The transition from being a dependent person to one who has to entirely meet his own needs is tricky. This is so because as an adult or high school graduate, there are some needs that probably nobody else can provide for you apart from yourself. One such need is transportation to enable you to carry out your duties.

I am personally one of the luckiest persons to have been offered a job directly after high school, but the credit is not mine to take home. This is so because KF helped me get an internship with BookWorld Zambia. I was later given a contract as a full time employee. Since signing a contract, a lot has changed in my life in terms of different things, from how I spend or handle finances to communication skills on a personal level.

Martin drafts tertiary application essays at the KF office.

As an employee and Gap Year student, I have had to find a balance between work, university applications, and studies. That seemed difficult at first because work was tiring and extremely demanding, but I had to get my game back on. The travel to and from work was not just stressing but costly. At some point, I began to think I was working for transport.

To curb the problem of transport costs, I thought of buying a bike, as I knew I would spend so much on a bike, but once and for all. I didn’t just curb costs of travel, I also created a way for me to exercise and travel around town without delay.

I have used my bike to run around the city within time, as I time my pace and start off times. For example, when my mentor wanted to meet me, I used my bike to get to Kabulonga and still managed to attend my soccer practice at the Olympic Youth Development Centre (OYDC), on the opposite side of town.

Riding around Lusaka is somewhat a funny thing but worth trying. You have no traffic on a bike and no daily costs of forty kwacha for a one-direction trip. I have used my bike to even get to Pestalozzi, my former secondary school, twice for a tournament the school invited me for. The only sad thing is that I didn’t take part in it, because I was known by one of the officials of the tournament, as he faced me at one point.

If you want to do something big in life one day, start simple. Having a bike has enabled me to use that extra money for transport on some of my own long-term projects. At times, you may just come across some guy and you start cycling each other, which makes me even ten to twenty minutes earlier for work or my destination. I am careful, though, when I ride. I always wear a helmet to protect myself from head injuries.

The only problem I had at first was how people view owning a bicycle, but I am a kind of person who works to get to my goals, so I ignore people’s thoughts. The night rides are fun too; they make me happy.