Tour du Faso!

So what is the Burkina Bike Tour?

The Bike Tour was started last year as a fundraiser for our Gender and Development Committee (GAD). The riders in the tour ask their friends and family back home to make a donation to in support of them biking the tour. The money was then used to fund small grants for volunteers and their communities throughout this past year. All the projects that grant money was used for had to help promote the development of women and girls. (This really awesome project was done by my nearest neighbor, a Girls' Empowerment and Education volunteer who lives about 30km from my village! She used grant money to train some middle school girls to act as "health agents," teaching the community about a variety of topics.)

This year, in addition to using the tour as a fundraiser, the GAD committee wanted to use it as an opportunity to spread awareness about Peace Corps Burkina Faso and about individual projects volunteers are working on. I know this year's route was chosen so that they are passing through as many sites as possible. At some of the sites we pass through, through group will help lead a formation (session? sometimes i forget that words i use aren't really english words...) about hand washing, hygiene, malaria, family planning, or anything else that the volunteer wants to put together. In some villages, we will have a welcome festival and simply enjoying spending time spent eating and dancing.

The Bike Tour is going to cover a total of 1800km (about 1120 miles) over 22 days. I will biking 7 days for a total of 572km (355 miles) for an average of 96km/day! I'm super excited, and I tell myself that 100km is not actually that much; most cars can do it in an hour, so I figure I can do it in a day, right? The tour starts on the south-western corner of the country, and I'm starting at the third little dot. I'm ending at the most northern dot, and if you're curious, my village is just north of the 4th dot.

Yes, there are more dots than sites listed. We are just passing through some villages, and spending the night in others.

So now that you know all about the Bike Tour, consider donating to the GAD committee. I mean, what better way to spend some tax-deductible money than on the development of women in one of the poorest countries in the world. And you do get quite a bang for you buck, too. At the current exchange rate: $8 will buy all the needed supplies for a hand washing station (bucket, spigot, and soap); $10 is enough to buy notebooks and pens for girls' camp of 15 girls; and just $2.50 is enough to feed each of those girls breakfast, lunch, AND dinner for that same week long camp. So without starting to sound like one of those infomercials for sponsoring children, even a little bit goes a long way! If you do donate, make sure to mark GAD Gender and Development in the comments box. Here's the website, and the donation box is on the right hand side.

I will hopefully have at least one update on how the tour is going, but I'm not sure what our internet access is going to be like. If not, I will most definitely write all about it once I'm done :) Also, if you have any other questions about the donations or grants, let me know!