Rebuilding
Rwanda, one bike at a time
“I always
wanted to get involved” in helping people, said Jacob Siegel-Boettner in an
interview this week at this home in Santa Barbara. “I lead a mountain bike camp
for teenagers every summer at Elings Park, and I thought ‘how powerful’ a bike
can be. We consider it a toy; to them it’s a car.”
The “them”
he had in mind when he said that, are the people who grow and sell coffee beans
in Rwanda. The bicycles that Siegel-Boettner is raising funds to provide are the means of transporting
their coffee harvest to market.
Siegel-Boettner said that, looking for a meaningful way
to become involved, “I found out about Project Rwanda, which was started by Tom
Richie. He basically invented the mountain bike in Marin County in the ’70s.
Project Rwanda was just getting started, and I felt like I could have an impact
there.”
The
initial objective in the program was to provide bicycles for people who work
Rwanda’s coffee plantations. On the rear of each bike is a platform capable of
carrying 200 kilograms — nearly 450 pounds — of coffee beans.
Siegel-Boettner has taken a term off from UC Berkeley to
work on Project Rwanda for independent study in tandem with his degree program.
His major is in peace and conflict studies, and his minor is in global poverty
and practice.
The
suffering endured in Rwanda during the genocidal conflict of 1994, Siegel-Boettner said, “is very complex. It’s not ‘Hotel
Rwanda’ (the recent film about the genocide). It’s much more complex. The
Tutsis and the Hutus always got along. They are the two major tribes, and they’re
virtually the same, they speak the same language, they don’t have a history of
conflict. They are the nicest, most outgoing people you could find.
“But the
Belgians came in and stirred up these conflicts.”
Siegel-Boettner said when he was in Rwanda, he walked
around at night in the capital, Kigali, and never worried.
“As a
white person, you stand out,” he said with a laugh. “You practically glow in
the dark. People think it’s dangerous” because of the civil conflict, “It’s
absolutely not. Rwanda is known for the best coffee you can find, and also for
the mountain gorillas that live there.”
Jacob
emphasized that the conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu populations is a
latter-day result of “Belgian colonizing of the country and giving most of the
good jobs to the Tutsis.”
The
Belgians came to the African nation after World War II and seemed bent on
playing up real or imagined differences between the Hutus and the Tutsis, he
said. “They were even measuring facial features,” he said.
The
Belgians left in 1959, and the Hutus took over most of the government, he
explained. The inter-tribal fighting that followed was “the first time that it
happened. A lot of Tutsis say that’s when the trouble began. Some people didn’t
want to share power.”
As Rwanda
struggled to establish its own hegemony, France helped to create a governmental
structure. Once the genocide subsided, Siegel-Boettner said, “They kicked out the French
Embassy and Air France (the international airline). They really don’t like the
French.”
As
Siegel-Boettner has become more
and more immersed in his bicycle project, he credits his parents with helping
to shape his attitudes. John Boettner and Lynn Seigel are teachers, and ardent
bicycle enthusiasts, as is their younger son, Isaac, who also attends UC
Berkeley.
“I rode
home from the hospital in a bicycle trailer after I was born,”
Siegel-Boettner said. “My parents
were always taking us on bike trips.” The family has pedaled through Ireland,
Italy, Austria and France on vacation. “My parents did Japan before I was born.
We’ve gone all over Canada. Everybody rides.”
Siegel-Boettner has a girlfriend, Sarah Hart, who is
going to Namibia this year. He is hoping to coax her into going to Rwanda with
him. “I’m working on it,” he said with a grin.
Meanwhile,
he has made a video about Project Rwanda and hopes to have it accepted for the
next Santa Barbara Film Festival. “I’m keeping it short,” he said, “even though
I have about five hours of film.”
He also
wants to keep young people involved with Project Rwanda, including some of his
father’s middle school students.
“We’re
trying to set up a sister bicycle shop in Rwanda like the bicycle shop I use
here.”
So far,
he’s raised about $9,000 over the past two years, and hopes to raise $6,000 in
the coming year.
“I’d like
not to rely on donations,” he said. “It’s a social business, based on the
theory of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.” That means, he said,
that non-governmental agencies can build micro-financed industries, plough the
profits back into them and become self-sustaining.
“The
wealthy and middle-class in Rwanda want their bikes to ride, and the farmers
want to have fleets of them. We’re working with micro-economics here,”
Siegel-Boettner said.
“It
originated as a hand out, but now we say, it’s a hand up, not a hand out.”