Another postcard from Kigali

Well if you read prior posts you will know I’m on a volunteering project here, sponsored by my employers IBM. It’s the end of day 4 proper of the four week exercise and my brain is somewhat fried (from the research, I hasten to add). There are four of us – Erica, Praveena and Noriko, plus me – assigned to what has colloquially been called ‘the Imbuto project’. This is centred on female economic empowerment through harnessing technology, and it’s fair to say that at this point I possibly (no, make that probably) know more about the Rwandan economic model than I do about the Irish version. Weird but true.

Interview One this morning was with the Irish-named (though I think she thinks I’m joking) Assumpta from the Imbuto foundation, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. Among many projects they sponsor, one is called the Imali project and it involves investing in a greenhouse, some tomato plants, and plant food and forming a co-operative venture around that. There are about 12 of these revenue-generating projects all around the country and the plan is that they will become self-sustaining after a reasonable period, and then lift these women and their families out of poverty. What was a bit heart-stopping was the description of the way the women were selected/grouped. One was a group who ‘became the head of household at an early age as a result of the genocide of 1994’. Another was women who were rape victims from that period. Another were HIV positive ex-prostitutes. And one were ‘just’ from a minority group – the Twa people. So this interview was a fairly graphic start to the day. And also a crash course in how this is definitely a country with a harrowing past, when you scratch a bit below the surface.

Interview Two was with a ‘gender issues expert’ from Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT), our local volunteer partners (and invaluable helpers) and that focused, inter alia, on male attitudes to female empowerment. Enlightening. And I think we all heard echoes of the male-female relationship in our own ‘developed economies’. When you hear phrases like ‘men allowing women to be empowered’ it’s a place where you have to choose your words carefully.

Interview Three was with Alex, Bosco and Charlotte from the Ministry of gender and revealed that the Rwandan Government has multiple projects designed to focus on this area. So many in fact that I began to lose track. But the great thing is that there seems to be real commitment to pushing them through and persisting. Charlotte’s contribution was interesting. She’s a Rwandan College graduate now studying Economics and Sociology in the US. She was home working as an intern in the Ministry and preparing her thesis on – guess what – female economic empowerment. She seemed much empowered herself – to coin a phrase. Her view was that key to the whole discussion was creating employment opportunities in the country through inward investment. Because it’s pointless educating people, of whatever gender, unless you try to harness that by offering prospective career paths. Makes sense to me and I guess the parallel with Ireland is the number of young people jumping on planes and going to work abroad when the latest recession started to bite. She was running a mentoring program for girls while back in Rwanda – so on Facebook check out ‘100 women who will impact Rwanda’.

We’re based in the relatively new Public Library building on top of a hill (naturally) in North Kigali, and it’s interesting to see the large numbers of school kids reading books in the aisles and using the internet terminals. I guess the thirst for knowledge is strong. There’s a phrase written large on the walls – ‘Readers become Leaders’. Good line.As I perused the shelves I stumbled across a period piece – the manuals below…

My final research efforts for the day were to read the Imbuto latest annual report and then – the killer blow – the 85 page ‘Millennium Development Goals’ document produced in late 2014 by an independent World-Bank linked team of Nordic advisors. I will spare you the details (cue sighs of relief) but there were a few telling facts.

Gender empowerment is succeeding in some areas and stalling in others. Technical enablement (internet, smartphones, etc.) is strong in the capital but in rural areas many districts don’t even have electricity yet – or at least a reliable source. And finally the prediction was that in late 2015 – even though this was seen as a positive in the sense that ‘it could be worse’ – 20% of people will live in extreme poverty – principally as subsistence farmers in rural areas. Sobering stuff.

The follow-up what with Assumpta was even more sobering. As we built up trust she told us, with quite a lot of emotion, that her parents had been killed in the 1994 genocide and out of a family of eight siblings there were only three left. It’s rather hard to take this in, but yes it happened, and I think we all feel a duty to visit some of the many genocide memorials around the country, of which sadly there are several. She did tell us that she works with people whose fathers were locked up due to their brutal actions during 1994 (they are labelled ‘genocidaires’) but she said everyone feels ‘they have to move on’. So I think after that discussion we all felt a huge amount of admiration for where the Rwandans have collectively come from, and it does seem that the leader Paul Kagame is indeed ‘the father of the modern nation’. I hope to read up more about him in the weeks ahead.

Having said all that, the good news is that there is a sense of purpose from everyone we have spoken to, and hopefully some of the work we’re doing may contribute in a small way to the progress. On a more mundane level, a few initial observations about Rwandans. Many are very tall. Most speak extremely softly (or else my hearing is going) and are very courteous people. So far I have adventurously tried eating goat (fine), yams (bland), green banana mash (tasted like mashed potato), plantain greens (a bit like spinach) and worst of all, stuffed cow intestine. Let’s just say I won’t be trying that last one again…Outside the hotel, lots of people walk (Africans seem to be especially accomplished at this), pedal cycles are very rare, and motor cycles are used as taxis to ferry people from A to B. I have not tried that yet but time will probably conquer my misgivings. Below is the primary source of nutrition in the country, as far as I can see…

All the IBM team are getting on well together and no faction fights have broken out as yet. I think as the mission proceeds we’ll all get to learn each other’s ‘back story’ and that promises to be interesting too. Weather-wise, it’s the dry season in Kigali. I still am confused as to the city geography but maps of the traditional variety remain elusive. It’s really hilly though, and at night that becomes more obvious with swathes of lights dotting the hillsides. Power cuts are reasonably common but seem to ‘come back’ shortly thereafter – perhaps fall back generators are being employed.

So on we go, I think the plan at the weekend is to try to see some of the countryside and see the ‘real Rwanda’, so that promises to be interesting also. More anon as we get a deeper understanding and see what the real countryside looks like.

#ibmcsc rwanda

Misty morning in Kigali

 

Africa. So amazing that Toto wrote a corny ditty about it. ‘I hear the drums echoing tonight, etc.’ So vast that IBM devoted an entire suite of Think Friday to it. It’s so ancient that we’re all supposed to have started in the Olduvai Gorge. It’s given us Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela, David Rudisha, every top middle distance runner of the last twenty years, George Weah and a lot more besides. Musically it (probably) gave us the Blues and a lot of World Music to boot. And the really cool thing is that now I’m there (i.e. here), working on a volunteering project based in Kigali, Rwanda for the next four weeks.

The ‘getting here’ was a bit of a nightmare. Late take off from Dublin meant I missed my connection in Istanbul and had to overnight there. I did see a bit of the heaving, packed city the next morning, which was interesting, but I guess in my head I was already flying to the heart of Africa. And so at thirty minutes after midnight on July 26^th I touched down at Kigali airport. Ironically not three weeks earlier I had – as part of my rapid orientation – been reading an account of the 1994 war when the UN forces dug in at one end of that airport were being shelled on a regular basis. Happily now it’s a lot quieter, and despite being the very last person to get through the combined visa/passport station my local contacts were waiting to ferry me to my home from home for the next four weeks. A very welcome bed was ready for me and I dived into it around 2am.

It seems to get bright around 6.30 AM and because it’s virtually on the equator it gets 12 hours day and night, all year round. I think that longer term I’d find that a bit odd and one-dimensional, but it is what it is. But I arose Sunday, looked out at the hawks circling thought the foggy morning air and gazed across the valley at some of the hills of Kigali. A bit different from my usual ‘let the dog out’ start to the day!

Day one was all about orientation, meeting the other members of the IBM team, meeting the head of IBM East Africa and the local team from IBM’s partner organisation for this exercise, called Digital Opportunity Trust. It’s a bit strange meeting IBM colleagues that you only have spoken to on calls previously, but happily first impressions are that they are all friendly, flexible and committed to doing a good job. They also seem to be prepared to share the odd beer or two, which is encouraging. Sure enough after a brief twilight, darkness fell promptly at 6.30pm, so I’d spent the entire Sunday working in the hotel.

So on to Monday 27^th and gradually getting our collective feet on the ground, we paid a courtesy call on the ministers for ‘Youth and ICT’ and for ‘Gender and empowerment’ (dress formal). This was, quite frankly, pretty amazing. It was hugely impressive what a clear ‘vision’ (a word I normally distrust greatly) they have of where they want to take the country and where they currently are on that ‘roadmap to 2020’ which began in 2000. Both the ministers ‘sang from the same hymn book’ and all of the visiting team found what they had to say to be really coherent, convincing and powerful. So that was a great start to the day, and we were all quite invigorated by what we had heard. We had a brief lunch in the fabled Hotel Rwanda, (these days’ labelled Hotel des Milles Collines – note right side of pic) which was another rather powerful experience.

Next up we separated into our three respective project teams and my ‘new friends’ from US, India and Japan and I headed for the Imbuto foundation HQ. Imbuto is a kinyrwanda (local language) word meaning ‘seed’ and its philosophy is to plant seeds of female empowerment and nurture them to maturity. It’s a well-established organisation and we were very warmly welcomed by a large group of very well informed people. Once again we had what appeared to be a very constructive and informed discussion and we managed to broadly come up with a scope we could work on (given that female empowerment is not exactly a small topic). However I hope we established our bona fides by explaining our combined skills and by asking some reasonably intelligent questions. We’re going to have to go through a fairly rapid fact finding exercise this week and then probably start brainstorming how to utilise that new-found information. We exited Imbuto around 4pm and the plan is to really engage closely with them for the next few days. We’re especially excited by one existing project they have which is centred on providing women with the tools and a greenhouse to grow tomatoes and thereby create income, with a co-operative being created in each commune around this. It’s a model we might be able to adapt to other ends so we (project team) are hoping to be able to do a field trip outside Kigali to see this in action and meet one or two of the women engaged in the project.

So the net of all of these very interesting meetings is that one does get the impression that Rwanda is really serious about positioning itself as a model economy. They have a stated aim to become a knowledge based economy, and maybe their relatively small size is actually an aid to achieving this. It is – apparently – the most densely populated country in Africa (with about 12m people) but I think the short distances and the fact that Kigali is smack in the middle of the country probably helps with executing these initiatives. Time will tell. Currently it seems tourism, minerals and exported agricultural products are the chief contributors to the economy. I’m not sure what those minerals are and my prior research did not indicate this as a major earner, but given the wealth in countries like Congo/DRC and Zambia (say) I guess it should not be a surprise.

We flirted with economics today, as the stated aim is to get Rwanda’s GDP per head from $160 to $2,400 per head between 2000 and 2020. And the years 2000 to now have apparently been about ‘sowing the seeds’ so they really want to kick this into high gear between now and 2000. Hopefully the stuff we’re working on can play a part in that. And beyond that, what’s new? Well through the various trips to ministries and foundations we did today I can confirm that Kigali is indeed hilly. I have seen virtually no cyclists so far, though    moto-taxis are everywhere. These are basically motorbikes where you pay the driver to get you from point A to point B and you sit behind him and hang on and pray quietly. I do need to buy a proper map so satisfy my ‘where am I’ gene which history has shown can manifest itself in these situations – Google maps is no substitute I’m afraid, I need the version you can fold, traditionalist that I am. So night three in Kigali and we’re up and running, and I’m looking forward to telling the rest of this story as it evolves. #ibmcsc rwanda

Travel travails

So here I am sitting in Dublin airport, waiting for my delayed flight to Kigali via Istanbul. I now need to overnight on the outskirts (I assume) of Istanbul and get to Kigali tomorrow. Hopefully.

I managed to negotiate ‘duty free’ successfully, treated myself to a spray of ridiculously expensive Ton Ford  eau de parfum and it looks like the gate will be called soon. The longest journey starts with the first step. Up up and away #ibmcsc rwanda

When technology really works…

About four months ago I set myself a target, which was to write about something (anything) every week. The hope being that with an ‘organic’ approach to this, I’d naturally talk about stuff that intrigued and interested me. So most of the stuff (generic term) I have talked and thought about so far has intersected technology, cycling, volunteering and those aspects of working in a fast-paced large organisation which catch my fancy. Happily – train wreck alert – I don’t try to mash them all up together but once in a while a few of them do cross paths, and create enough natural synergy to warrant a mention.

And thus it was that a few days ago I sat on a mountain top in the French Alps and received real time information from an altitude much closer to sea level about the ongoing cycle-based efforts of one of my children. So let’s rewind a bit and try to make sense of this statement.

As I have previously mentioned, I began to develop a participative interest in road cycling in early 2013, partly fuelled by the semi-obsessive cycling activities of my older son (name with-held to protect the innocent). Two years later, and a few weeks ago, I managed to complete the Ring of Kerry cycle of 180k. As did my anonymous son, albeit he did it a lot quicker than I did. Fast forward three weeks or so.

We are standing in a village in the French Alps called La Toussiere. It’s 6.15 am. 18km down the hill and below us, 15,000 crazy amateur cyclists are going to try to emulate what the professionals of the Tour de France peleton will do five days later. This involves climbing three brutal mountain passes, the middle of which (Col de la Croix de Fer) is so difficult that the professionals will be asked to do it two days in a row, on July 24 and 25. The name of this mad exercise is ‘L’Etape du Tour’ and it’s seen as a high water mark of amateur road cycling in Europe. You can’t just ‘turn up’. You register, you pay your fee and you train a lot beforehand.

My son departs down toward the start. I go back to a fitful doze in the camper where a friend of ours has selflessly ‘put us up’, smack in the middle of La Toussiere. At 8.30 AM my phone beeps and I snap into what passes for wakefulness. And lo and behold, it is the official ‘course recorder’ telling me via the contact number (which my son supplied) that said son has passed the start line. Woah. We’re into new territory here. Someone has harnessed the tech stuff to create an interactive experience? I have never seen this kind of joined up tech stuff. I am used to bananas and hot cups of tea (added sugar for short term energy bursts) at food stops. Not the full ‘where is he now’ situation unfolding. I surmise that this quantum leap is due to the interaction of the microchip in his race number and mobile phone technology, even though my mobile is based in a country other than France. Then I do the only logical thing, put my phone on silent, turn over and doze for another two hours.

By now my son is well upon the road, getting great footage on his front and back mounted Go-Pros (a subject in itself) and generally pumping his legs at a phenomenal rate. I get another text. Wow. He’s done 45k now. Only another 95 hard km to go (for him). I give in and get up. At this rate he should be home in, oh, another six or seven hours. Oh and by the way, that’s a good/great performance in prospect, these are really brutal climbs. I dawdle. I have a café crème. I buy a bottle of water. I wander through the ‘village’ of bicycle themed stalls in the ‘fan zone’ and manage to buy only a few modest souvenir items. I congratulate myself on my discipline. I get the ski lift up to the start of the grassy Alpine meadows and begin walking through ‘Sound of Music’ territory.

After two sweaty hours of upward progress I get to the absolute top of the mountain. There is simply no other word for the surrounding views but ‘stunning’. All round me are high, jagged and (in some cases) snowy Alpine peaks. Overhead (but disturbingly close) vultures circle. And way, way down below I can see the ant-like cyclists descend the hairpin bends on the other side of the disturbingly high ‘Col de la Crois du Fer’. Is my son among them? Well no, not yet. Because the latest text message to me says he’s 20km shy of the top of the pass and presumably working very hard to get up that hill. But that is the point. He’s working very hard and I am COMPLETELY informed of his progress. Somebody joined up the dots, and brilliantly.

   

 

He descends, eventually. So do I (much less dramatically). I hang around the ‘1 Km to go’ marker for quite some time, watching all the madmen and women grind their way up the last winding hill from St Jean de Maurienne to Las Toussiere. It’s hard to keep clapping and shouting ‘Allez, allez’ all the time but these people really deserve it, so I keep it going as does everyone around me. Finally MY guy inches up the hill. Funny how you recognise the style/gait of someone you know so well. He’s got 600m to go and he digs it out. I take a few pictures and he slides away from me. I trot after him toward the finish line as he comes in after nine hours on the road as finisher 6409. He’s shattered but ecstatic and I’m thrilled for him. I could never have done this, and as Clint Eastwood said many years ago in ‘Magnum Force’ – ‘well, a man’s gotta know his limitations’. Very true. And I know mine.

Fast forward (and this in many ways is the most interesting bit). 36 hours later and at our own kitchen table in Ireland my anonymous son is getting wildly excited by the fact that the organisers have just released online a) a set of photos of each finishing participant and b) a set of videos featuring them ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS. For 9,600 ‘official finishers. Obviously there is a fee involved, but it’s not astronomical, And IF you have paid a significant initial entry fee, driven down to the Alps, found and paid for accommodation, and (most important of all) done the hard yards, then of course you will be prepared to pay for the privilege of your ‘official’ portraits on your (probably) ultra-lightweight carbon-fibre vehicle of choice. Not to mention the videos of YOU from multiple angles on the hard climbs, the descents, the sprint and – best of all – the finishing straight. Oh yes – get out that credit card now and start downloading. Because you’re worth it. Every last cent.

And that’s the real point. I have never seen this level of joined up thinking before. They tell you (Mr Spectator) where your ‘persons of interest’ are. They keep you engaged. You know roughly when to stand at the railings and start clapping. And if you are a participant then they use that chip to sell you chunks of high definition video and digital stills that you can download. And they don’t really have to sell the images. Every drop of sweat and every grind and every leg cramp and every pause and every question in your mind going ‘can I do this’ is compelling you, once you get over that hard-won finish line, to buy every single souvenir available of your once in a lifetime experience. Trust me – if they could create a fridge magnet of you limping across the finish line – you’d buy that too. And honestly, you should, because if you finished this monster you are a hero.

And this is where the story ends, for now. The images are available, a few short clicks and a credit card number away. The technology is simply amazing. But it works, it’s timely, efficient, targeted and used for a very specific purpose. And on Friday July 24^th I will fly to Rwanda #ibmcsc rwanda on my volunteering mission, while even the hardened professionals of the Tour de France inch up those mountains. I do hope to watch the taped footage of that day’s action at some future point.

And yes, even they will find them tough going. They’ll have helicopters overhead, and spare wheels and team cars behind and every food known to man available on demand and we won’t even mention the possibility of illegal substances. But I bet they won’t get the pleasure and the sheer buzz that the amateurs got from their individualised video footage and stills of high drama. And that is where the magical intersection of the hard grind and the technology takes place. I’m excited by technology yet again…

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

If you are an Irish citizen the above catchphrase has a special meaning. It’s attributed to our legendary footballer Roy Keane in the run in to his sensational departure from the Irish camp in Saipan 2002. This split a nation. No, it really did. Did he walk or was he fired? Debates raged across the land and not a household remained immune from the controversy.

Well its’ an incredible thirteen years on from that historic episode, and I’m putting the last minute touches to my preparations for my volunteering trip to Rwanda. The departure date of July 24^th is looming, and as you possibly have read in this blog before, my mission is being underwritten by my employer IBM as part of their Corporate Service Corps commitment. Hence the hashtag #ibmcsc Rwanda . I do have to say I buy into the ethos of ‘preparation’ so what have I been doing?

The specific project I will be working on relates mainly to female empowerment in Rwanda, with the underlying theme that technology may play some part in this initiative. Obviously I am very under-informed at this point about the local culture, gender politics, poverty, opportunity, infrastructure and sociological trends. But I and my fellow project team members hope that we’ll collectively build a rapid learning curve and also rely on building trust with our local partners the Imbuto foundation to get them to educate us quickly.

Beyond that? Well it’s funny how you start to notice things in the press and coincidences happen. A bit like when you decide you want to buy a particular car you see them all the time. Recently in the news was the arrest of Karenzi Karake in the UK (June) associated with events in 1994 during Rwanda’s darkest genocide days. Then totally by chance I happened to tune my radio into a long interview with Paul Rusesabagina, who was the manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali during the 1994 troubles, and was immortalised in the movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’. An interesting interview.

Then I managed to get my hands on what is seen as the definitive book on the Rwandan genocide – ‘Shake hands with the Devil’ by Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. This is a VERY long book and some of the military-speak is almost impenetrable but it does paint a very credible picture of what happened in 1994. He has his own perspectives and they do seem to be based on his first hand experiences. I had also previously read some great books about the Congo/DRC (not too far away), notably Blood River by Tim Butcher and the long but moving novel The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Plus I have always had an interest in wildlife so I think I know what to expect in terms of different climactic zones in Rwanda.

Obviously there is a limit to what you can absorb in a limited space of time but I think having an open and inquiring mind will help to get a sense of ‘what Rwanda is about now’ and enable the exercise to be as rewarding as possible. I also started following President Paul Kagame and a few of the official government feeds on Twitter so that should prove educational too.

On the home front I’m trying to get as many things organised as I can, so that my absence is acceptable/understandable/regretted/un-noticed (delete where applicable). I do think this trip might inform me about many things I need to know more about and I plan to take full advantage of that. Robert Louis Stephenson (no less) said ‘It is better to travel hopefully that to arrive’. While I have to say I do plan to arrive on this occasion, I think it’s a good motto to have in my back pocket. Eight sleeps now to Kigali on July 24^th…

Packing for Rwanda

If you read this blog occasionally you may recall that a while I back I posted about the fact that I’m lucky enough to be going to Rwanda on a volunteering mission this year. Thanks to the program sponsored by IBM, my employer of 20-odd years, I’m now packing my bags for Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and two weeks from today (July 24) I expect my wife to be bidding me a tearful goodbye at Dublin airport. Obviously I could be over-estimating her grief, but I’m confident she’ll miss me (a bit, at least, I mean who’s going to cut the grass?).

Briefly the idea is simple (in principle). IBM sponsor ‘missions’ in many countries to try to bring the experience of their employees to bear on local problems and hopefully also provide the participants with a steep learning experience in cross cultural teaming, consulting with third parties, stepping outside the comfort zone, etc. And it’s been heartening the number of people I work with who have expressed a real interest in this program since I was lucky enough to be selected from the many wanna-be participants. Rather obviously, more people in IBM want to go than can be chosen, so it is a big deal to ‘get the trip’. Now I want to deliver.

The program is called the ‘Corporate Service Corps’ and the hashtag is #ibmcsc Rwanda so expect to see that appear in any Rwanda-related blog posts over the next six weeks of so. Back to now. I have had all my vaccinations. I debated for a while whether I ‘really needed Rabies’ but just in case I meet a cute dog that turns savage I reckoned it was worth it. I have started my packing list, so once I get that done I am going to throw out half of it because I ALWAYS pack too much stuff. By the way have you noticed that half our luggage now seems to be made up of chargers and leads of one kind or another? The digital age I guess! I guess in the old days I’d have had a steamer trunk and I’d be packing my pith helmet, my trusty rifle and my safari jacket…

I’m trying at this stage to assimilate all I have learned about Rwanda over the last 3 months, which is something of a mush in my head right now. I have also (just possibly) turned into a Rwanda bore, and at cocktail parties people move away as I approach them to share facts (that they never wanted to know) about Rwanda. Such is life.

I have been doing some thinking about the culture of this experience-to-be. I will be working for four weeks with other IBMers from different countries, from Japan, India, Costa Rica, US and beyond. How will we get on? Will language prove to be a barrier? We have different skills – how will they come together? WILL they come together? I just don’t know. Then there is the question about what is the local Culture. Do people we’ll work with work at the same pace we do? Will they take us seriously?

There’s a legacy of colonialism in Rwanda, among many legacies. Will that be a problem? Last but not least, the specific project I have been assigned to is centred on female empowerment, apparently from an economic perspective. What does that really mean and what are the underlying Rwandan perspectives on the female position in society? As you can see from this endless list there are a serious number of questions and angles that I think we’ll need to explore as a team, and I think that promises to be fascinating. And I will also – I hope – develop new and informed perspectives on how one small enough part of Africa really works. More anon. Meanwhile I’m going back to trying to make sure I remember to pack my Kindle charger cable. Talk soon.

Gravity, Momentum and me.

 

I just recently became mildly obsessed by one of those laws of physics that I (possibly) vaguely understood several decades ago. I need to qualify that statement. A long LONG time ago when I was forced against my better judgement to study Physics prior to college, I realised that equations and ‘laws’ were never going to be my forte. I learned them with a heavy heart, probably wrote a few of them in very small text on my wooden ruler, and entered the exam more in hope than confidence. Writing equations in miniscule text on your ruler was, incidentally, probably the only kind of mild cheating anyone did back then, and evidently it was a hit and miss affair. Mostly you chose the wrong equations, although it did keep wooden ruler sales stable . But I digress.

Many years later, and to my own surprise, I have become mildly interested in this stuff again. And why is that, I hear you ask? Well if it’s due to anything it’s the length of time that one has to ponder the mysteries of life and inexplicable phenomena when on a four hour plus cycle ride. Yes, you idly look at the fellow participants, you may even pass the time of day with them, although I tend to need all my lung power for the hills. You look around at the beautiful landscape, predict the likelihood of that dark cloud turning into driving rain, and you also keep an eye on the people around you lest they launch into an unexpected lurch while your feet are TRAPPED in the pedals. So there’s a lot going on but nevertheless the mind does tend to ramble. And so we come back to the hills, or more precisely what happens on the downslope.

Going up I grit my teeth, tell myself ‘It’s not that far’, try to not end up behind someone going slower, and I grind it out. The crest of the hill is the spot for a heart-rending gasp and a sit-up in the saddle to ease the backache. I may even decide to eat that banana I have painfully lugged up the hill in my back pocket and whose skin I discreetly (with a hint of guilt) jettison because it’s biodegradable. And then it’s physics time.

When I started this cycling lark a relatively short time back, I was very, very, cagey coming down the hills. I kept thinking about how once the front fork snapped, the piece of carbon fibre would pierce my chest as I fell. I thought about the skin grafts I’d need. The years of rehab. I thought about how much my arms hurt as I clutched both brakes with a drowning mans’ grip. In short, I was a wimp. But time changes everything. I’m not exactly Evel Knievel now, but I do tend to ‘let the bike run’ a lot more and reap the dividend for my painful efforts on the other side of the hill. And as I am no longer descending at the pace of a constipated turtle, I have begun to notice something rather odd. I actually come down the hills faster than most people, all other things considered. And this, in turn, plus all that ‘thinking time’ has begun to make me look with fresh eyes at the laws of physics, or maybe even at a few of them joined up together.

My impression is/was that because I’m ‘bigger’ (this covers a multitude) than many of the others around me, I tend to ‘fall faster’. I know there are differences in bikes, aerodynamic shapes and so on, but all other things being equal I believed that big/heavy objects fell faster, due to the law of gravity. And yes, I know I’m not ‘falling’ exactly, but hurtling down a straight hill at 50kph is pretty close in my opinion. So I was more than surprised to discover that I was COMPLETELY WRONG about this stuff. I also discovered that the WWW is literally awash with stuff about physics and merely typing in ‘Do heavy objects fall faster?’ yielded hits on Google reaching comfortably into the thousands. Evidently this is a major playground for moonlighting physicists. Who knew?

And then the names? Even I know that Aristotle, Newton, Galileo and Einstein were heavy hitters. And they ALL have had a piece of the action in their time. Sadly the WWW was not ready for them to share their respective insights, but it seems their disciples are making up for it these days. And what is the overall conclusion, from all of this brain-power?

Well in (this) layman’s terms it seems that a heavy object will in fact fall faster than a lighter one. But – the big equaliser – it seems that conversely the force needed to get the heavy item moving from a standing start is greater than that of the lighter item. So inertia causes the inherently faster object to start slower (my words) and simply cancels out the greater gravitational pull. After a bit, they are both descending at what appears to be about 9.8m per second, and they stay there till they hit the ground. However air resistance does some into this too, so an aerodynamic item (sphere) will fall faster than say a grand piano. They will both make quite a mess if they land on you, but at this point I’d say that was a fairly remote possibility. Incidentally I also discovered that in addition to entire server farms devoted to hosting videos of animals doing crazy stuff, there are – to my astonishment – endless videos on youTube which demonstrate ‘laws of physics’. For reference, the stories about Newton and the apple, Galileo and the leaning tower of Pisa and Einstein and the theory of relativity are all bound up in this, should you decide to spend a wet weekend checking this out on the web…fascinating stuff that I dimly remember.

Now having said ALL this, it’s possible that the law of Momentum is more relevant than the forces of Gravity. Momentum, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. This seems to be Newton’s area of expertise again and if you have ever seen one of those weird desktop objects with balls hanging on threads and moving improbably, that’s ‘Newton’s cradle of momentum’. Not just a silly object to while away endless hours.

So back to me on my bike, and the down slope. Why do I go faster than a lot of people? I do have mass (sadly) and when I combine that mass with velocity I do manage to build the momentum quickly. Gravity is less of a consideration, unless I fly off a cliff, which is not in my game plan. So in short, I think I have more or less gotten to the bottom of this unfolding mystery, but I will continue to explore further. It will never turn into a rekindled love affair with physics, but if you have any added scientific evidence to help me reach some definitive answers, I’d love to hear from you. In the meantime I’ll keep rolling, observing and pondering the mysteries of applied physics.