Project Rwanda is an effort spearheaded by Tom Ritchey and Gary Boulanger. Until last year Boulanger was the owner of Cycles Gaansari, a small classic bicycle manufacturer in Ohio. Ritchey, of course, is that Tom Ritchey, cycling’s Steve Jobs, a pioneer of mountain biking, a philanthropist, and a perennial mogul of the cycling industry, the founder of Ritchey Bicycles.

Ritchey and Boulanger have shared an interest in using cycling to help others and had been flirting with working together for a while, before Ritchey called Boulanger one night to ask if he’d go to Rwanda with him.

Ritchey knew Dan Cooper, an avid mountain biker employed by a Chicago-based investment company. Work had brought Cooper to Rwanda and he found a much different place than expected. Cooper told Ritchey about this friendly, hospitable country, that was totally at odds with its reputation, being both beautiful and safe, with incredible wildlife and mountains ribboned with dirt roads and singletrack. “Every time Dan would go, he’d return with stories of seeing bicycles everywhere,” Boulanger says, “And it occurred to them then that the bicycle industry might be able to contribute in some way.”

So, would Ritchey come and check it out, Cooper asked, and find new ways to network and make something happen? The opportunity for change was huge. Ritchey accepted Coo- per’s challenge, Boulanger accepted Ritchey’s invitation, and Ritchey, Boulanger and other team members journeyed to Rwanda last December, to explore what they as mountain bike entrepreneurs could do to help the country get a leg up, economically.

“Re-branding” was mission number one for the team, which at first was calling itself Wheels of Mercy.

“Everyone has this Mr. Yuck image of Rwanda. ‘Stay away from it, there’s fighting going on, there’s corruption and everything else,’ you know? When that hasn’t been the case since 1999,” Boulanger says. “The world was trying to give aid to African countries, but was blowing off Rwanda for these reasons. That’s why Dan was going in and looking for different ways they could find to help.”

Initially, the group wanted to simply tour Rwanda, to ride around the country and experience first-hand what it had to offer. What happened was the trip exposed them to a startling beauty of the people and the land, and a huge opportunity to assist Rwanda in the tender years of rebuilding itself.

There is a short film documenting the group’s initial visit on the Project Rwanda website, projectrwanda.org. A photo gallery displays locals riding with Ritchey and com- pany, and a series of clips showing how the group got around by bicycle, an old boat, and an even older helicopter. It shows the children of Rwanda seemingly everywhere, wearing big smiles. There’s a clip of Ritchey riding an Igicugutu, one of the Flintstones-looking wooden bikes common to the region.

An early idea of how to bring Rwanda to the forefront of national attention was that of a Rwandan national team. A group of riders was picked to accompany Ritchey on a 70-mile ride around the countryside during one of the first days of his visit.

They were young men on thirty-year-old steel bikes, displaying conditioning and strength, if not racing experience. Other local riders showed some conditioning, too. Ritchey, on one of his own prototype titanium mountain bikes, whizzed along at a brisk pace with the rest of the group and Boulanger says several times locals would appear out of nowhere on heavy, cobbled-together bikes and join in for parts of the ride.

“There would be these guys on what had to be these hundred-pound singlespeed bikes, and they’d be barefoot, with one pedal just a shaft and the other a platform of sorts, and they’d just drop our guys on hills like they were standing still,” Boulanger says. “We were like, ‘Now, that’s who we’d want for a national team.’”

“The guys weren’t trying to compete,” Boulanger says, “they were just getting around.”

But even if a Rwandan mountain bike team never saw a podium in international competition, it occurred to Ritchey that the simple fact that they wanted to compete, to ride together, was enough to get the world’s attention and show the level of reconciliation that had miraculously occurred in Rwanda in such a short time. The initial members of this “Rwandan National Team” were immediately understood to be strong and enthusiastic, but also raw and not used to real competition outside of the small country.

Project Rwanda’s vision is now distilled down to a few tangible objectives, one of which is the Wooden Bike Classic. The festival, held this past September, invited both international and local competitors as a way to help convince outsiders that the Rwandan people aren’t scary and that the weather is gorgeous.

Another objective is adventure travel, due to the favorable climate and Rwanda’s history of a hospitality economy. The experience the team had in Rwanda initiated a more immediate, obvious possibility for Rwanda to find revenue from the mountain biking resources at hand through tourism. Nearly every day of riding in Rwanda ended with a meal at one of the four-star hotels that still exist from the times before the trouble.

In the beginning, Boulanger thought that some sort of bicycle industry would both better equip the population and provide a boost to the economy, since better transportation meant more things happened when they should in an agriculturally-based economy like Rwanda’s. Getting goods to market and goods back to the villages where people still suffered from malnourishment was key; and, since neighboring African countries were also bicycle-hungry, exporting finished bicycles seemed like a good idea.

However, due to the country’s transportation issues and exchange rates, in-country manufacture of any bicycle isn’t feasible right now. There is a specialty utility longbike modeled on the Xtracycle idea that Project Rwanda is trying to have manufactured and shipped to the coffee-growing nation. Growers could get a greater return on their beans if they could use the new utility bikes to make it to market sooner.

Besides facilitating the delivery of finished utility bikes, better bicycling would mean more to the human spirit in Rwanda. Ritchey explains that the bicycles he saw around him in Rwanda reminded him of how bicycles are a freedom tool in any country, whether the rides were the cherished museum pieces of the young men who rode with him that first day, the cobbled-together Chinese-made singlespeeds, or the Igicugutu hauling bananas, coffee, potatoes, and other goods to the market.

If bicycles were introduced, a better repair infrastructure would also need to be established. Donations of tools and mechanical training are as important as the bicycles themselves.

“Each village had a bike shop of sorts, usually in the center of the village next to the fruit stand, where they had some crude tools to work with,” Ritchey says. “They’d always have a hammer and some broken tools.”

“It comes down to you can give a man a fish…you know the saying,” Boulanger remarks. “Or, you can give him the rod, and the line, and teach him how to catch and cook and prepare the fish.”

But for all the fantastic colors, good food, hospitality, smiles, decent beds and remote riding the group enjoyed, signs of Rwanda’s past were not well hidden.

Easily obtainable drinking water and electricity are rare. Boulanger talks about how the country seems so young on average, for uncomfortable reasons. The old people are gone, but orphanages are everywhere, all full, parents taken either by the murders, or the following civil war, or the AIDS epidemic that grips the entire continent of Africa.

In fact, the very bones of those slaughtered in the genocide are left in the open, so no one forgets, whether Rwandan or those visiting Rwanda.

Ritchey, Boulanger and the rest of the team visited the Ntarama Church Genocide Memorial Site, about 45 kilometers south of the city of Kigali. This former church now serves as both museum and tomb.

“The walls were brick, the bricks made of mud,” Boulanger recalls. “Basically this place was left alone and made into a memorial, just as it was after the genocide.” The holes where grenades were thrown into the church can still be seen. Skulls line the walls, many with bullet holes, some with machete marks. “They were small skulls, so they were obviously small children. It looked like it happened yesterday, and this was just one of five or six sites. In this one, we were told there were 5,000 people killed.”

Upon leaving the memorial, the westerners were surrounded by children—alive, smiling children who were fascinated by the mzungu—the white man.

“I had to ask, how in the world did this happen here?” Boulanger says. “Just outside the gates of this memorial there were kids whose parents were involved and all of them had to be affected, and who were giddier than most chubby kids in the suburbs we live in.

“These were children that had nothing at all to their names, in Rwanda. They were just so happy to see people. They weren’t begging and they weren’t asking for money. They knew we had digital cameras. Tom was crouching down, showing them the pictures, and they were just so excited. And this was just several feet away from where all this happened.”

Ritchey says that the poorest country in Africa seemed rich in other things, one of them redemption. “I’d say the things that struck me, that make me want to come out of my shell and look at things differently…is how people couldn’t do this unless they had taken the steps to forgive.”

Besides the cooperative government, the welcoming populace, and the apparent need for economic development, Ritchey, Boulanger and Miller believe it is the spirit of the place and the people in the face of such adversity that makes them think something needs to happen, must happen, and as soon as it can happen.

“I came away thinking, man, there’s something special going on here, it’s unique…they are doing it and getting on with their life,” Ritchey says. “I think they had the feeling until just recently that if they were going to survive they would have to do it themselves, without any help from us. No handouts. Them, taking ownership of their terrible treatment of one another and doing something about it.

“For me and my perspective,” Ritchey says, “it’s a personal hope story for me. This is not normal. This is not the way people think. Cynicism and culture conflict is the way people think.

“To study this and experience this is the reason I am there, and to fan it, to support it somehow. To take it, to give it back…More than anything to me, this is hope.”