Look Ma! No pedals!

Along for the ride
Edinburg man makes his rickshaw a business venture

February 1, 2008

By James Osborne

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.

James Osborne covers McAllen and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at
(956) 683-4428.

If you’re in the mood for a ride: Call “The Frank Man” at (956) 342-2491