October 27, 2009 News

Next stop: Ghana

Montrealers dig out their old bikes and give them a new life in Africa

by Elizabeth Faure

Glenn Rubenstein stands with a collected bike.PHOTO ALAN MACQUARRIE

Volunteers and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce residents came together on Oct. 25 in the name of a good cause: providing used bicycles to people living in impoverished countries.

One of the volunteers was 11-year-old Matthew Goldsmith, a seventh-grade student at Loyola High School.

“The organizer, he’s a very close friend with my mom so he told us about it and I decided to go for it,” said Goldsmith. Arriving with his mother at 9:30 a.m., Goldsmith spent the day cleaning the used bikes brought to Co-op La Maison Verte on Sherbrooke Street West.

“We did the collection in partnership with Coop La Maison Verte,” explained Glenn Rubenstein, the development coordinator for Cyclo Nord-Sud, the group that collects and re-distributes the bikes. Sunday’s bicycle drive was one of 60 held annually in Quebec.

Cyclo Nord-Sud takes Quebecer’s old bikes and ships them to Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. They work with nongovernmental organizations in the countries where they donate the bikes, to either distribute them for free or to sell them at a below-market cost.
Bikes are shipped 400 to 450 at a time, and Rubenstein said that the organization ships 4,000 bikes annually. This year, the group is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

On display at the bike drop-off were photos of the people and communities that Cyclo Nord-Sud has helped over the years.

“It’s just wonderful, when you look at the photos, what they do with the bikes,” said Sheindl Rothman, who identified herself as a proud, card-carrying member of Cyclo-Nord Sud.

“These are bikes that people aren’t using here, and [Cyclo Nord-Sud] gives them a whole new life,” said Rothman.

The bikes being collected during the Oct. 25 drive were destined for a women’s association in Ghana.

“The bikes are used by the women to bring their goods to market or to ease the work associated with searching for water,” said Rubenstein, who reported that over 50 bicycles were collected that day.

“We came to buy some soap, and we saw this activity going on, and we said, ‘Hey, we have a few bikes in the attic,’ so we brought one down. As simple as that,” said Alain Saumier, a communications professor at Université de Montréal, who was out running errands with his wife.

“For these people, it’s their livelihood,” said Saumier, referring to the people who receive bikes from Cyclo Nord-Sud.