No doubt he will draw on his own experience.
After all, since he was 10, the Arlington resident has been collecting bicycles. He sends them to countries in southern Africa, places like Namibia, where some are forced to walk for hours to accomplish the basic chores of everyday life. “I want to get people involved,” says Winston, whose efforts are being saluted Thursday by the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation, a nonprofit organization in the United States and Africa. Among others being honored are actress and activist Mia Farrow and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. “Just to hear my name with all those people is something,” the 14-year-old says. The inspiration for what became Winston’s charity, came during a vacation with his mother in 2005. “What touched me the most was traveling through Swaziland. There was an older lady and boy on the road. They were walking and they looked so tired. It reminded me of my grandmother and how we would go to the pharmacy and get her medicine. But we were in a car and we had really good times together,” Winston says. “I thought, Why not give people something like that” Back home, he hit on the idea of donating bikes to them, and shortly after his 11th birthday, he organized a collection drive. “He kept asking me, ‘How do they get their medicine’ It haunted him. It got to him,” says his mother, Dixie Duncan, a tax accountant. “He said, ‘If I send bikes, I can help them get to the store.’ ” She says 20 members of Winston’s extended family are coming for tonight’s event. “We have a great life together and that is probably why he realizes he is so lucky and wants to help others. And he really works hard at it.”
Recruiting from the sports teams he participated in and his mother’s friends, Winston’s first haul, in 2005, netted 250 bikes. The next year he received 500. The drive went on hiatus the year his grandmother died. But last year Wheels to Africa collected 1,000 bicycles at five locations.