Beyond the Bike - it's not about the bike...
A good friend of ours, Stuart Block, will be cycling from South Africa to London, on a tandem bike, over the course of a year, starting later this summer - a challenge known as "Beyond the Bike". He's doing this in order to raise awareness of education in Africa, but more importantly, to raise £100,000, most of which (60%) will be used to support the building and running costs of schools in northern Zambia, in partnership with Beyond Ourselves. The first project will be to start building much-needed classrooms at Kawama School in Kitwe, where Pastor Cephas is the headmaster (see photos). The school, currently consisting of 220 pupils, is run from a single building where five classes are taught simultaneously. The remainder will be split between the charities UNICEF (promoting sport for development in Africa), Alive & Kicking (social enterprise that manufactures sports balls in Zambia & Kenya) and Right to Sight (helping eradicate preventable blindness in Africa).
So where do we fit in? Well, we'll be joining Stuart in August for the Zambia leg from Lusaka to Kitwe, where the schools are based and aiming to raise £2,000 to contribute towards the £100k target. Along with a few others, we'll be using locally made bikes that are optimised for Africa (read bulletproof, but heavy!) to cycle 400km in 4 days, aiming to leave the bikes at the school, which will loan them to the students who live furthest away, in order to allow them to get to and from lessons.
400km in 4 days on African roads will be quite a challenge for us. However the person you will really be sponsoring is Stuart, who will be covering c.14,000 km on his trip, so do please dig deep as this is a massive challenge in aid of some very worthy causes.
If you want to find out more about Beyond the Bike, or follow Stuart's progress, his website is here.
Finally, note that all money raised for these causes will go directly to the charities and is not being used to subsidise any of our or Stuart's travel costs.
James & Kate
