April 2, 2005: Headlines: COS - Senegal: Bicycles: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: RPCV Allegra Troiano founded the Casamance Renaissance Foundation in 2002 to send bicycles to Senegal as incentives for the students to stay in school and maintain their grades.
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April 2, 2005: Headlines: COS - Senegal: Bicycles: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: RPCV Allegra Troiano founded the Casamance Renaissance Foundation in 2002 to send bicycles to Senegal as incentives for the students to stay in school and maintain their grades.
RPCV Allegra Troiano founded the Casamance Renaissance Foundation in 2002 to send bicycles to Senegal as incentives for the students to stay in school and maintain their grades.
RPCV Allegra Troiano founded the Casamance Renaissance Foundation in 2002 to send bicycles to Senegal as incentives for the students to stay in school and maintain their grades.
Bicycles can mean lunch for students
Donated bikes will help keep children in school in Senegal
By TOM HELD
theld@journalsentinel.com
Posted: April 2, 2005
When a school has a dirt floor and a thatched roof, it's not hard to fathom that its lunch program would suffer from a lack of bicycles.
An elementary school in the village of Thionk-Essyl, Senegal, shows the extremely poor conditions under which the students study. Days are often hot, and there is no electricity.
Allegra Troiano came to that realization quite easily last spring during a return visit to the Ossouye village in the Casamance Region of Senegal, where she worked as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1980 to 1982.
Meeting with the teachers in the school where she had taught English, Troiano learned that walking was still the primary means of transportation, and the students traveling from villages nearly 10 miles away had no way to get home for lunch. Their typical foods of fish and rice don't pack well, and many of the youths spent long afternoons enduring the sharp pangs of hunger.
Bicycles would mean they could eat; and Troiano knew how to get them from her experience gathering 260 bikes in a drive she ran two years ago.
She'll be collecting bicycles again, April 8-10, at the Wheel and Sprocket Bike Expo at State Fair Park in West Allis. Troiano hopes to collect and deliver 200 or more bicycles to the village, where they will serve as the primary means of transportation and help ensure students eat and thrive.
For many of the students, a bicycle may make the difference between dropping out of school and getting an education and leaving behind subsistence living, said Reine Marie Assana, who grew up in Senegal and now lives in Milwaukee.
"Most live in rural settings," Assana said. "Usually what happens in those regions, you go to school in a city, and you walk back home in the village area to eat and come back. At some point, you get tired and you just drop out.
"This is an incentive for them to keep them going."
Troiano, who founded the Casamance Renaissance Foundation in 2002, said the local officials in Ossouye would use the bicycles as incentives for the students to stay in school and maintain their grades. The students themselves will use the bikes as their only means of transportation, to carry farm goods and food, and for recreation, she said.
"If you offer someone a bike, it's like offering someone a Cadillac here," Troiano said. "They will get to the market in half the time."
Local support
The organizers of two local bike collection and distribution programs applaud Troiano's efforts. Enough unused bicycles sit in garages and basements throughout the area to supply nearly every child and adult who needs one, said Rob West, who coordinates the YMCA Bykes for Tykes program at the Holton Youth Center.
"The idea to send some of them overseas is a good one," West said.
Dana Nix, who coordinates a bike collection and repair program through the Boys and Girls Club, said she had extra adult bikes that she plans to donate to the Senegal cause.
Troiano said she preferred that donors contribute either mountain bikes or hybrids, with wider tires better suited for the dirt rides in southern Senegal. Donated bikes should be rust-free and in reasonable working order, although the Casamance foundation has been raising money to pay for minor repairs.
Troiano and her fellow volunteers will be stationed in the back of the exhibition hall from noon to 9 p.m. on Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. A 40-foot container will be there ready to be filled with the donated bikes.
The Meehan Foundation has provided the shipping container and is covering the cost of transporting the bicycles to Senegal.
During her time there, Troiano grew to respect the Senegalese people for their work habits and their desire to improve themselves.
"Even though they come from some of the poorest conditions and have very little money, they put a big priority on education," she said. "That's the whole point of getting these bicycles to these kids.
"It's going to help them get jobs and do something beyond rice farming."
From the April 3, 2005, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
When this story was posted in April 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Senegal; Bicycles
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