A bicycle built for 10,000
It started, like many successful international projects, with a relatively simple proposal made by an individual Rotary member. A dozen years later, the project has expanded remarkably in scope and gained the active participation of more than 10 Rotary clubs in three districts in Ontario.
In 2011, while visiting Cambodia, Lisa McCoy, a member of the Rotary Club of Gravenhurst, took note of how difficult it was for children to attend school because they lacked transportation. Upon returning home, she shared that observation with club members and began a fundraising campaign to purchase and distribute used bicycles. The following year, McCoy led a team of 30 volunteers to Cambodia, where they purchased and distributed more than 1,000 bicycles in what would become the club’s annual Wheels for Learning project.
Members of the Wheels for Learning team assemble bicycles during their 2023 visit to Cambodia.
Courtesy of Mike Cole
In 2015, John Gordon, a past governor of District 7010, invited his friend Mike Cole to join the Wheels for Learning team. “I was in the military at the time,” recalls Cole, “and I had served in operations in Namibia, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. I have always believed in the importance of service to others, and Cambodia seemed like a nice fit for me.” (By his own admission, Cole also possessed some traits well suited to the task at hand: “I am highly organized and a team player.”) The following year, after McCoy had to step down for personal reasons, Cole served as co-leader of the project, and in 2017, the same year he joined the Gravenhurst club, he became the sole leader — and, you might say, the soul — of the Wheels for Learning initiative.
“Many of the children in Cambodia have to walk more than 3 kilometers to school,” Cole says. “Shortcuts through fields and jungle offer the prospect of encountering long forgotten land mines, unexploded ordinance, or poisonous snakes. They simply cannot attend school without the aid of a bicycle.
“After a couple of trips to Cambodia,” he adds, “I soon learned that getting the children to school wasn’t enough. The infrastructure at the rural schools was either very old, in a state of disrepair, or nonexistent. Without wells, latrines, and wash areas, the children have no way of using the washroom, cleaning their hands, or having water to drink. This lack of critical infrastructure further disadvantages adolescent girls, who generally drop out of school once they start to menstruate.”
This realization, Cole says, prompted him to expand the focus of the project in 2018 by hiring a local contractor to build a three-stall latrine, a wash area, and a well with a storage tank as a pilot project at a school in Kampong Speu province. He also decided to take steps to improve the quality of the bikes being provided.
“We have been buying ‘gently used’ bikes from a dealer in Phnom Penh,” Cole says. “But what is considered serviceable in Cambodia is different from what Canadians would consider serviceable. Our approach changed from simply distributing bikes to conducting detailed repairs on them before they are distributed. I buy about $800 in spare parts to use when we assemble them. Our intent is to provide the child with a ‘like new’ bicycle. Because I’m a technical person and I bring technical people along, we are able to do that.”
During their 2017 visit to Cambodia, members of the Wheels for Learning team led a presentation about dental hygiene.
Courtesy of Mike Cole
In addition to the bicycle distribution endeavor, Wheels for Learning became a water, sanitation, and hygiene project. In 2019, the program provided funds for local contractors to build and install five latrines, three wells and storage tanks, three wash areas, 32 water filters, and two playgrounds in rural schools. That same year, a 22-member team of volunteers repaired and distributed 944 bicycles, along with 70 pounds of school supplies, 200 books for a school library, a year’s supply of soap and towels, and a ton of rice.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the trip to be cancelled in 2021, but the project still funded components of the sanitation construction initiative and the delivery of 20 tons of rice. Cole reports that over the last two years, the program has funded the building and installation of 148 latrines, three wells, four wash areas, 34 water filters, and two playgrounds. In keeping with the program’s original mission, 32 volunteers repaired and delivered more than 1,300 bicycles, bringing the total to nearly 10,700 bikes since Wheels for Learning first got rolling — which occasioned a jubilant celebration at the Gravenhurst Opera House in June 2022 as the project reached the 10,000-bike milestone. Distributing school supplies, personal hygiene products, and books has also become a project staple.
Cole says that the initiative has an annual budget of “upwards of $80,000,” with financial support coming from two district grants and donations from individual Rotary members and Rotary clubs throughout Ontario. The clubs include Bracebridge, Collingwood-South Georgian Bay, Huntsville, Kirkland Lake, Minden, Niagara Falls, North Bay-Nipissing, Orillia, Parry Sound, Toronto, and Toronto West. Members of the Rotary clubs of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh in Cambodia also volunteer with bicycle assembly and distribution and donate to the project.
But, Cole says, the largest portion of the funding is raised by the team members who take part in the project. “We generally never have an issue of not reaching our goals,” he explains. “It just takes a lot of work getting there.”
Cole finds it gratifying that half of the 15 to 20 people who volunteer on the annual service trip sign up to participate again, noting that the project is “not like a vacation,” but a labor-intensive gig that runs from the last week of January through mid-February. As of July, he says, 17 volunteers have committed to participating next year.
The Wheels for Learning team has delivered more than 10,000 bicycles to people in Cambodia.
Courtesy of Mike Cole
“This project involves nine full days of working in the hot sun,” he says. “The men and women who go are people who really believe in Service Above Self. That holds true, but once you get over there, you get to meet so many amazing Canadians. When you work with people for three weeks, you build lifelong friendships. Every year, that’s the takeaway. By the end of those three weeks, we are all like family.”
The annual trip has become a literal family affair for Cole. His 31-year-old daughter, Lia, has joined the group four times, and his wife, Julia, has accompanied them once. Next year, Cole says, he and Julia plan to bring their 5-year-old son, William. “We want him to get a bit of an understanding of what we’re doing over there,” he says. Until then, William will have to settle for watching a video about the project produced by Cole’s cousin Mikayla Bruder that appears on the Wheels for Learning website.
Cole says that he has “an aha moment’’ every year. “It comes during the first bicycle distribution, when I see the excitement and smiles on the faces of not only the children receiving the bikes but on the faces of the parents as well,” he says. “It’s a smile of hope, of dreams, and of the future.”
This story originally appeared in the October 2023 issue of Rotary Canada.