By Sara Nerone | Founder
Dear Friends and Donors,
If you had to buy a bike for your daughter, what color would you chose? The first time that I saw the pink bikes that our program manager ordered for the girls in Vietnam, the word gender bias came to mind! I thought, oh gosh, pink, it’s so gaudy! With my two daughters I’ve always tried to play down girls in pink, boys in blue. Well, now I’ve had second thoughts about the color pink. Pink really stands out!!
I was looking through some photos of our bike giving ceremonies and noticed that when we were giving silver-colored bikes, the boys who are usually always standing in the background during the giving ceremony were sometimes riding the bikes home once the girls received them…and we’ve returned to the villages to see boys now on the bikes… I started thinking about these brightly colored VERY PINK bikes, and sure enough, you can indeed identify one of our bikes a mile away, and they are clearly a “bike for a girl”. Pink might not be a bad idea after all!
Last month our team traveled out to a village that they hadn’t been before in the province of Khanh Hoa, called Khanh Son. The villagers are mostly ethnic minorities, and very, very poor. The girls were shy and not used to being given gifts like the bikes, they were extremely grateful. Thank you for providing these bikes to these beautiful girls. This gift will make a very big difference in their lives as well as to their family members.
In November and December we have plans to give 60-80 more bikes. We also continue to work on getting our bike repair program off the ground, but we’ve been finding that the concept of hiring women to do the bike repair is definitely a foreign concept in Vietnam. We had to ask the local bike repair man if he would ever be willing to teach the women we hire, and he wasn’t overly thrilled, but finally agreed, grumbling that they wouldn’t be strong enough. I had to snicker about this comment because if you’ve ever been to Vietnam, women are everywhere working in the fields, repairing the roads, and involved in just about every aspect of manual labor. We know that they can learn to repair the bikes, becoming important role models for the girls.
Both November and December are fundraising months for us. We would love to have any of you volunteer as fundraisers for our Bikes for Girls program. Global Giving now has the option to set up your own personal fundraiser for our projects. Here is the link if any of you would be willing to Holiday fundraise for us! https://www.globalgiving.org/dy/v2/fundraiser-new/type?projId=13980
Also, please consider giving a bike as a holiday gift by honoring someone with a donation to 100 Bikes for 100 Girls.
Thank you as always!
Sara Nerone (Founder)
sara@rockpaperscissorschildrensfund.org
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