I’ve been a member of WIMA since 2004. I actually found the organisation when looking for local women to ride with as I didn’t know anyone in Gothenburg, where I had moved after university. While WIMA didn’t give me local female riding friends, I soon found the international aspect and got hooked. In 2005, I worked at the European rally hosted in Sweden and the same autumn I travelled to New Zealand for the international rally and after that over to Australia connecting with WIMA members there. The international rallies became addictive, and I try my best to attend every year. In 2016, I even quit my job to be able to attend in Estonia, but that is another story. The essence, though, is that I love the international friendship that I have through WIMA and the possibilities to see and explore places I might never have gone to otherwise.
My ethos is that if I benefit from an organisation, I want to give back, contribute and help the organisation grow. That is why I stood for international vice president in 2015, and later for international president. To give back and contribute to an organisation, that is very important to me and to help more people benefit from it.
When I passed on the leadership to Zara in autumn 2020, it was in order to use my spare time to pursue a career in linguistics. As a linguist, I love working with texts, so in December 2020 when Sheonagh asked if I could help her a bit with the editing for the book, I got really excited about this new way of contributing to WIMA. In addition, I was also naïve; I thought that if I took a three-month study break, we could finish the book before the second half of the spring term started. Not only has the project grown over time, but the task proved to be far more difficult than first anticipated.
The rallies section has proved to be especially difficult. We are not only editors; we are also researchers, writers and detectives trying to find material from old motorcycle magazines and other archives since there are many rallies that are not recorded in our own divisional histories. Hundreds of hours have gone into this project, and it has been much more rewarding than I could ever imagine. I’ve learned so much, especially about the early years and the old rallies, and I am excited about the prospect of WIMA members all over the world reading about this soon too.
