Four Dutch friends cycle 400 days for women's rights
Monique, Carlijn, Sophie and Lidewij, four Dutch best friends, make a bicycle tour of 14.000 kilometers through 22 countries on two tandems to draw attention to women's rights. They started in Indonesia and will travel through Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe to the Netherlands, where their journey will end after four hundred days in October next year.
Along the way, they talk to women's organizations, service clubs, embassies, even men; not to air their own ideas but to find out what rights women have in the areas of education, family planning and gender equality.
Earlier this month they were Bangkok and today the Saturday magazine pulls Muse of Bangkok Post two pages for this remarkable initiative.
Remarkable: yes, but not unique because they came up with the idea at a conference at which two men said they had cycled for a year to promote clean drinking water.
In Thailand, the four spoke with students from Webster University in Hua Hin and Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University and met the staff of the Dutch embassy in Bangkok.
By now they must be somewhere in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos or Myanmar, neighboring countries that all four will be cycled.
Spending the night in expensive hotels is not an option. Sometimes they spend the night in police stations or fire stations, which prove to be excellent locations to have a serious conversation about women's rights.
On their website they report what they experience and there are portraits of women with whom they have spoken. Follow their adventures at www.r4wr.org.
(Source: Muse, Bangkok Post, 29 November 2014)