Our Zimbabwe Sister Shop container is loaded up and in transit. Wondering how we stuffed all 395 bikes in there, plus crucial components and supplies? Click below:
How to load 395 Bikes (and a ton of components) on a 40ft. Shipping Container from Mike's Bikes on Vimeo.
Africa donation bike container #3 has come quite far on its journey from San Rafael, California. As far as Johannesburg, South Africa to be exact. Yet, as we’ve so often found with our philanthropy projects in Africa, unexpected complications have a habit of tossing a monkey wrench into the gears exactly when you think things are going smoothly.
This time striking South African rail and port workers have stopped the container of 474 bikes in its tracks (so to speak). It’s awaiting loading onto rail transit in Jo-burg, in order to head to Mike’s Bikes Sister Shop Jonmol Bicycle Services in Gaborone, Botswana. The strike is now in its sixth day, and we’re hoping along with Bones and the Jonmol crew that the strike reaches a resolution posthaste. As we’ve experienced first-hand, the people of Gaborone need bikes!
In the space of a half-hour drive, we passed through entire neighborhoods of corrugated metal shacks and dirt roads with chickens and children playing in the dust. There were shells of stripped cars on the sides of these roads, and everywhere there were people walking. And walking, and walking, and walking, sometimes with their burdens of goods balanced impossibly on their heads.
Yet directly adjacent to these places were areas of dramatic development and, frankly, consumerism gone wild. There were strip malls, indoor malls, car dealerships, and billboards everywhere in Gabs. Many of the residential neighborhoods looked like lower middle class U.S. suburbs in fact, and there was, to me, an almost shocking amount of construction going on. All over the city there were buildings and roads being built. Development in Gabs was very clearly on the rise.
A side effect of this situation that was extremely relevant to our mission was the traffic. Some of the traffic jams we encountered, particularly when you compare them to the lack of population density, were just horrendous. It could easily take an hour to go 10 miles at the wrong time of day. And the lines for the combi transporters, which are privately owned vans that serve as public transit in Gabs, sometimes stretched for hundreds of yards (or meters, as it were). These lines were where people waited to pack into the combis and sit in traffic just like we were doing. With public transit in this kind of state, it quickly became clear why there were so many people walking everywhere. Despite the fact that the city of Gaborone is very low-density and very spread out—meaning that it would probably take a very long time to get where you’re going—there were always throngs of people walking from place to place.
Yesterday after bidding a fond farewell to Bones and the boys at Jonmol Bicycle Services in Gaborone, we hopped a plane back to Johannesburg and then another out to Windhoek, Namibia. We spent the evening dining with Peace Corps Volunteer Kami who works with the villages we’re headed to and who will be traveling with us today and helping us to establish the new shop in Divundu. We also had the invaluable company of Clarisse from the Bicycle Empowerment Network, who is taking us to some of their upstart shops in the Windhoek area as we head out of town this morning.
It will be something like 10 hours until we reach the villages on Namibia’s Caprivi strip. Connectivity continues to be a challenge, so once again this must be just a brief update. The whole story of our time with Bones will be posted here as soon as we have the connection to do it. ‘Til then, it’s time to hit the road!
Literally.
