By Elizabeth Bales Frank
- Aug. 20, 1990
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TOMORROW, Bike-Aid ’90 will conclude with 120 cyclists pedaling through Washington to the Lincoln Memorial, the final destination of six individual routes covering 2,000 to 3,400 miles over a period of five to nine weeks.
Bike-Aid, in its fifth year, is a transcontinental cycling event sponsored by – and for the benefit of – the Overseas Development Network, an organization that addresses global poverty on a local level.
Four groups of about 20 cyclists each left in mid-June from Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The fifth group left from Austin, Tex., on July 20, and the sixth group, composed of alumni riders from previous years, left from Montreal on Aug. 4.
With the exception of those in the alumni group, who raised a minimum of $500 apiece, all riders committed themselves to raising at least $2,000 each before their trips began.
The funds raised go to support projects sponsored by Overseas Development in Asia, Africa, South America, and the United States. Grants go to projects that are locally initiated and controlled, providing, for example, funds to build a storage center for donated goods in Harlan County, Ky., or to complete a processing plant for coconut jam in the Philippines.
Fund-raising, however, is only part of Bike-Aid’s purpose. The Overseas Development Network was founded in 1983 by two natives of Bangladesh: Nazir Ahmad, then a student at Stanford, and his brother Kamal, who was at Harvard. The brothers found that American students seemed unaware of the challenges that faced impoverished communities worldwide, and determined that education was as important as fund-raising. The network now includes more than 75 chapters around the world, mostly at colleges and universities.
In 1986, Bike-Aid was started as a means of raising both funds and awareness. The Bike-Aid program was ”developed in the era of Farm Aid, Live Aid and Band-Aid,” said Benay Lazo, a Bike-Aid coordinator in the group’s San Francisco headquarters.
Lazo said that although the group’s original intent was to increase public awareness of the work it was doing, Bike-Aid was ”not a publicity event any more – there’s more attention to educating the cyclists.”
”It sort of includes everything I’m interested in, from the exercise to the community work to the big picture of solving poverty and world hunger,” said Jessica Saulfield, one of the riders on the Portland route, who was calling from a church basement in Riverton, Wyo.
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Local accommodations are provided by churches, environmental groups and sometimes host families in town, many of which have members who are Bike-Aid alumni. Saulfield, a native of Manhattan and a junior at Harvard, said she had just bicycled across the Grand Tetons.
A fellow rider, Felicity Wood of Princeton, N.J., who is between semesters at the University of Pennsylvania, said she had joined Bike-Aid because she wanted to ”do something, instead of sitting in college and studying.”
Wood eagerly listed the virtues of the ride: her increased energy level, the exposure to cultural diversity, meeting ”the kind of people I would never meet on the East Coast and in an Ivy League college.” As examples, she listed farmers, miners, and, she added, ”native Americans.”
On days set aside for rest, the cyclists volunteer their time to community projects. They might help weed a garden for Volunteers in Service to America, for example, or clean a park that may have served as their bedroom the night before.
In Cincinnati, where the Portland group rendezvoused with the San Francisco group, 40 bikers spent two days landscaping, painting and cleaning the Franciscan Housing Development Center. Members of the Austin group volunteered their time to an AIDS hospice when they biked through Atlanta.
Shelley Preston spent last summer on the Seattle route just after her graduation from Duke University.
Bike-Aid was the perfect answer for Preston’s desires to spend the summer outdoors, see America (but, as she put it, ”not in a touristy way”), and experience public service on a grass-roots level. She wanted, she said, ”to see people empower themselves and try to affect public policy in some manner.”
Preston said the demands of bicycling an average of 70 miles a day for nine weeks across the United States, through heat and mountain ranges, were mild compared to the responsibility the bikers assumed when they volunteered to address problems in troubled communities en route.
Preston said the experience was ”truly no joy ride, not a vacation.”
Nonetheless, Preston spent her one-week vacation this year with the Bike-Aid alumni on the Montreal route, traveling as far as Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
As for Wood, facing the conclusion of her Bike-Aid journey one week and 500 miles away, she was not prepared to think about her future plans. ”I feel like we could just keep on going,” she said. ”I’m going to bike home.”
For information about Bike-Aid ’91, call (415) 431-4480 or (800) 827-4480 after 5 P.M.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 20, 1990, Section C, Page 10 of the National edition with the headline: ON YOUR OWN; This Tour Blends Cycling and Helping. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe