Good jelly

(if you like bikes, building stuff, or design for developing countries, click all the links!)

On this sunny day did five intrepid explorers ride from olde Cambridgeport to Carlisle to visit the honourable Gwyndaf Jones.

Not only is Gwyn one of my favourite people ever, he's also Welsh. Over lunch he recounted a story from a past visit to Wales. Apparently, there are so few Welsh names and so fewer surnames, that when our hero found himself standing in a cemetery, he had to look but two stones away to find the grave of one Gwyndaf Jones.

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Spang, Daf (another Welshman who makes my list of favourite people ever), Amelia (who rode across the USA last year!), Laura and I put some food, brews and ice into some panniers and rode up the lush green Minuteman trail and then into the woods to find Gwyn at his gorgeous little house.

Gwyn has an amazing story. He worked as a BMW motorcycle mechanic once, and started one of the first super-high-end titanium racing bicycle companies, Merlin Metalworks, just one town over in Somerville MA. Today, he's a mentor for D-lab design classes, and teaches his own cycle-focused class at D-lab. He collaborates with Guatemalan bicycle-machine inventors and builders, and Indian rickshaw businesses, to name a few.















Gwyn's house is beautiful and cosy, and his workshops and store rooms packed with the most exquisite hand tools and bicycle history: old bikes, one-off crazy experimental bike frames, and beautiful (and huge) hand saws, planes, and files. We brave mosquitoes the size of bees on a little jaunt into the woods by his house, where a tree hangs with a hundred rejected Merlin frames, the steel completely rusted but the titanium pristine and shiny.



Alas, all good things do end and Gwyn took us on a lovely ride on a track through the woods on our way back to Cambridge. I'm already planning my next ride out to Carlisle.

safi sana

Back in Cambridge, it's all reverse culture shock again.

In Arusha, hot on the heels of 2010 (which we celebrated with a second goat)-

I think this will be a ramble...
Let me take a couple of seconds to recount history. We celebrated Christmas with a goat. Now, I very much believe in living lightly on the world, and as such I choose to consume next-to-no animals and animal derived products (I also cycle everywhere, althought I must say this is as much out of convenience as concern, and showering is another story entirely-) although I am not opposed to the consumption of animals on any kind of moral grounds. I would be super excited keep chickens for their eggs (it's a beautiful, if an essentially weird relationship if you ask me). They would eat worms and crap and kitchen scraps, and eating them would affirm the ancient adage that we are what we eat: at the end of the day, poop.

And the great Tom Waits did say, "most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete."

I would hunt animals for food, if I had to. If I was in the jungle and had to eat an animal to survive, I would, easy. So whilst I did not eat this goat, I did watch its slaughter and subsequent parting out into various cuts and edible bits with great interest. After all, in America, goats come in parts from the supermarket. This was a real goat, it had to die and be parted.

It was the most visceral experience of my life thus far, I must admit I felt a little strange watching blood run and hearing air hiss from lungs. I don't think death had ever been this close, apparent, or bloody to me before. Watching the goat be cut up was easier. It reminded me of a time in Boston before I attended a sustainability fair and watched an artisan butcher skilfully cut up a (happy?) organic free range hog.

This brings us now to the second goat (this one seemed to come conveniently already in parts -- the skin was nowhere in sight), roasted in a grill made out of an oil drum at Shaibu's swanky bachelor pad, where we celebrated the new year. Shaibu is a dude. He manages the bike programs at Tumaini, the workshop at Global Alliance for Africa's Vijana (youth) centre. Many people have overheard conversations about the centre (mostly in America) and thought we were talking about something else altogether.



















"Damn! The meat won't fit on the stove! Good thing we have this nifty oil barrel grill!"




Our stay in Arusha was punctuated by visits to the nearby village of Nadosoito to demonstrate and gather views and feedback about GCS products. The first ended up being mostly a long, scenic walk through the village, which is absolutely beautiful: mountains on the horizon, and filled with beautiful people working hard in fields. The second was accompanied by business and management guru Javier, who taught us so so many lessons about how to characterise a market (besides talking to people and finding out how much land they had and how their harvests were- which we did), how to find demands for a product and willingnesses to pay, and also neat tricks on finding information about customers. The trick is, quite unintuitively, to try lots and lots of different ways to sell your product to different people. And we sold one, and sat in the shade of a mud brick house drinking tea and talking to John the farmer about his harvests, his family. Bernard's father did mechanical work for John, and John knew Bernard since he was but a child. Small world.

















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We passed our following days building up documentation and fiddling with corn shellers (did you know the majority of maize eating people worldwide shell their maze by hand?), learning to build dynamo-cellphone chargers by hand on our daily trips to Mwamba's house.

We had two last adventures before we departed this magnificent city. The first of these was the Mama Afrika circus, with acrobats who jumped and twisted through the air, climbed poles upside down and swung from trapeze and silk (which was announced by the circusmaster as "aerial tissue"). There were young boys who could bend their bodies in half the wrong way, and squeeze through squash rackets. There were also three young men who:

-juggled clubs
-juggled little straw hats (their routine was amazing)
-rapped
-breakdanced

I was also unwittingly recruited by a clown to be part of his four piece rock band. I was lead vocal.

The second adventure was a leisurehike with the D-lab Tanzania team through the lush green foothills of Mount Meru to a waterfall. Rain mid-hike made the going treacherous and slow, and I began to get frustrated with what began as an fresh, exciting hike on a beautiful day. We walked our way down a winding stream in a jungle river valley, hopping over slippery rocks, and ducking under outcroppings of rock worn down by years of water. Finally, we arrived in a huge clearing I can't seem to find a good object to compare in size to. It was completely overgrown with lush green vines and gigantic ferns, a wispy stream of water rushing from some high place to crash down two hundred feet below. It felt like I was in the land of the dinosaurs.

Alas, great things must come to an end, and a few days later, I passed through Nairobi, got on a plane and went "home" to Singapore for a few days. It had been a long time, my parents had moved into a new house, and Singapore was as weird as ever. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant week spent at home.

Life goal: only own so much stuff that I can carry on my back. It's slow progress, but I've stopped checking bags on airplanes, and learning my goal one month at a time.

mchizi kama ndizi

Arusha is a neat place: a friendly little town sitting in the lush green shadow of Mt Meru, Tanzania's second tallest mountain.
I arrived in Arusha, Tanzania to cheers of "Bruce Lee! Bruce Lee!"

Alright, so it didn't quite happen that way. Bernard picked us up in his lovely sky blue beetle and whisked us off to begin three weeks of mystery and adventure, volunteering at GCS in Arusha.














Global Cycle Solutions is the brainchild of Jodie Wu and Lisa Tacoronte, MIT alum and student, both D-lab veterans and entrepreneurs. We soon settled into a comfortable routine of hopping onto dalla-dalla's (vans) each morning and riding out to Bernard's dad's house to document the tech development of a top secret! GCS product, doing some work in the afternoon on an instruction manual and cooking rice and beans for dinner.

The first night, we met Jodie's next-door neighbours - Mic and Mas, two members of Contagious (or was it Contagiouz?), a band of young men who:

- breakdance
- rollerskate
- don't drink
- don't smoke

On the second night, we watched them perform a show and throw down some serious moves at a local bar/club.

We seem to be surrounded by Arusha's most exceptional people. Bernard's father moved to Arusha from Moshi when he was young, starting small with just a simple provision store. Over the years, he began to buy cars from junk yards, fix them up and then sell them, earning enough money to buy tools, sewing machines, a flour mill, land.

Today, he's a local celebrity. Dalla-dalla's in Sinoni will know where you want to stop if you say "Mwamba's house". Bus drivers recognise Bernard by face as Mwamba's son. They live in a spacious three storey house with a yard always full of vehicles in line for repair work and the largest accumulation of Volkswagen spare parts in the country...maybe on the continent! Bernard and his brother Peter are both accomplished mechanics from growing up working on cars with dad.




















Bernard bought his lovely sky-blue beetle from a scrap yard where it was rusting away, for about four hundred dollars. He spent three months to fix every single part in it by hand, and then got it painted sky-blue. It's beautiful.


Their house is a really happy place; Bernard's sister Stella sewing clothes, his brother Peter fixing cars or radios, both of whom are always happy to talk to you if you walk by. They have a yard full of chickens and tons of Bernard's neat inventions, like homemade solar water heaters and a pedal-powered drill press(!!!) Bernard's two nieces are the sweetest children I've ever seen. Melinda sneaked up on me one day whilst I was eating lunch and poked me in the small of my back with a tiny finger. I jumped two feet into the air from my seat.



Oops, took a video instead of a picture

Eyeh small

Koforidua is a city with a small, dense bustling centre, and large lush green suburbs spread out at the foot of some hills in Ghana's Eastern region. The surface of this country is like the palm of the hand, with small, even (but steep) undulations.

I woke up in Koforidua this morning to roosters crowing and Muslim prayers from nearby mosques. After a quick breakfast of bananas, peanut butter and brown bread, we jumped on bicycles while the day was still cool and set out for Suhum, 25km away. Creeping upslope in low gear and then speeding down, we wound our way on a wide road through the Ghanaian countryside: hills covered with small trees and tall grasses, fields bursting with bananas and maize. It was green and so gorgeous.

At Suhum, we chopped (ate) koko and kosi: thick homogeneous porridge made from millet flour spiced with ginger and nutmeg, and (which goes together with) fried bean cakes. Holy fried bean cakes it was good.

Back in Koforidua, after a quick shower, we chopped a quick banku (fermented maize meal) with beans, okro (okra), palmnut and groundnut soup, and spent the day at Ability Bikes. It is perhaps the first worker owned cooperative bike store and workshop in Ghana, and is run by six disabled people. How culturally cutting edge is that? Most of them have had polio. One of them is a strong rider, who came out to Suhum with us, and all of them are on the Koforidua wheelchair basketball team, which recently defeated teams from Accra and Kumasi, the two largest cities in Ghana.

David, an ex peacecorps volunteer is the Bikes Not Bombs man in the country, mentoring Ability Bikes in mechanics and co-op management. Read about their story here! This is where, after leaving the IPA project unanticipatedly early, I will spend a week before moving on to Kumasi.

As we sweated over the wheels we build and bikes we overhaul, the sky grew dark. "Let's move the table in," David said as rolled in over the hills, "There will be a strong wind."

Sure enough, minutes later, a fierce wind whipped across the front of the workshop, ahead of a thick grey curtain that obscured everything behind it. We sprinted to the roof of the three-storey building, uniformly punctuated by rusted steel rebars poking up, ready to build the next floor.

I was speechless as I climbed the last flight of stairs and beheld the awesome panorama that rose up over me as I stood level with Koforidua's rooftops. Below the wide open sky, we watched the city scatter and scramble as the nearby hills were almost completely hidden by the storm pulling in. It was so beautiful that if the lightening had struck me down right there I would have went happily.

(where did that photo go!??)

In a matter of seconds, the storm was on top of us, and we were soaked.

Low ebb

One night, I was riding a bicycle through the village. I had just turned a swift corner, cool breeze on my face, when the power went out and the ground beneath me fell away and disappeared.

My stomach sprang back to its rightful place, and I began calmly ringing the bell, weaving through the shadows that materialised in the air around me. My body merged with the bicycle to form a single and complete unit, following the undulation of the road as they resonated through the wheels, frame, into my fingertips and up my spine.

I got my bucket and walked to the centre of the village. Strangely enough, collecting the sugar cane juice man's waste pressings was the one thing I felt too bashful to do under public scrutiny.

As I shoveled the fibres into my bucket by the armful, the man shouted at me from the inky depths of his shop. He expressed his incredulity that I wanted to take his waste (you foreigners are all so strange), and I left sheepishly with a brimming bucket, minutes later. Damn.