Sierra Leone:

Helping Girls and Women Ride Bikes!

Brittany Richardson, VBP volunteer from California, taught almost 300 youngsters (85% girls) how to ride while in Sierra Leone in 2009. Brittany's work focused around the town of Lunsar, and she taught riding to girls there and in outlying villages. Brittany's work assures that girls will have a head start!

What is so special about teaching girls in Africa to ride bikes?

 For starters, many females in Africa don’t know how to ride, while most males do. They tend to be culturally excluded from riding, for many reasons. Learning to ride is a special gift, one that will stay with them.  The gift includes the exuberance of bicycling, balance and speed, girl and machine, confidence, accomplishment. These young girls will always know how to ride, and no one will take that away. When bikes come around in her life; to her brothers, neighbors, her husband, she’ll ask to use it too, unstuck from the stereotype that bikes are not for girls.

We found that when we give bikes to girls, they’re too often taken and damaged by the boys. So if we want females to have bikes, we must first supply the males. And early in our involvement, we realized we must teach the females how to ride. It is much easier to teach a young girl than a grown woman. Children don’t have as far to fall, they’re more resilient, and more willing to try new things. Adults everywhere get stuck in their ways, and a defeatist fear of bicycles takes hold.

Maybe even better than the teaching of 300 girls how to ride, before Brittany left Sierra Leone, she had organized two Sierra Leoneans, a man and a woman, to continue teaching girls to ride in the Lunsar vicinity. Jack and Kadiatu have been teaching girls since Brittany left, and will keep reaching out to villages in the months ahead. From state side, we are committed to sending more bikes to help meet the tremendous demand we’re seeing in Sierra Leone.

Read more below:

David Peckham reports from Sierra Leone,  8 January, 2010 :

Almost one year after we got the idea to  teach girls in Sierra Leone to ride bikes, there I was again at the Catholic Mission in Lunsar, talking with Sister Bernadette, the tiny Japanese nun, who after 30 years in English-speaking Africa, still has a very thick accent.  It was a classic moment of closure to our first year in Sierra Leone!

Last January I and a young man from the town had gone to Bernadette’s kindergarten class to fix the six small bikes she had there for the kids to play with. She had told me then about Gudleik, the Norwegian volunteer who had been doing PE activities with the kids. He was organizing a ‘bi-athalon’ with the students, a biking and running race for the following weekend. “Are the girls going to be in the race too?” I asked. “No, they don’t know to bicycle,” she replied.

It was time for me to leave the country, but I was determined to meet this Gudleik. So, with my bags packed, I took one last bike ride to his place at the compound for the Baptist Eye Clinic. His wife was a volunteer mid-wife there, and he looked after their two small boys, and organized activities with school children.  He had a fleet of about 15 small bikes that he’d bought in the capital, Freetown.  He said he hadn't had the time or patience to teach girls to ride, but that he’d be glad to share his bikes if someone else would do the training.

I ‘gave’ him my bike, (long-term loan), and got a motorbike taxi back to my room, grabbed my bags and left. I was pleased to think that we had the basics for a program; a group of girls to teach, bikes to use, a place for room and board, all we needed was a woman volunteer to do the training. Then Brittany Richardson came and taught nearly 300 girls how to ride, starting with Sister Bernadette’s kindergartners.
Almost one year later, on my last day of my second trip to Sierra Leone, I stopped at the Mission to return some borrowed dishes. Sister Bernadette answered the door. “Ah how nice to see you!” She told me that she was not with the children just then because they were out preparing the field for a bike and run race. “Will there be girls this time?” “Yes yes!” and I got that moment that Brittany should have had, because she was the one who spent six months teaching them to ride.

It was pretty special, the culmination of a year’s work, which started when I was lucky enough to spot all the ingredients of an opportunity, and we were all lucky enough to have Brittany want to come and volunteer to get it done.  I wish she could've been there, cuz she deserved it.