Resident's Volunteerism Featured in Reader's Digest

Steve Madden has traveled to South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Tanzania, Senegal, Mali, Mozambique and Afghanistan to build bicycles for people who need transportation to work or school. But when he went to Rwanda in 2010, he did not expect to be haunted by what he saw—or by one young boy he met there.

The boy, "Jean-Paul," and how he touched Madden can be found in the April edition of Reader's Digest. The former editor of Bicycling magazine also spoke with Chatham Patch about his experiences there.

"I think he was 16 when I was there," Madden said. "I looked at him, I thought he couldn’t have been any more than 9 or 10. He was really small, he had a young-looking face but he was sort of physically underdeveloped. They think it was because of underdevelopment as he was younger."

The boy reminded Madden of his son and twin daughters, who were 9 and 7, respectively, at the time. Madden described him as "upbeat" and intense as the two worked through the language barrier to build bicycles.

"I haven't had any contact with him since then, but he's pretty hard to forget," Madden said. "He just threw himself into his task with an energy that was amazing. I thought, my kids would never have that amount of intensity or focus on a project."

The boy's mother lost most of her family during the genocide in 1994. He went to Madden's workshop to build bicycles so his mother could take one of the bicycles home.

"When I had to get really specific with him, I would ask a translator to come over and help. Mostly we used a lot of hand signals: Thumbs up, okay, watch me," Madden said.

Madden said he still thinks about the things he witnessed in Rwanda, even 16 years after the genocide. "I've been all over Africa, but that was nothing like what I saw there," he said. "This terror of neighbors turning on neighbors [I] found really hard to shake, and still do."

While working on the bicycles, Madden saw a chain gang of convicts working outside the compound. "They were wearing different colored jumpsuits to match their degree of culpability in the genocide, and just to see this and then to come back to Chatham is just amazing. ...

"When I took this trip, I got back on like a Friday night, and on Saturday night I went to a bar mitzvah in Maplewood. You can imagine how it compares to anything in Rwanada. It was a bit of a culture shock, and I found it difficult to talk about what I had seen," Madden said.

Madden next trip will be to Tanzania, and he welcomes his fellow Chatham residents to make donations or to travel with him. "People come on trips with us to help build the bikes," he said. "We've done it with as few as two people and as many as 10."