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Edinburg man makes his rickshaw a business venture |
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Saturday, 02 February 2008 |
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 Late at night, outside your neighborhood bar or eatery, Frank Moses is
waiting to give you a ride.
“All over Sierra Leone, people ride in
rickshaws,” said the 52-year-old Sierra Leone native.
“Here it’s mostly for
fun. Maybe a couple wants a ride around the block. I entertain them, tell them
about Africa.”
Better known as “The Frank Man,” Moses is trying to initiate
car-loving Valleyites to the joys of the rickshaw, a traditional man-pulled taxi
popular across Asia and Africa.
So far business has been sporadic — earlier
this week Moses said he’d just come back from a night outside the McAllen
Convention Center where he earned about $30 — but it’s done nothing to diminish
Moses’s enthusiasm.
A non-stop, philosophizing, entrepreneurial mass of
energy, Moses left Sierra Leone in 1980 for Canada. He studied at the University
of Winnipeg, where he met his wife, Kathy, and out walking one day saw another
man running a rickshaw.
Inspired, Moses borrowed a neighbor’s welding
equipment, collected the necessary scrap metal and before long was running his
own rickshaw — or rick-e-shaw, as he calls it.
“I even did it in the snow,”
he said.
“I designed a gliding rickshaw with runners so I could make more
money in the winter.”
Moses moved to Edinburg with his wife and three
children in 1998 and now studies at the University of Texas-Pan American.
Whether he’s rummaging through boxes that appear not to have been opened in
a decade, looking for a traditional African musical instrument, or dusting off
his dancing shoes, Moses is the sort of person who sees a potential business
opportunity wherever he turns. Recently he rented a vacant space in Falfurrias
with the intentions of putting on a musical and comedy one-man show.
The
rickshaw business is but one of Moses’s countless passions, which extend from
soccer to drama to preaching against violence.
Moses left Sierra Leone
before civil war broke in 1991, a bloody, 11-year conflict that left tens of
thousands dead. But he says a number of his relatives were killed, including an
aunt who he was told was massacred by soldiers.
“Had I been in Sierra Leone
I probably would have died five times already,” Moses said.
News:
Along for the ride | moses, rickshaw, sierra - The Monitor
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