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As many as 250 women from 30 different countries, including Turkey, will take a peace tour on their bikes across the Middle East, with the intention to help end violence and bloodshed.
 
This bike ride will cover the distance from Syria s Aleppo to Palestine s Ramallah between April 6 and 18. There will be 12 women from Turkey joining the bike ride. This bike ride is part of a project called “Follow the Women.” The idea behind this project belongs to Detta Regan. Regan founded this project three years ago as a result of her meeting with Yasser Arafat, who said, “People should come and see with their own eyes the reality here.”

“Follow the Women” will draw the attention of the world as a peace initiative to the Middle East in a bike ride on April 6 from Syria to Palestine. “Follow the Women” is an international project aimed at “raising awareness of how the current situation in the Middle East affects the lives of women and children in the region.”

The bike ride will take its point of departure from Aleppo all the way to Ramallah, which will last until April 18, 2007. The first bike ride took place in 2004 with participation of women regardless of age and location. I am one of the women to join the 2007 bike ride from Turkey. This year’s bike ride will take us from Syria through Lebanon and Jordan to Palestine. The bike ride will start after the whole group meets in Aleppo. The program for this bike ride contains formal meetings with institutions like UNESCO, pedaling along the Lebanese coast of Beirut-Sidon, and staying with local families of Jericho (Eriha), Palestine. It is said that the paths to be followed are suitable for even beginner cyclists to ride easily. Besides, the women from my group who joined the 2004 and 2005 bike rides frequently say that it is an unusual experience to travel with hundreds of women “handlebar by handlebar,” and that they have tried unimaginable acrobatic movements on their bikes to shake hands with the children who wait along the road to salute the cyclists, and that physical difficulties tend to lose their significance in the face of the excitement of riding. In all cases, a fully-equipped ambulance, a police car and some buses will escort the cyclists.

The route is set between the following cities: Aleppo-Lazkiye-Beirut-Sidon-Sour-Kana-Beit Jabel-Şam-Amman-Jericho (Eriha)-Beytullahim-Jerusalem.

The mastermind behind this project is Detta Regan. She is an international sports trainer for youth, who has worked for over 23 years in several parts of the world. With her special interest in both Mediterranean and the Middle East, she has always had a dream of a project that could attract huge welcome and bring peace to the region. A cyclist, Detta found it compelling to start a project of this kind in 2002, when she heard that women in and around Lebanon and Syria don’t bike. Thinking that encouraging women to take a bike ride would be an excellent way of drawing the attention of both the media and people to the region as well as to address political problems, Regan immediately contacted her friends to organize an international bike tour that would host only women. This way, women (and children) have had the opportunity to make their voices heard at a time when their participation in the decision-making processes is the least, even though their suffering from conflicts is the greatest. That the organization is only calling for women can be called positive discrimination, however, “Follow the Women” is an initiative of peace which is more egalitarian in terms of its ultimate results and more striking in terms of its power to attract the attention.

The ultimate aim of this organization is to “raise the awareness of the world public” by calling attention to the urgent need for peace and a solution to problems in the Middle East. The following can also be cited among other aims of the project:

- To use the media to make international perception of the Middle East and women there more positive

- To create a platform where women can freely discuss their daily life as part of the population in the Middle East, often perceived around the world solely as a region of conflicts.

- To introduce to foreign visitors the natural beauties of the region, ways to access the region, and about the general security in the region.

- To teach ordinary people in the region to learn about the meaning of daily life in order to ease the negative impact of events on them.

Different women to join for the same goal

One exciting thing about the organization is, of course, the people to join it. Women from any age groups and professional backgrounds will join the bike ride, although the only thing common to all of them is that they will bike to support the notion of peace. When you look at the lives of such women, most of them seem to be much too busy to be a peace activist. But they will join all the same.

Women from Turkey, Algeria, Argentina, France, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Greek Cyprus, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Iraq, Italy, Tunis, Austria, South Africa, America, Britain, and the Netherlands will be there to pedal between April 6 and 18, 2007.

As has been said “One person who spends all one’s time for peace is worth making a news story about, however, a lot of people who spend a little bit of their time for peace can make history. Here are short introductions of the women who will accompany me on the bike tour:

Fulya Sezer: A sociologist who graduated from Boğaziçi University. She is working for the Boğaziçi University’s Center for Lifetime Education. This is the second time she will join the bike ride. After she joined the 2005 bike tour, she also attended major seminars on the Middle East and contributed with her remarkable views to discussions.

Leyla Ergil: A Turkish women from Los Angeles. After she studied anthropology as her undergraduate main course, she received her MA degree in Middle Eastern studies in the Texas Austin university.

Candan Üstün: A medical doctor from Ankara. She will for the first time join the Follow the Women organization.

Duygun Göktürk: A research assistant at Haliç (Golden Horn) University. This is the first time she is joining the bike tour.

Colleen McGuire: A 51-year-old American. She is of the opinion that when women get together for peace, there is always good energy.

Zurrine Arruza: She is coming from the Basque region of Spain. She joined the 2004 and 2005 tours.