Bicycles for Humanity - Thunder Bay completed its ninth shipment of bicycles to Africa yesterday, bringing the total number of bicycles shipped to well over the 4000 mark.

This year, one of our volunteer's fifth grade group of school kids painted a sign to go with the bicycles. I though it to be very cool...



We started loading at 10:00am, predicting a four hour time frame to complete the loading process. At exactly 2:00pm, we closed the door on the tractor trailer, and the driver snapped on the seal...



Of the hundreds of bicycles we had staged for the shipment, all but one went into the shipping container. And that one just would not fit. And, believe me, the loading crew knows how to fill a box with bikes...



So, though none of them will likely see this note, thanks to all of the volunteers who helped add one more special day to my life... (by the way, that is my oldest grandson, front row second from our right).

Good on you Randy. I love charity work like this that limits the wastefulness built in to most charitable organizations.

You are one lucky fella, to be able to participate in that collective good deed. Thanks for sharing.

Wonderful thing to do.

Karma is a good thing, Randyjawa. You and the group you support have it in spades. Cheers, mate, and here's to shipment number ten!

What various kinds of bikes went in?

Good on ya, and the good folks of T Bay. Love the sign, that's a great touch.

Great stuff. Will that box go on to a ship as a container?

Congrats Randy. You guys have a huge presence for a relatively small City. I've read some of the accounts of what an immense impact owning a bicycle can have on the lives of African women especially.

We ship mountain bicycles, but no full suspension unless we don't have enough bicycles to fill a box. We find that the cheap full suspension mountain bicycles wear out too fast, adding to the cost to maintain and/or shortening the life span of the bicycle.

We ship only bicycles that are in repairable condition. No bent or badly rusted frame set. No incomplete bicycles (well, very very few but only as fillers). No Ten Speeds. No roadsters. No antiques. All of those are not considered optimal for third world riding conditions, amongst other negative factors making them poor choices for us to pay to send over seas.

The mountain bicycles that we send range from near mint to needs lots, but still repairable. Cosmetics are not always perfect but generally pretty good. Kids bicycles are as nice as we can find and we include about fifty each shipment. I might add that the kids bicycles are great fillers, getting slid into spaces a full bicycle would not fit.

As for making a difference in people's lives. Twenty eight orphan children now get three squares a day, thanks to the fruit harvested (pardon that unintentional play on words) from the first shipment to Namibia, six years ago. Few of us can even begin to appreciate how life changing a simple bicycle can be, to some people and their families.

that's a fantastic poster: got to wonder what the African kids will think of that "huge paddle-tailed bear" above the flag...

Kudos to all of you who do this enormously valuable work: you are an example to us all.

+1 on no cheap suspension bikes I volunteer at a local bike coop and avoid these as bikes to build on the cheap also. For cheap/free usable bikes nicer vintage hard frame Mountain bikes are great supension bikes and road bikes just don't seem to work for charity bikes. Great job I love seeing old bikes get a second life rather than going to the dumb or fixie hell.

The box is the shipping container that will travel by truck to Montreal, I believe, where it will be loaded onto a ship. Across the big pond and then received by the Bicycle Empowerment Network (BEN) in Namibia.

The container might then be trucked directly to its final destination or stored for transportation and/or sorting. Our shipments are unique and have gone directly to final destinations. Once there, the shipping container, which we purchase ourselves, is turned into a workshop, and another LCB is born. For each hundred bikes, one full time job is created.

And this is what the box (53 ft shipping container), with the sign in it, might look like before the end of the year...

Fantastic. And that repair stand made from a handlebar is such a good tip I might start hanging my bikes that way too to save space in a stylish way.

+1 on that^ the Namibians have shown us a clever way to use redundant drop bars!