Students at the College Preparatory School helped send 400 bicycles recently to Botswana, and this month, they’ll unpack the bikes and distribute them among nurses in the African country.

The bike project was created from a partnership between College Prep, a 340-student private high school in Oakland, and Mike’s Bikes, a bicycle shop with several locations in the Bay Area. Adrianna Smyth, a College Prep science teacher, saw a news story on television about the bike shop’s efforts to collect customers’ old bikes and send them to Botswana, a country in Southern Africa. She contacted Mike’s Bikes, and the partnership was formed.

Students dissembled the donated bikes and packed them into a large container that was loaded onto a ship bound for Africa on April 14. This month, about 15 students will travel to Botswana to unpack and reassemble the bikes and prepare them for distribution.

“There are kids’ bikes and bikes of all styles,” said Smyth, who will go to Africa with the students. The bikes will be sold at affordable prices to people in Botswana and nurses, who can reach more patients in rural areas by bike than on foot. Proceeds will help send more bicycles to Botswana.

Ken Martin, co-owner of Mike’s Bikes, said that his company is working to support a start-up bike repair shop in Botswana that will ensure cyclists can obtain repair services for their bikes.

“We wanted to take this project one step further, not just to Advertisement provide the bikes, but to help establish a sustainable business to provide ongoing maintenance for the bikes and to keep economic growth within the local community,” he said in a press release. “Our goal is to create a sustainable bike that is affordable. To do this effectively, we need to establish local technical support and also to do basic marketing of the bikes — to grow excitement about using bikes. We don’t believe charity alone is sustainable.”

Mike’s Bikes asked customers to donate their old bicycles along with a $15 fee to help offset the cost of shipping the 400 bikes the stores collected.

Once in Africa, students will not only unpack the bikes; they will also go to a nearby animal park to learn about African wildlife and will visit a local school, where they’ll attend classes with children whose families have been affected by AIDS.

“They will see a school where students are not that different from College Prep students, but they’ll see cultural similarities and differences,” Smyth said.

Annie Johansen, a College Prep junior who will help unpack the bikes in Africa, said she is looking forward to the experience.

“These days, a lot of people don’t understand global education,” she said. “I’m certain this trip will change my perspective on several things.”

Exposing students to other cultures is a major goal for Andy Dean, College Prep’s assistant head and dean of students. The school places a strong emphasis on global education; this year, all students, faculty, staff and parents read a book about Botswana and learned about global issues like AIDS, poverty and malnutrition. He knew that the Mike’s Bikes project was perfect for the school from the beginning because it is a “program that would bring the world to College Prep and that would bring College Prep to the world.”

Teacher Smyth said that taking part in the bike project has increased some students’ self-confidence.

“I think students who helped with packing (the bikes) had a strong sense of accomplishment,” she said. “I could see it in them.”

As for the bike project’s future, Smyth said she’d like to see other bicycle dealerships become involved and hopes to “replicate the project to other parts of the world, not just Botswana.”