PEDALING HEALTH CARE

Eight Namibian men walk through the desert. Four of them carry an injured person on a stretcher.

The other four walk alongside and wait until the first four get tired. They switch off, hoisting the person and continuing along the unpaved ground.

This is the way people in rural Namibia usually reach a hospital. Kilometres from the nearest health care facility, villagers living with HIV/AIDS often miss their treatments because they have neither transportation nor enough income to charter private vehicles.

But today, Namibians are getting an opportunity to reach clinics from the most isolated places -- and a better chance at survival -- because of bicycle ambulances.

The Bicycling Empowerment Network (BEN) Namibia is a nonprofit organization that started out providing bicycles as transportation. It launched a bicycle ambulance project after noticing that health care workers used their bikes’ luggage racks to transport patients to hospitals and clinics.

To bring bike ambulances to the country, the organization looked to the Rotary Club of Windhoek, Namibia, for support and adopted a design from Canadian Niki Dun. Dun, cofounder and director of Design for Development, a Vancouver-based charity, had come up with an innovative concept: a bicycle that could tow an adjustable stretcher, already being used in Malawi, South Africa, and Zambia.

Chris Offer, a member of the Rotary Club of Vancouver Chinatown, B.C., became involved after he read a newspaper article about an award Dun had received from the Canadian government for her design work. Offer wanted to learn more and to see if he could help. They were in sync: She needed funds to support the project in Namibia, and he could help raise them.

Now, more than 70 bicycle ambulances are serving remote villages with support from the Vancouver Chinatown and Windhoek clubs and the Rotary Club of Port Moody, B.C., in partnership with Design for Development.

The ambulances are often the only option for transporting impoverished people with afflictions ranging from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses to scorpion bites. BEN Namibia has found that the bikes usually best serve areas within 10 kilometres of a health clinic.

“It means the difference between getting to a clinic and a hospital or not,” Offer said. “It means being carried on someone’s back when you’re injured or pregnant, being carried in a stretcher by a group, verses one person being able to transport somebody. That’s the difference.”