Georgia Today Meets Ride for Women’s Rights

Georgia Today met the Dutch cyclists and interviewed them about their time in Georgia.

Q: What do you hope to change in women’s lives by cycling?

Carlijn Bettink, 25, graduate of Medical Anthropology & Sociology: We founded our organization “Ride for Women’s Rights” in 2013. Its main purpose is to raise awareness of women’s rights worldwide. And we are doing this by cycling 14000 km. We started in September in 2014 in Indonesia. After cycling in Georgia we are cycling through Turkey and then back to the Netherlands. It takes four hundred days so we have 4 months left.

Q: There are many other ways to raise awareness for women. Why did you decided to cycle?

A: Cycling is very popular in Holland. Since an early age we have used bikes a lot. All we wanted was sport and physical challenge to raise awareness of the issue. With the bicycle we can visit many places throughout the countries we pass. We come outside the tourist areas, thus we get attention by cycling. Generally, we cycle around 70/80 kilo meters per day and stay in different villages and places every night.

Q: Have you made contact with organizations to help with your trip or you are doing it on your own?

A: We have connections with two International NGOs: “Plan International” and “Care International.” Before we started cycling we contact their Netherlands offices to tell them we were going to cross several countries and to ask if they had projects or offices in those countries. But we also contacted other organizations en-route. If there is a Dutch Embassy, we go there and to other organizations to get information and visit projects focused on women empowerment. Besides cycling, in every country we take photos and videos of women and girls we meet to show why they and their lives are inspiring to us.

Q: Is it your first trip in Georgia?

Monique van der Veeken, 25, graduate of Culture, Organization & Management Logistics: We had visited Georgia before but we didn’t get much information about women’s condition here. It was just a vacation. But when we enter a new country we enter with an open mind and start meeting with various organizations focusing on women to learn as much as possible about women’s rights, and then we share the information with our followers. In Tbilisi, we met with the UNFPA and UN Women. Besides the capital, we are going to cycle through rural areas to talk to women, although the language barrier has to be taken into consideration. Some people speak English, some can’t. At this moment we don’t know much about the situation [here] but we hope to learn about it during our trip. We are staying in Tbilisi for a few days and then we are cycling from Tbilisi toward Batumi and then into Trabzon, Turkey. After finishing cycling we plan to give lectures back in Holland about the issues in order to expand on it. Since gender issue is a worldwide problem, we don’t confine ourselves to only cycling: it’s better to involve as many people as possible.

Q: What have you changed regarding the issue so far, and what do you hope for?

A: What we noticed is that the women we talked to are very happy to share their stories. There are places where women are empowered and have changed some things but people don’t know about it and we are trying to bring attention to it. They are very happy that we continue to hear their voices.

Through social media, we spread the information about what’s going on in the countries regarding women in a positive sense. What was the history and what it is now; how women made a difference or empowered themselves.

First of all, we want to learn about Georgia from Georgian women. Of course, there will be change but it doesn’t mean that we want to create change. We want to give people some sort of motivation. In other countries women told us that we gave them strength and motivation. We want women to be free in the sense of what they want to be. And we hope to achieve this here as well.

Lastly, we would like to tell people to follow our ride via our Facebook page R4WR and become part of our move to fight together for women’s rights.

Meri Taliashvili