Source: The Washington Post
July 31, 2011
By Susan Svrluga,

COROMA, Costa Rica — By the time Odily Sanchez Segura saw her bike for the first time, it had crossed a sea, sped through cities and mountains, and jolted over rough dirt roads deep into a reserve for an isolated tribe of native Costa Ricans. It had floated 40 minutes in a canoe along a river lined with plantain trees, and then, with several other bikes donated in suburban Washington, bounced miles over a jungle path to Coroma, a small village of thatch-roofed huts on stilts.

The bikes had been lying under the back porch of the Rushfords’ cedar-shingle-and-stone home in Potomac near Congressional Country Club. Then one of his son’s friends said he was doing a collection for a group called Bikes for the World.

The Arlington County nonprofit group takes thousands of unwanted bikes in suburban Washington — where things go from coveted to clutter in an instant — and sends them overseas to people who need them.

Its founder, Keith Oberg, knows how much of a difference even one bike could make. In the developing world, bikes can transform lives — increasing the number of people a public-health nurse can treat, helping a farmer deliver his fruit to a better market or making it easier for a family to get clean drinking water.

Click here to read the full article and visit Bikes for the World for more information.

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