Head Over Wheels to Help Africa

Middle-Schooler's Bicycle Charity Continues to Pick Up Speed

Two years ago, Winston Duncan was on a trip to southern Africa when he was struck by the lack of transportation. He saw a woman and child walking in the middle of nowhere. He saw people walking long distances for necessities like food and medicine because cars and buses were scarce. Their plight made him think of his grandmother, who for most of his life had needed medicine and oxygen tanks.

So when he returned home to Arlington, he decided to take action. He started Wheels to Africa, an organization that collects bicycles and sends them to charities and non-government agencies in several African countries to be used for transportation. He has started a Web site, passed out fliers and organized school assemblies to publicize the effort.

His first time out, he collected a surprising 275 bikes in two days. On Saturday, Winston hopes to more than quadruple that number in a drive being held at five Washington area locations.

Oh, and Winston just turned 13.

"They all looked like they wanted to go somewhere, but they all looked like they needed food, water and medicine," Winston said, referring to the Africans he saw during the trip with his mother. "It really made me sad to see people in Africa who had diseases like my grandma. I thought, 'What could I do to help these people?' "

He considered cars, which didn't seem feasible, so he came up with the idea of sending bicycles.

It wasn't easy for Winston, who was just 10 years old when he returned from his Africa trip in 2005, to convince people of his goal, starting with his mom. As a single mother working as a certified public accountant, Dixie Duncan didn't have a lot of free time, so it took a while for her to warm to the idea. Winston's persistence and seriousness won her over.

"It was his idea; he came up with the name. . . . I'm proud he thinks of other people," Duncan, 51, said, joking, "It'd be easier on me if he didn't!"

They held the first drive in December 2005, and Winston hoped to collect 75 bikes. He collected more than 200, including his own. After that came media coverage in The Washington Post and on CNN, "Good Morning America" and the Voice of America. (Oprah's people called, but they couldn't make it happen.) He even received a letter from President Bush. But it was the radio appearance on Voice of America that meant the most to him, he said, because the spot aired in Africa.

"I was really anxious at the beginning of the bike drive, because I didn't know how it would turn out," he said. "To see those first bikes come, that was really cool."

And now he's hard at work on the next drive. On Saturday he hopes to collect 1,000 bikes, which will be disassembled, loaded onto tractor-trailers, and shipped to Senegal and Uganda. The extra space in the trailers will be filled with items such as crutches, soccer balls and books.

"I learned it's a big world . . . there's a lot of avenues to take to publicize something or do something if you put your mind to it," Winston said. "It's fun for me to do it and good to know I'm helping people. I just like giving back to people who don't have as much as I do. It's something I want to keep doing."

When he's not collecting donated money or bikes, hanging up posters, painting banners or doing other work for Wheels to Africa, the Williamsburg Middle School seventh-grader is busy playing on two basketball teams and a soccer team. He also likes geography and playing with his dog, Precious. The dog, and her name, came from Deda Duncan, his late grandmother and Dixie's mother. She passed away in February 2006, two months after the first Wheels to Africa bike collection, but lived to see her grandson on CNN.

"There's a lot of components to doing something like this together that teaches you a lot about life, which I feel is my job as a parent," Duncan said. It teaches Winston about budgeting, time management, drive, compassion and many other things. "I learned a lot, too. Who knows how many lives could be affected? Who knew somebody's life could be affected by something as simple as a free bike?"

Visit the Wheels to Africa Web site athttp://wheelstoafrica.blogspot.com.