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.
