Congratulations to Rwandan cyclist Adrien Niyonshuti, who this past weekend qualified for the summer 2012 Olympics in London. He is the first Rwandan mountain biker ever to qualify for the Olympics.

Adrien, who lost six brothers in the Rwandan genocide, was introduced to bicycle racing through the efforts of Team Rwanda, which first brought mountain bike racing to Rwanda in 2005. He currently rides for South African UCI Continental team MTN Energade.

You can learn more about Team Rwanda in this article or in the forthcoming documentary Rising From The Ashes.

Rising From Ashes from T.C. Johnstone on Vimeo.

Congratulations Adrien!

You may remember that a few months ago we helped load a container in Seattle with our friends from Village Bicycle Project.

Most of the bikes in the container were headed to VBP’s programs in Ghana, but also nestled in the container was a stack of goodies headed further afield, to the “Racing Squirrels” national cycling team in the West African nation of Benin. Parts, frames, tubes, shorts, shoes, and other equipment donated in support of the team.

The Racing Squirrels are a ragtag team I’ve blogged about before, whose exploits have been documented by recently-departed Peace Corps volunteer (and former bicycle racer) Christopher Herby in a series of articles on CyclingNews.com. He recently followed the team to Burkina Faso where the team competed in an international race, the Tour de Faso, and got a taste of competition at that level. His guest post on Bikejuju and blog posts on Cyclingnews.com (with titles like “Things Fall Apart“) were great reading.

So it was incredibly heartwarming, in the midst of the Christmas season of excess in the USA, to read that after several delays, the container of bicycles had finally made it to Accra, Ghana. Christopher Herby’s last CyclingNews.com post describes how, when word finally reached him that the container was in Accra, Ghana, four days before the end of his Peace Corps tour:

I piled into a taxi with Coach Gandaho and the secretary of the Cycling Federation, Roger Zounon. We traversed Benin and Togo, finally arriving in Ghana late at night. The next morning, we woke early to meet the good folks at the Village Bicycle Project. We arrived to a bee’s nest of activity: piles of bicycles surrounding the shipping container, and people running in every direction with bicycles and wheels and parts. Amidst all this chaos stood George, the coordinator of VBP in Ghana. Somehow he orchestrated the unloading of the container and the allotment of bikes to various individuals who sell and distribute them throughout Ghana.

Tucked neatly to the side, we found that special pile of bikes with Benin tags on them. We were so excited to explore our treasure pile! Ventilated helmets… sturdy wheels…. fresh tires, even a few complete bikes! All this stuff will be put to great use. (Read more…)

Happy New Year, Team Benin! And Christopher, thanks for sharing so many great stories from Benin, and we wish you luck on your next adventure, a documentary project among the Fulani people.

I love this video. Reminds me of the awesome track-standing sidewalk mechanic I met in Axum, Ethiopia.

You’ve doubtless been skipping the World Series to follow along as the Tour du Faso has wound through Burkino Faso, West Africa, confronting riders with 110-degree temperatures, rutted roads, dust, and an opportunity for Africans to compete with Europeans on home soil and under a modicum of media attention. This year’s competition features teams from France, Belgium, Holland, Ivory Coast, Togo, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and of course the Mighty Squirrels of Benin. Today, according to Cycling News, “Home rider Abdoul Aziz Nikiema won another stage for Bukino Faso on the final day of the race to the capital Ouagadougou as Julien Schick of Team Reine Blanche managed to defend the leader’s yellow jersey and secure overall victory.”

Cycling News has the full race summary, stage by stage, with photos from our friend Christopher Herby. He also contributed a couple of Cycling News blog posts while traveling with the Benin team. While he has many great things to say about the Benin riders, and their coach, the short version of their tour experience is:

There’s a classic book by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe called Things Fall Apart. That would also be a pretty good title for the adventures of the Beninese cycling team at the Tour du Faso. While things fall apart metaphorically in Achebe’s book, things are literally falling apart here in the Squirrel camp. Things like shifters, bottom brackets, wheels, and quite excitingly, steerer tubes. All this makes it quite difficult to compete against a peloton equipped with modern bikes and fancy carbon wheels.

I know I speak for so many of us when I send hearty congratulations to the team for their efforts in this race. Here’s another of Christopher’s sentiments, which I share.

Like Benin, Burkina Faso celebrated its 50th independence anniversary this year, and the Tour plays an important role in showcasing Burkina’s development. I was excited to see a strong contingent of media coverage at the opening ceremony for the big men’s speeches and the team presentation. As I watched the Benin team walk on to the stage, I couldn’t help but get a little sappy: it’s such an incredible opportunity for these boys to travel to a foreign country and compete against top athletes. Alphonse hadn’t ridden on paved roads until six months ago, and now he’s about to start a UCI 2.2 stage race. Pretty cool.

And I absolutely love this image, among many great images Christopher took during the race.

You already know I love the Village Bicycle Project, because they’re my home town crew, and they have a long track record (101 containers shipped!), and good infrastructure and programs on the ground in Ghana (and now Sierra Leone) to run efficient, vertically-integrated programs. I like their emphasis on getting bikes into the hands of women and girls, and on running sustainable programs.

But they are not the only folks doing amazing work in this sector, not by a long shot. In fact, if anything, the sector is getting crowded!

Re-Cycle, a charity in Britain that collects bikes for Africa, has recently received almost a thousand donated bikes through a bike drive at Abel & Cole, and the next couple of Saturdays they could use help in London prepping those bikes for their next shipment. The container-loading with be November 13 and 14 at the same location – a container that, coincidentally, is headed to Village Bicycle Project’s programs in Ghana. Meanwhile, as Britain’s Royal Mail scraps over 24,000 Pashley bicycles in favor of vans (boo!) Re-Cycle is at the forefront of sending those bicycles to Africa, where they are a model favored for their strength and longevity.

A Royal Mail Pashley finds a second life in Africa.

One of the bike projects in Ghana that uses bikes shipped from both Village Bicycle Project and Re-Cycle is run by an independent bicycle social entrepreneur named Jason Finch, who is in Ghana working at the village level to set up a bicycle workshop. Jason got interested in this work while helping Re-Cycle to fill a container in London in 2007. As a senior project at university, he got a grant to visit Ghana and follow the bikes he had been packing. On the ground in Ghana he found a small, earnest, and overwhelmed village nonprofit organization, struggling to keep the bikes in good repair. He returned with his partner Grace, and together they have been working to get a full bicycle repair shop off the ground in the village, based in a building built from two reclaimed shipping containers. They hope to have it fully up and running by the time they leave next month (the shop currently employs a mechanic and is fully functional, but in a much smaller space).

A community bike shop takes shape in Ghana.

Ester Ndenju is a member of the Walvis Bay HIV/AIDS Support group.

Meanwhile, further south, Bicycle Empowerment Network (BEN) Namibia is another great bike program, distributing donated bikes and building what they call “bicycle empowerment centers,” or small bike shops whose profits support a social enterprise. BEN just put up a new blog post about the real impacts these programs can have at the community level. In the Namibian port of Walvis Bay, they have built a Bicycle Empowerment Center with a local HIV support group (and the support of international donors of both bicycles and funds). BEN writes:

“At one of the first meetings we had with the support group, the group decided that profits from the shop should be used to support other members with small enterprise funding. Recently we met with the first beneficiaries. All had existing small businesses, but with the common theme of never having enough capital to get beyond a hand-to-mouth existence.  The approach the group took was to buy stock and materials for four small enterprises: two small neighbourhood tuck-shops, a traditional jewelery-maker, and a kapana (cooked meat) retailer.

While the goods were only distributed a few months ago and it’s still early days in terms of these becoming sustainable businesses, the short term results are impressive.  Ester, who runs one of the tuck-shops, says she was constantly out of stock of many items because she didn’t used to have enough cash to buy stock in advance. Now she organises her stock so that when a buffer supply runs out, she replaces the buffer, meaning she is never out of stock and her customers don’t go elsewhere.”

Read the full BEN blog post here.

MK Cycles Zimbabwe gets a helping hand.

And that’s not the half of it. My inbox is full of announcements from amazing groups collecting bikes for Namibia and premiering a film about it in Thunder Bay, tabling at GreenFest DC this weekend, looking for space in Denver to pack bikes, inviting participants to join trips to Malawi and Rwanda…

And Mike’s Bikes, a chain of California bike shops that has been helping found “sister shops” in Africa, is helping open a new bike shop in Zimbabwe this week.

And of course, the Benin team is racing. Amazing, inspiring work everyone! Keep rolling!

Photo of the boys in Ghana by Jason Finch.

I’ve written a couple of times before about the national cycling team in Benin, West Africa. This week the team is heading off to the Tour du Faso, a 10-day, 1300 KM stage race held annually in Burkina Faso in October (the race seems to have zero web coverage in 2010. I challenge you to find a single link!). Christopher Herby sent us some photos as they prepare:

Coach Fernand Gandaho talks to the team in their dorm. The athletes slept on straw mats during the 10-day training camp.

Hello BikeJuju Friends,
I’m a bike dork like any other, but I’ve spent the last two years of my life working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin.  Much to my surprise, I discovered an obscure yet energetic group of cyclists here in one of Africa’s poorest countries.  As a former racer myself, I’ve gotten involved with the national team, and I’ve been sharing stories about the team on CyclingNews.com.  I’m getting ready to join the team next week at Africa’s biggest cycling event: the Tour du Faso.  I invite you all to follow along and cheer for the team.  Though most of them have never used a computer or traveled beyond Benin, I’ve assured them they are the most popular team in the Tour! Cheers from Benin! — Christoph Herby

The team crosses a bridge on Benin's coastal highway, one of the country's smoothest roads.

We wish the team team bon courage as they grind towards what is surely Africa’s best-named capital city, Ouagadougou.

You may have read here on Bikejuju or on Cycling News about the Benin National Cycling Team.

The Republic of Benin is a small West African country with very limited resources, and their national cycling team is enthusiastic but poorly equipped. Christopher Herby, a cyclist, photographer, and Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, has been working with the team, as well as posting great stories and images to his website and to Cycling News.

Well the Benin team can get psyched! Village Bicycle Project secured a number of donations for them, and while we were loading their shipping container, Claire worked for a while with the group that was packaging up a whole pile of stuff for the team.

Herby writes on Cycling News about the scarcity of road tubes in Benin - mountain bikes are much more common. In the bicycle market he finds used tubes with many patches, for $1 each.

We packed up tubes, tires, shoes, lycra shorts and jerseys, and components.

When this pile of goodies wends its way to Ghana, out of the container, through customs, across Togo, and reaches Benin, I think the riders are going to be pretty excited–and maybe a lot faster–considering that the 1970s Batavus that Herby has been riding, with downtube shifters, aluminum bars, and a chromoly frame, is the envy of the team members.

Go team Benin!

Claire and I spent a good part of the day helping to load bikes with the Village Bike Project, who were packing a shipping container for their program in Ghana. If you don’t know about VBP, you should stop by their website to learn more.

I’ve posted about Village Bike Project before. They’ll ship this container to Ghana, where a portion of the bikes will be sold off to pay shipping costs, leaving them with a sustainable organizational model, and a large number of bikes for use in their Ghana programs.

There was an extra special moment today when a birthday cake arrived for Village Bicycle Project founder David Peckham. Happy birthday, Dave!

Packing the container is hard sweaty work, with a great group of people, for a great cause, and it’s fun even when there’s not cake! First, the bikes are pulled out of various storage containers and laid out in rows by wheel size.

Volunteers prep each bike by removing the pedals, twisting the handlebars sideways, and dropping the seat. This minimizes the space the bike will take in the container.

Meanwhile the container-packers jam as many bikes into the container as possible, filling any extra spaces with wheels, tires, and bags of parts as they slowly work their way forward. Throughout the day the packers call out for what they need: “More tires!” “More 20-inch bikes!” And the volunteers outside adjust the flow into the container accordingly.

When the container arrives in Ghana, the process will be reversed, as illustrated by these photos from Jason Finch.

And soon after that, in the most important step of all, the bicycles find new lives in service of new riders! (Also Jason Finch photos)

I was looking through some old posts and I was struck by this image, so I’m re-posting it. Here is the original post, part of my series about bicycles in Mozambique.

My parents saw this postcard at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe and thought of me (hi Mom!). They know I collect toy bicycles, especially from Africa, because when they are guests in our house they stay in a room that is the valet parking lot for a whole spectrum of toy bike makes and models from all corners of Africa.

I like the spokes-and-sprockets overkill on this postcard, but I sure have some more finely wrought toy bikes, like this Red Bull example from Senegal (below), or all the ones shown in this post about my collection. (And by the way, a heck of a lot of traffic from Stumbled Upon has been visiting that post. Hi, Stumbled Upon folks!)

Related Bikejuju post:

• Beautiful Little Toy Bikes From Africa