So here's Jane Prater's idea for my blog:  posted selected pictures from my travels and comment on them.

This is one of my favorite pictures.  I took it in Kampala, Uganda, back in 2008--hard to believe it was over four years ago.  Given my penchant for bicycles and my admiration for them as the most energy-efficient form of human transportation ever created, I tend to always be on the lookout for how people are using them.   Movement, transportation, sustainability, physical activity, mechanical beauty, and the implications of the bicycle for urban design:  all of these things are tangled in my head.  So here I am in freakin' Africa seeing these bikes that none of the other Americans on the trip even seem to notice.  And one of the first ones I see is this bike carrying an impossible load of . . . what?  One of our Ugandan hosts enlightened me that those are sacks of charcoal--the fuel of choice among the poor brought in from the country by the even poorer folks who have the one of the worst jobs in Uganda.  Father Stephen told me that one of the lowest positions in the country is charcoal maker, a backbreaking and lung-blackening job sure to lead to early grave.  Charcoal making:  responsible for the widespread deforestation but necessary to fuel the subsistence living that seems to be large swaths of Kampala's population.

This picture could be entitled "Energy."  The energy it took to produce the charcoal.  The energy represented in the charcoal.  The energy it took for the cyclist to bring this product of the country to the city.  The energy of the city itself.  The glow of the charcoal fires at night that cook the meager meals and provide spectral light for those gathered around red penumbras in the pitch dark of night.

The bike represents a means of the semblance of a livelihood that the cyclist relies upon.  It is not for speed, for "green" commuting, for weekend leisure.  It's essential, like the bike in "The Bicycle Thief."  No bike, no job.

I had the chance to ride one of these heavy steel beasts.  They are awful single-speed monsters made in India or China.  They are ill-designed for the rigors of Africa--the "roads" and the loads that life in Africa demands.  So the first thing that a new bike goes through is Africanization:  rebar is welded to the front fork and rear triangle.  The meager rear rack is removed and replaced with a homemade steel rack which can support a passenger, jerry-cans used to transport water from wells, furniture, or impossible huge sacks of charcoal.  When we went up to Gulu in northern Uganda, I had the opportunity to see how this African retrofit happens with the most improvised of materials.  It was an exhibit of ingenuity that was cut short when the boss bruskly said,  "You go now."