BY CHRIS GAETANO
Staff Writer
SOUTH BRUNSWICK – For a moment, stop and think: If you didn’t have a car, how many everyday tasks would you no longer be able to do?
The fact that a great deal of mundane tasks require an automobile of some kind is often taken for granted in the United States, where citizens need to drive to get just about anywhere. In poorer countries, however, cars are less common, and the bicycle is often one of the only links between an isolated village and the rest of the area.
With this in mind, old bikes are being collected by the Viking Volunteers, a student volunteer club, to ship to developing nations for the eighth year in a row. The organization will be at the South Brunswick High School gym parking lot on June 3, collecting, repairing and shipping donated bicycles between noon and 3 p.m.
The bike drive will be conducted through Pedals for Progress, which collects over 11,000 bicycles annually for charitable purposes. Since the annual effort in South Brunswick started, the Viking Volunteers have collected more than 900 bikes and $9,200 in contributions toward defraying shipping costs.
Donated bicycles are disassembled for easy shipping and are then taken to countries such as Moldova, Sri Lanka and Honduras, where they are reassembled and given to needy people who often have no means of transportation other than their feet.
The Viking Volunteers’ faculty adviser, Larry Wittlin, got involved with Pedals for Progress after meeting the organization’s founder, David Schweidenback, during a Peace Corps conference in Minnesota. Wittlin became interested in how access to bicycles can promote sustainable development in economically disadvantaged countries.
While the event itself will be in June, people can donate bikes before that. The group requests a donation of at least $10 to help with the costs of shipping the bikes, and asks that the bikes be in repairable condition. Heavily rusted bikes won’t be accepted.
For more information, or to donate a bike, contact Wittlin at (732) 329-4044, ext. 7102.