Friday, January 23, 2009

2008 AIDS Bike Ride

At the end of November, after a couple of amazing Thanksgiving meals at the hostels, about 40 volunteers headed out to eastern Niger for the annual AIDS bike ride. We began the bike ride on World AIDS Day in the city of Dan Barto right on the border with Nigeria. For the next 5 days we rode our bikes the 160km to Zinder, the eastern capital, stopping in 20 villages along the way to talk to the villagers about AIDS- prevention and protection.


It was an amazing journey, both on and off the bikes. I had such a great time hanging out with all of the volunteers, most of them from my stage. The biking was really fun too since we had a lead car blaring music that we had picked! The bush out east is quite different from the southwest where I'm from so it was nice having a change of scenery.


We made most all of our meals and slept at random places along the way, mostly school yards. By now most of us are used to living the "bush life" so it wasn't a big deal throwing up a mosquito net and sleeping on a mat in the middle of nowhere.


Once at a village all of the villagers would obviously come crowd around the music truck to see what all of the "anasaras" or "foreigners" were doing. We then danced and danced and...danced with the villagers before beginning our presentations. We had a team of local animators that would either do a skit and then discuss AIDS or we would brake up into groups- men, women, young men and young women (4 groups) and have seperate talks with them concerning AIDS.


Since the language in eastern Niger is Hausa, and I am a Zarma speaker, I couldn't do much as far as talking to the villagers but I was on "kid crew" at just about each village. This involved gathering all of the younger children and running off somewhere with them to avoid them being a distraction. For the next 30 minutes or so we were responsible for keeping the kids entertained. This may sound easy but children quickly lose interest, even with the crazy white people. It was a riot playing "duck, duck, goose", "ring around the rosie" and the "hokie pokie" with all of these little kids, especially me trying to explain the rules in a different language. I love kids though and we had a blast playing with them.


Overall it was an unforgettable experience and I honestly feel like we touched the lives of many Nigerien villagers who otherwise would probably have never been educated about AIDS and prevention.