Dear Pedal People,
Happy Holidays! Thank you for your support to Pedals for Progress and Sewing Peace.
This is my favorite time of year as it gives us the chance to look back at all the great work we have accomplished. There is always so much, that I find it hard to know where to begin.
Start domestically, where each bike begins its journey, I’d like to thank our donors for parting ways with their beloved items and donating them to our cause. Theres a special kind of sentimentality that is felt with a lot of these items that are donated by the people we meet at our collection events across the tri-sate. The bicycles and sewing machines we collect have a life of their own and we appreciate your trust in us forwarding these items to others in need around the world.
Material objects like these have a unique function as they are operated by people. To operate a bike or machine, your body has to literally engage with the machine, using both your feet and your hands. They require you to almost hug and hold the bike or machine as your pedal forward or push fabric through the feet of the machine. The people operating these machines have felt them, literally held them in their arms in thousands of hours of operation. Thousands of miles peddled, thousands of miles sewn. It’s this connection of man and machine that injects life into these tools.
That life contained in an object creates the sentimentality we feel when letting go. It’s a fact of life that we must let go at one time or another. At many of our collections I get the special honor to watch people let go of these beloved items. I love to listen to our donors talk about their items as they unload their car. As they are in this phase of letting go, you sometimes see people re-live some of the greatest times of their life. Sometimes it means letting go of a bike they rode daily across campus. Maybe the bike they took cross country. Or a childhood bike they rode on their paper route and left it the rafters for 50 years.
The machines can hit the hardest. It’s often a mother or grandmother who has passed away and their next of kin is not sure what to do with the machine. I’ve heard endless stories of the Halloween costumes, the prom dresses, the mended jeans and coats, all the loving creations that were made behind some of the machines we’ve collected.
Regardless of the story, or the memories associated with them, it is always a pleasure to hear these stories and be able to confidently assure that we will indeed find a new home for your item. There is a lightness, a relief, that people show when they know that the item will not be forgotten, that those memories will not be forgotten as we pass them onto their new homes.
Looking internationally, these items truly change the way people live. They are tools of personal empowerment that radiate a sense of independence and freedom. The same objects that were once reminding our donors of who they were or where they’ve been, become objects that are now motivating our recipients of who they can be or where they can go.
These inanimate objects infect people with idea that they can go anywhere or do anything. As our recipients receive these important items, they are able to go out into the world and create their own lifetime of memories and successes. The connection of man and machine continues to grow and continues to inspire.
Your old bike that helped you around campus, will now help someone get to a school of their own. The bike that you rode across our beautiful country will continue to cross another. The bike that helped you on your paper route will continue to employ another young person on their budding career.
The machines continue to create dresses, costumes, and execute emergency repairs needed to keep life going. They are machines of powerful implications, once used for hobbies in the US, now being used in the trades in Uganda. The machine used by a beloved grandmother will be loving used by a new mother all her own in Guatemala.
We are proud to be able to extend your pre-loved items and extend the memories of those bikes and machines. I hope you enjoy the following stories and reports that illustrate some of what we hope to achieve with P4P and reminders of why we do what we do. I really cannot thank you enough for supporting our mission. And Thank you especially for making the sometimes-difficult decision to donating your pre-loved bicycle or sewing machine.
Sincerely,
Alan Schultz, President P4P and SP