By Sara Stevens Nerone | President
Dear Friends of our Bikes for Girls Program,
Thank you everyone for your continued support of our bikes for girls program. It’s only April and you’ve touched the lives of 160 girls already this year by giving them beautiful new bikes to ride to school! We continue to identify the lowest income girls in grades 4-12 with the help of our partners the local Vietnamese Red Cross. It’s a joy to share the new bikes with the girls and to see how proud and honored they are to be receiving such a beautiful gift. We continue to encourage them to go to school and to try and stay in school through high school. We have this discussion with the girls and their parents at the bike giving ceremonies.
We have also been learning a lot of new things and continue to work to improve our program. Recently we added giving a light-weight helmet to each girl along with their bikes. This has been an interesting experience to say the least…
In the fall we purchased 100 helmets to try out this new addition to our program. We certainly learned very quickly that you can’t assume that what we take for granted here in the states would be easy to implement in Vietnam. What I mean by this is that we thought that we would give the helmets to the girls, show them how to adjust and wear them, and off they would go! Well, this was not the case at all. We handed out the helmets, helped them to adjust them, talked with them and their parents about how the helmets help to prevent head injury, additional safety issues, took photos with them wearing their new helmets, but as soon as they left the school grounds, off came the helmets, right into their baskets. None of them wanted to wear them!
Somehow children in Vietnam are exempt from the motorbike helmet law that went into place only three years ago there. This is on motorbikes, so absolutely nobody wears helmets while riding bicycles! We are so used to everyone here in the states wearing helmets that we ignorantly thought if we give them the helmets, that the girls would automatically wear them! Not true! So, this has been quite a learning experience for us---we’ve decided obviously to continue to give the helmets and continue our training about helmet safety, with the hope that somehow the girls will eventually learn, and want to wear them. We hope that the Rock-Paper-Scissors Children’s Fund helmets will become a new trend there!
We also continue to develop our bike repair program, which has helped us to improve our program as well. Our mechanics have discovered that the bikes that we purchase in Vietnam tend to have parts from many countries, and that this is variable depending on the lot of bikes and factory they come from. The problem with the variety in parts makes the bikes more difficult to repair and replace parts if needed. Because of this issue we are considering having a custom-made Rock-Paper-Scissors bike in order to assure that we can continue to repair them easily.
Thank you again for helping us to run this program through your generous donations. We could not provide these wonderful gifts to the girls of Vietnam.
Sincerely,
Sara Stevens Nerone
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