In time, he began carting potatoes on wooden bikes-Flintstonean scooters made from machete-hewn planks and beams, and fitted with machete-whittled wheels-and, when he was grown, he found his place among the labor gangs that loaded the potato sacks onto trucks. He was paid a coin here, a coin there, and, because he knew how to live without money, whenever he saved five hundred francs (nearly a dollar) he hid it away. As he grew, the potato dealers put him to work, filling the hundred-kilo sacks that they trucked out to the rest of Rwanda. Amid the country’s general poverty and hardship, theirs was a particularly mean existence, but for Gasore it was not such a big change. When he was orphaned, he became a maibobo, a street kid-one of hundreds of thousands of children in Rwanda without adults to shelter them. On good days, he might find a banana or an onion, too. As a small child, armed with a sack, Gasore began making the rounds of village trading centers to scavenge fallen bits of potato. In northwest Rwanda, in the wet, chilly foothills of the Virunga volcanoes, the soil is black from lava, and ideal for growing potatoes. “I had to fend for myself, or else die,” he said. He kept qualifying his account of his father’s death with the words “I think.” The way he told his story, there was only one thing certain about his childhood. But Gasore didn’t sound sure about that, either. He was a hard drinker, who got so far gone that he couldn’t afford the next drink-and Gasore said that the thirst, plus tuberculosis, did him in. Sometimes his father came home, and sometimes he brought food, but not most of the time. His mother had died when he was an infant, and his father had remarried and had more children. Gasore isn’t sure exactly when he was born, so he doesn’t know if he was nine or ten in 1997, when his father died. He said, “It was my dream always-it was always in my head, the bike.” When Gasore spoke of the bike, he meant something almost mystical: the embodiment of an ideal of self-propulsion. I remember him carrying me on the bike to work the fields far from our village, and when my father died I thought of the bike.” So he felt a calling, or that is how he liked to explain himself. His father had once owned a bicycle, and although Gasore told me that he could not remember much from when he was young, he said, “I liked how the bike worked, the device. Gasore, who was about twenty years old, had worked for nearly half his life before he could afford it. It was a heavily used, Chinese-made single-speed, and it cost thirty-five thousand Rwandan francs-roughly sixty dollars. Gasore Hategeka bought his first bicycle in 2008.
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