Left out. I’ve neglected to mention three notable events that took place in the past few days. We spent time with Nurse Leticia as she ran an inoculations program for newborns in neighboring villages. This will be the primary need for her bicycle, as each week she must walk dozens of miles bearing several bags of supplies to set up these mini-clinics. Village mothers and sisters bring the infants to the nurse, who set’s up camp under the shade of some trees or in the case of rain, under the protection of a school or church roof. The babies are weighed, checked for illness, and given booster shots and nutritional supplements. The mothers are educated in the care of their children. The program has helped bring the infant mortality rate in the region way down. We documented this particular day again in the rain, under the eves of a local school to the beat of the children’s morning march and assembly.
We also followed Faustina in to Sege on her daily trek to secondary school. She usually takes a taxi, which costs a large chunk of her mother’s wages and can often take hours as it clatters over the broken roads. With the road washed out, even the taxi is not an option. The taxi poses other threats too, as nefarious drivers can try to charge more than just money for the ride. Her only other option is to walk, an even longer and more taxing proposition fraught with its own potential dangers. The largest problem posed by her current means of getting to school is that she is often late and always exhausted by the effort, leaving her with short attention when it comes to the morning lessons. On a bike she hopes to regain some time and energy for her first classes, as well as the opportunity to save the taxi fare towards continuing her education.
One evening we grabbed the bikes and another of our young hosts and set off on an hour-long ride to the coast, where we visited one of the local fishing fleets. The boats are like giant war canoes, and the village itself is reminiscent of a pirate’s warren straight out of a dime-store novel. Or maybe just a third-world Oxnard, I can’t decide. The vessels are beached along the high-tide line, colorful bows exposed and bearing ironic names like Liverpool and Magye Mae. The light is fantastic and the ride does us a world of energizing good.
Workshops. It is difficult for the tortoise to climb the mountain; another Shargy proverb. Morning on the day of the first VBP session kicks off with an ice-pick-to-the-eyes headache, screaming children who are probably being beaten or worse, three visitors before 6am and a lot of confusing issues to resolve before the workshops begin. Leticia’s boss is being a hardass and threatening to fire her if she attends the seminar. We surmise that the man is pissed he’s not getting a bike, so Moses and David go off to try and smooth things out.
The night before, Sammy and George arrived with the bikes piled high in a blue panel van. The evening was filled with ‘un-flattening’ the bikes, a process involving straightening the handlebars, raising the seat and putting the pedals back on. The local mechanics were enlisted to assist, providing George and Sam the opportunity to assess the skills of the neighborhood wrenches. While this was going on Moses and David were fielding an almost constant stream of people who now wanted to be added to the limited list of 60 bicycle recipients. The tact and decorum they employed to say no was impressive.
We had arranged for our four subjects to all participate in the first day of the seminars so that we could film them all together, and also so we could spend the following two days trailing them around on their new bikes. George ran the first half of the day in Ga, so I couldn’t understand a thing he was saying, but after a buffet lunch of warm cola and glucose biscuits he finished the day in English, leaving me rolling on the floor with some of his jokes. I can only imagine how funny he had been in the local dialect. Day one ended with a lottery method of getting the bikes to everyone, which met with a fair amount of grumbling, particularly from Mr. Iyam. Over the years of running this program, Sammy and George have determined that the only fair way to distribute the bikes is with a draw of numbers at the end of the class. Otherwise, if they give people the bikes at the start of the day no one will pay attention to the lessons, not to mention favoritism and possible violence can erupt. They make a big point out of mentioning that the behavior of this first group of participants will go a long way towards deciding if the program will return to the village next year. As a result everyone is well behaved, and even the slightly drunken excitement of Mr. Iyam tones down and goes with the flow. Once all the bikes have been picked everyone is giddy with the joy of their new rigs and we are giddy knowing that our efforts have been worthwhile.
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