Do You Remember Riding Your First Bicyle?

Spring of 2015, my long time friend, Kegan, generously donated money to buy three bicycles for my nieces and nephews. They were over the moon! To this day, they are still using those bicycles to get around, 6 years later. Bicycles help children in the village get to school, to forage in the woods, to the market and to the farm to work. Children from nine to fourteen might ride for as much as half a day or even a whole day to get to the farm from the village. They ride 45 minutes each way to get to school. Before bicycles, when I was a child, we would walk. Back then, we might walk for a whole day with no food or water except what we found along the way to drink in streams. Today, that these children can ride bikes eases the burden a little bit of the weight of poverty that rests on their shoulders and feet.

This is one of those bicycles

6 years later

The saying “it’s like riding a bike” we understand to mean something you’ll never forget. The process of learning to ride a bike for many of us is probably similar, involving scraped knees and bruises. Getting your first bike as a kid is an iconic experience, maybe you remember the details of the bike you wanted, the color, the yearning? Maybe you got it for christmas, or a birthday, or saved up chore money to buy it yourself. Maybe you remember the freedom it gave you to be able to ride yourself to school or a friend’s house, or an after school job. This is the story of my first bicycle ride.

First, I’d like to tell you a little bit about what it was like without any bicycles. When I was a kid, grandma would take my siblings and I out to forage for wild edibles in the jungle. We would walk from the crack of dawn to get to our destination to search for food and, later, would arrive home after dusk. We foraged for mushrooms, leafy greens, bamboo shoots, flowers, berries and fruits. Grandma walked her entire life without experiencing any other form of transportation. The calluses on her feet could have told unique stories of their own. It is hot in Vietnam, often reaching temperatures of 115 degrees F, and my grandma would often soak her feet in a bowl of cold water at the end of the day. In 1995, I first began to understand the existence of types of transportation other than feet, such as bicycles. I had never seen or heard of a car. I was nine years old. Owning a bicycle was just a dream, as it may have been for you when you were nine years old. School was far from home and the summer heat was gruesome on my feet. We often didn’t have proper footwear. We walked barefoot or wrapped banana flowers around our feet to protect them from the scortching hard dirt.

One day, out of the blue, my aunt and uncle brought home an adult-size bicycle. My uncle started to teach my older siblings to ride and then they took turns helping each other learn. There were of course no training wheels and it was very difficult. The ground was pebbles and hard dirt. I wanted to learn too, but that bike wasn’t made for children. The frame was so big, that I could not reach my legs over it. Instead of waiting around until I was old enough, I waited just long enough that the adults were not paying attention to me. My chance came one day when the bike was outside in the front yard and I couldn’t resist exploring what it was all about. I was too little to actually ride it the proper way. So instead, I placed one foot inside the triangle frame and began to pedal away. I tried and failed, then repeated it all over again. I had bruises and cuts on my knees from the falls. I was determined to keep going, because it was so important to me that I know how to ride it, so that one day I could utilize it to get around. In order to ride that bike, I would get the pedals going with my foot reaching between the frame, then balance while it was moving and hoist my leg over the frame. I couldn’t sit on the seat, but reached wildly for the pedals, swinging side to side, as I proudly and successfully rode my first bicycle. Do you remember riding your first bicycle?

Providing transportation such as bicycles and motorbikes helps villagers get to the farm, where they work to make a livelihood. Bicycle’s like these can be generously donated for as little as $250 USD to help to uplift their little feet and ease their burden.