Church happened to be Esme’s church and after she completed a counseling training course, her pastor asked her to offer support and lead a Bible study for the small group of women.

While spiritual guidance and Bible study was initially offered, it was quickly realized that women needed more help to get off the streets and stay off them.

HOPE
While there is little doubt that the women of King’s Daughters have suffered in the past, new opportunities have presented themselves. Along with spiritual guidance and Bible study, counseling was provided. And through partnerships with other NGOs and support from the church, some basic needs were provided for the women, along with training in needlework, computer literacy and cooking and baking.

“The goal is to empower them through skills training, to help them gain employment to earn a decent income and to better their lives and the lives of their children,” Esme says. “It’s effective. Some of the women who came to King’s Daughters are now employed as secretaries, cashiers, clearners, working at lodges and one is even a kindergarten teacher.”

In total, at the end of 2008, 65 women were taking part in King’s Daughters activities.

Most of them call Esme ‘Mama’. She has become a one-woman organisation who does just about everything: counsellor, spiritual leader, media relations, life-skills leader, clothing distributor, etc. etc. etc.

THE WORLD OF BIKES
Most recently, King’s Daughters became involved in the world of bicycles.

Early in 2009, an agreement between the King’s Daughters and the Bicycling Empowerment Network Namibia (BEN Namibia) was signed to set up a bicycle workshop at CCN in Katutura. In February, a container of donated second-hand bicycles arrived from Ottawa, Canada. In the same month, six women underwent six weeks of skills training in bicycle mechanics and small business management. In March, the King’s Daughter Bicycle Empowerment Centre was officially opened by the Deputy Prime Minister Libertina Amathila and Quentin Bryce, the Governor-General of Australia.

“The bike workshop really gave the six women a sense of worth. It really gave them a better view of themselves that they could now earn their own income,” Esme says.

INCORPORATED
On March 13, King’s Daughters became a registered Section 21 organisation. The goal, Esme says, is to offer more assistance to the women and to build a centre that provides more support for commercial sex workers who want to get off the streets.

However, before that dream becomes a reality, more needs to be done. Often, women without adequate support, turn back to commercial sex work to support themselves and their children. King’s Daughters needs more funding, more staff, more resources to effectively run its projects and get more women off the streets.

Currently, the organisation receives no donor funding (aside from what’s provide by CCN). Volunteers, Esme says, would be greatly appreciated.

“We still have a long way to go, we pray for help,” Esme says.

TODAY
As the group of bicycle mechanics take a break from fixing bicycles, they talk about the importance of transportation for women. Bicycles, they say, offer freedom at a lower price than taking a taxi. Plus, they’re a lot faster than walking.

Speaking about gender-stereotypes, the women of the King’s Daughters Bicycle Empowerment Centre offer encouragement to other women. The bicycle mechanics of King’s Daughter are among a handful of female bike mechanics across Namibia.

“We have to do things on our own,” says Moreen. “Learning a new thing is better in life.”

Back at work, the customer with the broken bicycle watches as the mechanic carefully repairs the pedals. As the women laugh and joke light-heartedly, the bike is quickly repaired after just a few minutes. The customer offers his gratitude, pays a small fee and leaves smiling. Throughout the day, more customers visit. More bicycles are repaired. And interested buyers investigate the bikes for sale.

Bicycles to an Outpost

Wilma, one of Okatana's Home Based Care Volunteers who will become a bicycle mechanic.

LONE RIDER
A man rode a lonely yellow bicycle down the dusty road.
He would be the first of many to pedal Okatana’s paths.

As the container of bicycles from Huron County, Canada arrives in Okatana this week, it is expected many more will join the lone cyclist in the months to come.

OKATANA
An outpost of a community, I’m told Okatana is famous for one thing: it’s Catholic roots.

Today, it’s a collection of buildings that serve a wide rural community of subsistence farmers. Most people live in homes constructed of branches and steel sheets kilometres from Okatana and walk into the community to use some of the services here.

Nearly 100 years ago, devout Catholics decided this village on the edge of a river, which is dry most of the year, built a mission project. A stout church was constructed and nuns and priests were sent to support the northern community. In the years that followed, the Catholic leaders constructed a clinic and school.

ADDRESSING A CRISIS
In the late 1990s, the Catholic community of Okatana took on an emerging health crisis facing Namibia: HIV and AIDS.

Spread across Namibia, Catholic AIDS Action works in numerous communities to provide support to people affected and infected with HIV/AIDS.

In Okatana, as Catholic AIDS Action leader John Kamati told me, Catholic AIDS Action goes from home to home and offers support to people living with HIV/AIDS. They offer palliative care for people who are dying of the disease. They offer counselling for families dealing with HIV for the first time. They offer financial assistance to children who are left vulnerable due to a sick parent or a parent who has died.

In total, the 275 volunteers with Okatana’s Catholic AIDS Action looks after 1,800 people.

USING A BICYCLE TO ADDRESS HIV/AIDS
To better support the people living with HIV/AIDS, Okatana’s home based care volunteers were each provided with a bicycle last year. An area of wide distances, Okatana Catholic AIDS Action serves a rural community and has a huge catchment base.

Last year’s donated bicycle from BEN Namibia and ITDP meant the home based care volunteers would be able to visit more homes in one day and cover wider distances.

However, as the bicycles rolled across northern Namibia, they would breakdown in the most inconvenient places. Parts were hard to get to hold. And basic mechanical skills weren’t often technical enough to adequately repair the bike. Further, numerous children and adults, not associated with Catholic AIDS Action, also wanted transportation of their own to cover the wide distances they normally walked.

A BICYCLE WORKSHOP
Realising the need, early in 2009 a committee of Okatana’s Catholic AIDS Action was formed to advocate for a bicycle workshop in the community.

As funding was secured and a container of second-hand bicycles arrived in Namibia from Huron County, Canada – it was decided that the Okatana Bicycle Empowerment Centre would become a reality.

In a pre-planning meeting last weekend, the bicycle committee congregated at an open field, where cattle grazed. This would soon be the home of the bicycle workshop.

The committee drew lines in the grass where the container would stand.
Conversation flew around about the responsibility they felt towards the project, about how certain community members would benefit and how they would choose the five mechanics that would run the workshop.

As details were sorted out, the bicycle committee parted on foot – all except for one.  Aupa, who was selected to be a bicycle mechanic, rode away on his yellow bicycle. Soon, they would all be like him – wheeling into action.

Anticipation

Anticipation is building as the bicycles land in Namibia. (This photo was taken at the opening of another bicycle workshop recently)

The container of Huron County bicycles arrived in Walvis Bay’s port on 1 April.

Once it clears customs, it will be sent to the village of Okatana, an 8 hour drive north of Windhoek.

The container will be transformed into a bicycle workshop. Bicycles will be refurbished and sold to assist a support group for People Living with HIV/AIDS, run by Catholic AIDS Action. The money generated will also pay for the salary of 5 people who will run the business. They will receive skills training in bicycle mechanics and small business management, giving them much needed employment.

Other bicycles will be donated to needy people in the community. At least 10 road bicycles will be given to secondary school children who are part of a competitive cycling program at Physically Active Youth.

It is expected the bicycle workshop will be open in June 2009. I will be traveling to Okatana in the next few weeks to put names and faces to the people who will benefit from this project.

Stay tuned.

More than a Rock Concert

A child watches a Team BENN rider during a Spin for Life campaign on the Coast.

It was a bit like waiting for a rock concert tickets.

Crowds of people camped out for long hours.
Government officials sang praises.
Children screamed to join the excitement.
A radio broadcasted live from the event.

But this was no rock concert.
This was a campaign to encourage people to go for an HIV test in two Namibian communities on the coast – Swakopmund and Walvis Bay.

The incentive – to stand a chance of winning of brand new bicycle if you test – drew hundreds of people during a week of intense promotion by Team BEN Namibia.

Thousands of people received HIV messaging through direct contact and flier distribution.

A multitude of young men and women surrounded a cycling display where they could try stationary bicycles and engage in contests.

And hundreds of people waited in queue to test for HIV. In all, the two centres that partnered with BEN Namibia, saw a 600% spike in the amount of people testing.

In fact, this was far more important than a rock concert.

Team BENN riders encouraged people to engage in sports, avoid risky behaviour and learn their HIV status.

Martin shows a crowd of people his cycling skills in a Spin for Life display.

Some of the Team with the bicycle that people stand a chance to win if they went for an HIV test.

Hundreds of people were tested for HIV in Walvis Bay

5 for the Future

Patricia and the four boys. All will be partners in the new Otjiwarongo Bicycle Empowerment Centre.

Five years ago, this group would have been a bunch of labels.

“Addicts”
“Thieves”
“Delinquents”

Thrown to the streets, this group – like many other young people in Namibia, were surviving the best, the only way they could.

Known as a group called: “Orphans & Vulnerable Children (OVC)” these teenagers are part of a growing number of youth who have lost either one or both parents, in a large part due to the impact of HIV/AIDS. The following statistics illustrate the magnitude of HIV:

• Around one in every 5 Namibian adults are HIV positive.
• An estimated one in every 3 Namibians under the age of 18 will be orphaned by the end of the decade.
• Namibia is one of the top 5 countries hardest hit by HIV.

As shocking as these statistics are, they fail to capture the impact of the pandemic on the lives of children.

For these five, who were living on the streets of Otjiwarongo, hunger was a regular visitor. They slept under bridges, dropped out of school, turned to crime as a way of earning income and resorted to violence as a way of protection.

The same time five years ago, Mrs. Muriel Fitch arrived in Otjiwarongo. A grandmother of 16, Mrs. Fitch was in town to help her daughter through a difficult pregnancy.

With a big laugh and a contagious energy, it wasn’t long before Otjiwarongo noticed the visitor and decided to keep her. Offering her a job to help run an after-school soup kitchen for children, Mrs. Fitch accepted.

In the weeks that followed, the after-school program ran out of money, the existing staff fled and, a month on the job, Mrs. Fitch was left with a huge group of hungry children – many of them street kids who would get their only meal of the day from the after-school program.

There are few people who can rise to challenges like this. Mrs. Fitch readily admits that she quit three times, after trying to run various versions of the program.

Then, three years ago, she decided – with the help of a few small overseas grants, to run a program for the street children of Otjiwarongo.

A home with food, beds and life-skills training was opened. The Joy Centre, as it would be known, offered young people a chance to start over. It became a place of hope for those who had endured the tragedy of loosing a parent, who had been stigmatized by society, struggled without support systems and lived on the margins.

But reformation didn’t come easy. Mrs. Fitch remembers her kids – the Joy Centre kids – stealing from shops, carrying knives and getting drunk or high on a regular basis.

It took time, love and discipline to turn things around. But today, the Joy Centre is a highly-regarded oasis. For this group, – Patricia, the 2 Sylvesters, David and Hans – the first five who came to the Joy Centre, a new opportunity has presented itself.

A container full of donated second-hand bicycles from Thunder Bay’s Bicycles for Humanity has been dropped off and is being transformed into the town’s only bicycle workshop. Donated bicycles will be repaired, refurbished, sold. Money that is generated will:

• Support the Joy Centre’s activities
• Help the organisation expand
• Pay the wages of the five partners
• Help purchase necessary supplies to keep the business sustainable.

With mechanical and business training already complete, the five are no longer facing the labels they once endured. Instead, they are redefining themselves as young businessmen and women, as mechanics and as valuable members of the community who have something to offer.

Tell them we love them

For more photos from the opening of the container, please visit BEN Namibia's Flickr photo site.

“Tell them we love them. From the bottom of our hearts. Tell them thank-you.”

The sun is breaking through rain clouds in Katutura. Outside a voluntary HIV testing clinic, a group of five women crack open the doors to a shipping container for the first time.

They gasp at what’s inside. Some shout with excitement. Bicycles, donated from a world away are in various states of repair, piled high. Bike parts and accessories: tubes, helmets, etc. are interspersed throughout.

This is a new beginning. As former sex workers, the five women starting this Bicycle Empowerment Centre see the bicycles donated from Bicycles for Humanity in Ottawa, Canada as the path to self-transformation, as an escape from the hell they’ve endured.

Most of the women who turn to sex work in Namibia do it because they feel like it’s their only option. They have little education, have often been sexually abused or raped as a child and feel like it’s the only way they can earn an income. According to a report by Namibia’s Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) most sex-workers were beaten by their clients, many chased or beaten by police and most had sex with a client without using a condom (which is particularly dangerous considering that Namibia’s HIV prevalence rate is around 20 per cent).

In one profile, reported on the LAC’s web site, a woman who has engaged in sex-work since the age of 16 tells her story. The woman, known as Dorina, says it is not uncommon for men to drive her out to the city-limits for sex. After the act, they beat her, refuse to pay, and leave her to walk home empty-handed. She displays scars she has from being stabbed by her clients with knives and broken bottles. Once after being robbed and beaten by a client, Dorina went to the police. She says they threatened to arrest her and dismissed her claim of being victimized.

Back at the container of bicycles, the realities of their past is forgotten, at least for the moment. They remove each bike from the container with great care. They laugh and joke light-heartedly as they work.

But the importance of this donation is not taken lightly. As the women begin to talk about the new workshop opening, about selling the refurbished bicycles to customers throughout their community, they grow serious.

“It’s not very safe in my neighbourhood,” says Beulah, a 25-year-old single mother of two. “But I’ll take a bike home, for advertising, and at night I’ll keep it in my house, locked to my bed.”

Again and again, the women tell us that a bicycle, a bicycle workshop is not what they imagined for their future. But it’s a welcome surprise and there is so much hope.

With this bicycle workshop, the women tell us that they hope this will be a sustainable way to provide for their children, to ensure they don’t have to return to the streets and to assist other women who want to get off the streets.

As we get set to leave, Maria, a 37-year-old mother of six calls out:
“”Tell them we love them. From the bottom of our hearts. Tell them thank-you.”