The Hard Way: A 75-Dollar Bicycle Revolutionizes

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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The Hard Way
Freewheeling (cont.)

THAT AFTERNOON we pedal around Bimbila, a dusty place with a roadside bike shop on nearly every corner, looking for lunch. Eventually, we're directed to a clapboard hut on the edge of town where a pair of women in bright turbans stir two large cauldrons with paddles. Inside one is fufu, yams pounded and then heated to a rubbery, mashed-potato consistency; in the other is a gruesome fish-head gruel. We pull up a couple of benches and are served.

Fufu turns out to be one of Schroeder's favorite dishes; he wolfs his plate down heartily, as does Gherardi. I'm three-quarters through my slimy, foul-tasting chowder when I feel something curious in my mouth and spit it out: a fat, white, wriggling maggot.

"Say, Brad, mind having a look at this?" I ask, figuring he'll just tell me to munch it down.

Brad and Ben peer into my bowl, and blanch.

"Well," Schroeder says in a tight voice, "I'm finished. How 'bout you guys?"

We saddle up and ride on. And on. It's another 45 miles of burning, leg-leadening, sweat-sucking dirt to Salaga. In villages along the way, our yellow bikes attract considerable attention from passing cyclists. To Schroeder's delight, several young men ask where they can buy one. At a bridge 13 miles outside of town, I don my headlamp and we carry on through dusk.

When we finally reach Salaga—a thriving slave-transfer station in the 19th century, but now an isolated village—the only rooms available are concrete cells with cold water and buckets for bathing. In these dismal surroundings, Gherardi becomes violently sick. By morning, he's so weak and pallid that we put him on the bus back to Tamale. He will eventually wind up in the Accra hospital with something nasty but unidentifiable.

Brad Schroeder's dream is to see independent, African-owned bike companies spread across the continent, making ITDP obsolete.

SCHROEDER AND I manage to pedal the last 75 miles of packed red dirt back to Tamale. To avoid drinking the dubious village water, which might expose us to guinea worm, we pour hot Fanta and Coke into our water bottles. Every seven or eight miles, we fall off our bikes and crawl beneath the shade of a baobab tree to hide from the heat.

Each time, while I try to decide if I'm suffering from heatstroke, Schroeder invariably falls asleep and then wakes up 20 minutes later, cheerfully crying, "Doesn't get more African than this!" and hops back on his bike.

As we roll into Tamale, Schroeder tells me his dream for the bike program: "Make myself and ITDP obsolete. In our place, independent California Bike corporations in Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa owned and operated by Africans with the money and muscle to lobby their own governments and influence policy."

Africa is a peculiarly obdurate part of the world, a continent where idealism can be worn down by brutal circumstance. But dreams are the wheels of hope, and I sense that Schroeder will stick his out until at least part of it comes true.

And that would be no small thing.

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