Expedition: Good Will
Voluntourism:
Its a term not known to everyone as a real word, but a hybrid of two concepts; which is precisely the idea behind this hip and fashionable way to see the world. "Voluntourism" is the amalgamation of tourism and volunteering and it's summed up in this quick phrase, "travel with a purpose."
This past winter, I met a woman, named Laura Perkins at a riveting Flagler County Chamber of Commerce function. A bookkeeper for the Chamber at the time, she saw that I was at the schmooze fest not to rub elbows with Flagler's big money types, but that I was there on official business. I was there shooting pictures of the hobnobbing for a business story to run in the Daytona Beach News-Journal.
She approached me when she saw my interest in the chamber function waning. "You work at the the newspaper right?", she asked, with slight trepidation and excitement in her voice.
"Yes, I do work for the News-Journal". She then launched into a long explanation of a trip she was going to take four or five months from then to Africa and wondered how she could tell people about a group she wanted to form.
This woman is going to Africa, and she's from Flagler County, how can I make this a news story that the readers will be interested in?, I thought to myself.
She told me she was starting a chapter of a charitable organization and I asked her, needing no more information, "how do I join?". She was going to Africa on a humanitarian trip and she was looking for other people with similar philosophies to join the local chapter of her group.
We exchanged information, a friendship and a local charity was born, weighing in at 2 people and 501c3 status. I decided right there and then, that I was going to Malawi, Africa.
In the coming weeks, she told me about Ambassadors for Children, a charitable travel organization focused on promoting peace and serving children throughout the world by humanitarian service that supports sustainable projects.
I had heard about trips like this in the past but never really looked seriously at them as a possibility in my future. I like helping people and I love traveling any and everywhere in the world. I traveled to Thailand on my own dime after the Tsunami of 2002 with a group of doctors from University of Florida's Shands Hospital. I documented their humanitarian mission there and the utter devastation that the natural disaster left behind.
I have traveled to Central America on separate occasions to visit family and to find any story I could tell through pictures. I have an insatiable hunger for travel and constant curiousity for other cultures. This trip was to fulfill all those desires and more.
Before June we found two more members to join our group and to go on our trip. Heather Lo, a music teacher at Indian Trails Middle school in Palm Coast and Annette Moore, a restaurant manager from Holly Hill. With our bags packed and our arms sore from the tetanus, yellow fever and cholera and other vaccinations we got, we headed to Washington D.C. to meet up with the fourteen other people that were to be our fellow team members for the next fourteen days.
We staged at an international gate of Ethiopian Airlines, in DC introducing ourselves to the other people that were headed to Malawi with us, to embark on this good will journey to Malawi. After an 18 hour flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we had an eight hour layover that we spent in a shady hotel, in the nation's capital, then at 4am we piled back into a micro bus to get on another 6 hour flight to Malawi.
After almost an entire two days of travel and 8200 miles from home, we finally arrived at our destination of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.
As a team building exercise and the lesiure part of "voluntourism", we were wisked away to Lake Malawi for a day in paradise. Lake Malawi is the third largest lake on the continent at 373 x 50 miles and home to over 500 species of fish.
We spent the day and one night at a breathtaking resort called the Safari Beach Lodge. Nestled up above Lake Malawi overlooking Salema Bay we had a chance to decompress from nearly two days of living on a plane with pressurized cabins, elbow wrestling for armrests. The rustic charm of the Safari Beach Lodge was just what we needed, a serene atmosphere with nothing to do but relax and get acclimated to the country we would be calling home for the next 14 days.
Our quarters were wood structures with canvas tent rooves, where characters from a rebel army might have stayed, straight out of a Hemmingway novel, hidden in the trees with the cool arid lake breezes wandering through.
After one day and night of getting to know the other members of our group, we headed back to our destination in our mini bus, dodging men on bicycles carrying bundles of parcels, chickens, or firewood, loads exceeding those I have seen in some small pick up trucks. In Malawi, there really isn't a speed limit and traffic signals exist not on signs but as only as the horn in the vehicle you are driving in. After a 5 hour trek, we made it to Lilongwe, Malawi, the capital city of the fifth poorest country in the world.
The guest house was located outside the city, and near the airport on the grounds of a private hospital and and near Mtendere Village, home to an orphanage of 125 children orphaned by HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty.
Eighteen of us walked down the dusty path to the small village below as children spilled out of the brick structures to see us, shouting "Azungu...azungu", translates to “ghost”, in Chichewa, the native language of Malawi, and is the word used for white people.
The children gathered around keeping a trepidacious distance of about 15 feet from us waiting to see what we would do next.
Its a powerful experience when you are greeted by 150 bright faces, full of curiosity and excitement, all smiling, despite a lifetime of strife, loss and hardship. Sure this life is all they have known, and they probably don't care how much opportunity the rest of the world has. When they broke out in song, carrying a tune with such innocence and niavete, I felt a lump forming in my throat.
According to Unicef, the life expectancy in Malawi in 2005 was 40 years old and well over half of Malawi's one million orphans have lost one or both parents to AIDS. At the risk of sounding like a "for just pennies a day" Sally Struthers soldier, it's not important to explain how poor and wretched these children seemed, but what seemed more important to me was that we were there to make an impact, not just to visit as a tourist, but to do something positive in someone's life less fortunate than ourselves.
Tourism helps economies in developing nations, but sometimes it's very impersonal and superficial. I found more fulfillment in helping a child understand something about the world they live in by answering a burning question, or play a round of soccer with them on a dusty lot somewhere across the world, sipping Mai Tais at the beach and calling it a day. I wanted more out of my international travel experience and this concept of voluntourism would satisfy all my desires.
We divided our group of "Azungus" into different activities that we would be doing with the children. We had a music group, a sports group, a crafts group and the photography group.
Located in southeast Africa, the Republic of Malawi shares a border with Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. This tiny little sliver of a country has an estimated population of almost 13 million people. Based on a 2004 Gross National Product per capita of $160, Malawi is the fifth poorest country in the world. GNP per capita represents the total amount of money that a country's people spend on goods and services in one year, divided by the population.
Even darker than the country's poverty stricken status is the shadow that AIDS/HIV the pandemic is casting over the country's children.
New Breed of Bikebuilders
SOUTH DAYTONA — Five miles south of the loud crowds, chrome and classic rock on Main Street, gritty
punk music screams from a trailer as 30-somethings with arms sleeved in ink, shaved heads, dreadlocks
and pirate beards build beautiful motorcycles out of other people’s junk. This place is known as the
Limpnickie Lot, headquartered at Stone Edge Skate Park, and it is as much a state of mind as a
vendor parking lot—an attitude that’s becoming a trend in the world of custom choppers.
‘‘The Limpnickie Lot came together out of necessity,’’ said 32-year-old Taber Nash,
Limpnickie’s founder and owner of Nash Motorcycle Co. in Vancouver, Washington.
Nash said he got tired of setting up his tent and display next to mainstream custom builders,
so he blended his love for punk and metal music with skateboard and BMX culture to develop
his own style of bike building.
Three years ago, Nash got some of his friends together to set up the show for the first time at the skate park,
and Limpnickie was born. Nash, and his brothers used the catchy name to describe dirty, scruffy kids in their neighborhood, and the name stuck. The rest is history, or the rest is the future, rather. . . the future of custom-chopper building.
Young meets old here, as builders in their 20s and 30s use recycled parts from bikes out of the Easy
Rider era that haven’t seen daylight for decades. Refurbished and tarnished steel frames and restored engines,
still covered in rust, are pounded and wrenched together in strange combinations to form bikes like you’ve never seen.
Unlike their shiny and highly chromed airbrushed counterparts, these bikes look like they’ve been through battle rather than the beauty shop. Most of the rides parked on the cracked asphalt could be props from ‘‘Mad Max.’’
This motley crew of like minded motorcycle builders employs more trash than flash to make their rides. Deltona resident ‘‘Boston Mike’’ Olson, owner of Boston Mike’s Custom Bikes in Sanford, used found parts like a filter from a 1950s-era kitchen appliance for an air-cleaner cover. He fashioned a ribbed aluminum drain pipe into an oil tank on his bike named Betty, built with a 1969 Harley-Davidson frame, the same year Peter
Fonda and Dennis Hopper appeared in ‘‘Easy Rider.’’
Olson, a 39-year-old Massachusetts transplant, doesn’t have the resources or the desire to build flashy, expensive bikes. For him, it’s about time, effort and a do-it-yourself mentality.
‘‘You can get further with elbow grease than you can with money,’’ he said. Olson estimates he spent 100
hours and $1,400 on Betty, and it paid off. The candy apple-red custom graced the cover of Street Chopper Magazine in February. Limpnickie builders make each ride with whatever parts they can collect or make by
hand, and the result is sweet, dirty and one of a kind. Builders like Nash usually don’t even sell bikes to just anyone off the street.
At his custom shop, he likes to get to know customers to build them a bike that fits their unique character.
The alternative building style found in this lot is catching the eyes and ears of the rest of the motorcycle industry.
William G. Davidson, better-known as ‘Willie G’’ and the senior vice president and chief styling officer
for Harley-Davidson Motorcycles, made a surprise visit to the lot Tuesday to check out what the next generation was up to. ‘‘These bikes accentuate, rather than cover up, exposing the beauty of the raw metal,’’ Davidson said while pausing next to the Bare Knuckle Choppers tent.
According to the Limpnickie Lot's organizer and editor of Cycle Source Magazine, Chris ‘‘Wild Man’’ Callen,
the lot is a chance for builders and friends to ‘‘be together and have a good time. It’s a celebration of the
motorcycle. I like to think of it as the island of misfit toys.’’ It’s not all shenanigans, though. Callen and his crew had the Boys & Girls Club out to the lot this week and collected canned goods for local families
in need.
The Limpnickie Collective, which travels to events nationwide, includes Nash Motorcycle Co., Led Sled Customs, Bare Knuckle Choppers, E-Fab Motorcycles, Garage Co. Customs and Black Sunshine Customs, to name just a few.
This next generation believes in less show and more go. For these industry deviants, the biker’s adage ‘‘chrome don’t get ya home’’ are words to live by.
STAY TUNED FOR MORE!