Bike-Aid and the Overseas Development Network By Shea Dean Sure, it looks a little difficult. But the easiest way to really understand tttjs country' and talk deeply with everyday people, may be to bike 3,600 miles across the US. Each summer five groups, with up to twenty cyclists each, stop in towns and cities, sleep in Native American lands, churches and community centers, help neighborhoods, rebuild hospices, sandbag against floods, casually solicit money for grassroots groups.' and chat in diners, bowling alleys and with the media. .They do all this to raise awareness_about issues as apparently diverse as AIDS and ThirdWorld development. And after a summer like that, Bike-Aid participants can handle just about anything. Bike-Aid always welcomes new riders. They leave · beginning in June from Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Brownsville, Texas, and Montreal. The Portland group, Page 30 RAIN Summer 1994 Volume XIV, Number 4 interestingly, is for women only. Everyone meets in . Washington, DC on August 19, where they pedal en masse around the Lincoln Memorial and engage in satisfying postjourney revelry. , Their arrival at the capital is an announcement to the powers that be, by a well-worn and diverse bunch of activists. Several come from developing countries to ride, and discuss, in the most unlikely places along the way, development from a transnationa~ and grassroots perspective. At the DC ceremonies, the speakers emphasize that AIDS, the environment, women, and economics can only be understood if you see what's happening beyond US borders. To move global issues into a local, personal context, Nazir Ahmad founded the Overseas Development Net~ork (ODN), Bike-Aid's parent organization, at Stanford in 1983. He and his brother, both from Bangladesh, felt that
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