Hey Ya’ll,
So Back Alley Bikes took a little bit of a vacation. Heather and I (jason) decided to take a long weekend after the holiday to hang out with family and re-energize. I returned to work today and found a great email containing photos of kids with their new bicycles!
You see, on Friday, November 16th I went out to the Academy of Americas Elementary School in South West Detroit with one of our volunteers, Tim. While we were helping kids pick out bikes and adjust their seat post heights, the Academy counselor Sylvia LaPan was helping corral families and snapped a few photos.
So thanks to Sylvia for being such a great resource for families at the Academy and for helping out with the Give-a-Way. Anyway, here are some photos to brighten your day:
Expect another awesome picture update sometime in December as a load of 16 bikes were just picked up to go to Ann Visger Elementary school in River Rouge. That puts us past 380 bikes out to youth this year!
Finally here are a few thank you notes I got from the Academy of Americas. All the students and some of their families wrote some really nice thank you notes to Back Alley Bikes. I got these right before that holiday called Thanksgiving. People online were posting what they were thankful and I was given a pile of thank you notes. It was a really nice feeling to be part of what people are thankful for.
But being that many families in SouthWest Detroit are immigrants from many different places I read letters from children explaining that their families struggle to have things like bikes. One child in particular wrote about their father being sent to Mexico. I don’t know if he was deported or had to cross the border for work or for family. I was translating a language I don’t speak so there are many ways ‘sent to Mexico’ can be taken. But it made me ponder this Thanksgiving holiday we celebrate, the birth of our nation and what political borders really are all about.
I don’t bring this up to bum you out or to cause you to have pity on these kids. Instead I want to thank everyone for donating, volunteering and working to do something as simple as getting kids on bikes. It takes a lot of us to do this stuff and while we aren’t solving the world’s problems, it is really nice that a few kids are riding bikes right now because of us. So good job team. It isn’t really hard to care about and work with each other when you try.
