About
When traveling through Africa in 2008 I came across a small village with a school just before Mvuu, near Liwonde National Park in Malawi. The classroom was a typical rural school under a thorn tree. I could see the hunger for education in the kids’ eyes and that struck me because even with the little they have, they were eager to learn. On my way to town I saw the same striking setting of “the classroom”. I started thinking about the situation and wondered how I could change it. In town I saw a shop with a sign saying: “Stationery, photo copies and photo development”. I bought all the A4 and A5 writing books I could fit in my empty panniers to go and hand them out to the kids under the tree.
After getting permission from the head master, I handed out the books to much delight of the kids.
They need 5 books and a school uniform to attend school for free, but most of them cannot afford the cost of about $3 for a uniform.
That’s where the seed was planted. With this fond memory in my mind I decided to go and do it again. We bought some stationery and went to a few schools close to Uniondale (Western Cape province) to hand it out. The response was huge when the kids saw the motorbike and then the pencils and crayons. We did it on Madiba’s birthday and I saw it as my 67 minutes to make a change in someone’s life. We reached about 120 kids . This was in 2011.
Bikers for Mandela did a project to change the lives of less fortunate people. The concept is that by giving 67 minutes of your time you can make a difference in someone else’s life. So I did my own one once again, but this time I went on route to our training facility at Country TRAX and visited 3 schools to distribute some much needed stationery. Who knows, maybe there is a great artist, engineer, poet or a new Madiba among them.
Whilst doing a lot of mileage in South America and through Africa in 2012, I realized that we travel to remote areas on our adventure bikes and we can make a difference. So this was the idea, as we travel in the most beautiful places and we are so fortunate to have these experiences, we can give back to the communities. I spoke to our local BMW Motorrad dealer principle, Raymond Botha, and he bought in on the project. We decided to get some fellow adventure bike riders together to help us to distribute the stationery to 6 schools in the Garden Route and Karoo on Madiba’s birthday (18 July). We asked local businesses to help with sponsorships and we raised just over R30 000 in two weeks. So off we went on the awesome routes in our area that we travel so often past the small schools. On this day we reached over 3000 kids and handed out much needed printing paper to the schools to.
Stationery 4 Africa has grown over the years and we aim to keep distributing stationery to less fortunate schools through numerous stationery runs happening throughout the year.
