Charlotte's Web: The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

If you ever want to get to know a local community quickly, find a rickety old bicycle and peddle around town. It should ideally be green and have spokey dokeys - those coloured bits of plastic that move up and down the spokes as you peddle, like in the movie "My Girl". Every time the chain falls off, you get a puncture, or (at a particularly sticky moment) the whole back wheel comes loose, I can guarantee that you'll have lots of people offering to help!

So, as Monique Roffey's book is called, I am now "The White Woman on the Green Bicycle", or as they say here, the "Musungu" on the green bicycle. And I wouldn't want to be anyone else. When you're wobbling home after a day at work, dodging pot holes and watching the sun go down, it's hard to imagine cycling along the Cycle Superhighway No.7 (my daily cycle commute in London) with all the angry bus drivers, traffic lights every 100 metres and likely sogginess, coldness and darkness!!

Rescuing the bicycle from the office shed was a bit of an adventure in itself but I don't know what I'd do without it now. Getting to and from work, popping to the market to buy food and (on one particularly adventurous day) braving the 7km out of town to go to the lovely Fig Tree Café has all been made possible by my trusty old bike and I've grown quite attached to it. There are not really any taxis or even buses that go around town so I've really appreciated the independence it's given me to get around relatively easily and at the Kabwe pace of life.