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Tell Them We Love Them

Mark Nonkes - February 18, 2009 - Windhoek, Namibia

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February 18, 2009 - “Tell them we love them. From the bottom of our hearts. Tell them thank-you.

The sun is breaking through rain clouds in Katutura. Outside a voluntary HIV testing clinic, a group of five women crack open the doors to a shipping container for the first time. They gasp at what’s inside. Some shout with excitement. Bicycles, donated from a world away are in various states of repair, piled high. Bike parts and accessories: tubes, helmets, etc. are interspersed throughout.

This is a new beginning. As former sex workers, the five women starting this Bicycle Empowerment Centre see the bicycles donated from Bicycles for Humanity in Ottawa, Canada as the path to self-transformation, as an escape from the hell they’ve endured.

Most of the women who turn to sex work in Namibia do it because they feel like it’s their only option. They have little education, have often been sexually abused or raped as a child and feel like it’s the only way they can earn an income. According to a report by Namibia’s Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) most sex-workers were beaten by their clients, many chased or beaten by police and most had sex with a client without using a condom (which is particularly dangerous considering that Namibia’s HIV prevalence rate is around 20 per cent).

In one profile, reported on the LAC’s web site, a woman who has engaged in sex-work since the age of 16 tells her story. The woman, known as Dorina, displays scars she has from being stabbed by her clients with knives and broken bottles. Once after being robbed and beaten by a client, Dorina went to the police. She says they threatened to arrest her and dismissed her claim of being victimized.

Back at the container of bicycles, the realities of their past is forgotten, at least for the moment. They remove each bike from the container with great care. They laugh and joke light-heartedly as they work.

But the importance of this donation is not taken lightly. As the women begin to talk about the new workshop opening, about selling the refurbished bicycles to customers throughout their community, they grow serious.

“It’s not very safe in my neighbourhood,” says Beulah, a 25-year-old single mother of two. “But I’ll take a bike home, for advertising, and at night I’ll keep it in my house, locked to my bed.”

Again and again, the women tell us that a bicycle, a bicycle workshop is not what they imagined for their future. But it’s a welcome surprise and there is so much hope.

We like to think that seeds of hope are planted with each Bicycling Empowerment Network Namibia’s (BEN Namibia) project. By setting up a bicycle workshop, by offering training in both bicycle mechanics and business management, we believe people are given a new chance to improve their life.

With this bicycle workshop, the women tell us that they hope this will be a sustainable way to provide for their children, to ensure they don’t have to return to the streets and to assist other women who want to get off the streets.

As we get set to leave, Maria, a 37-year-old mother of six calls out:

“”Tell them we love them. From the bottom of our hearts. Tell them thank-you.”