In Montreal, the journalist Louis-Philippe Messier is mainly on the run, with his office in his backpack, looking for fascinating topics and people. He speaks to everyone and is interested in all areas of life in this city chronicle.
A well-known organization active in both Quebec and Montreal has sent more than half a thousand repaired bicycles to Togo, where women and children use them to go shopping or to get to school.
This task of bringing so many bikes together in a shipping container is not easy from a physical point of view.
It’s a marathon.
Photo Louis Philippe Messier
Adam Aït-Âarab shows one of the bikes given to a disadvantaged Québec or overseas child.
“We start around noon and end around 9pm,” explains Adam Aït-Âarab, communications director for Cyclo Nord-Sud, the organization that recycles donated bikes and has dozens of donation drop-off points in several regions of Quebec.
Note for those of you who have an old bike gathering dust somewhere: Cyclo Nord-Sud issues tax receipts for donated bikes.
“We receive everything: almost new bikes and bikes that don’t look as good and that have to be disassembled to keep the reusable parts,” says Julien Aguado-Millan, the bike mechanic in charge of parts logistics.
“Frankensteinizing” bicycles
The organization has existed for over twenty years.
Its workshops in Quebec and Montreal, with 20 and 60 volunteers respectively, manage to repair around 1,000 bikes annually and donate to those in need here and 1,000 bikes internationally.
Some of the bikes donated to the organization just need tuning, others are “Frankensteinized”:
“Sometimes it takes two or three user bikes to make a good one,” explains Anne Dongois, a well-known publicist who volunteers for the organization.
“My job is to make sure the bikes that come out of our workshops are safe, and of course for countries like Togo with bumpy or unpaved roads you need stable frames, not mountain bikes,” says Aguado-Millan.
“Our volunteers train themselves in mechanics. The most experienced are paired up with those who don’t know about it but are motivated,” says Anne Métivier, the volunteer coordinator.
One of the volunteers on site loading the hundreds of bikes to Togo, a certain Alan, explains to me that he is a former industrial mechanic.
Maximize Send
That’s why he passes his knowledge on to the neophytes he meets in the workshop.
A 68-year-old pensioner, André Turcotte, works diligently in the container, helping to create the giant ‘puzzle’.
Jérémie Trudel, a 25-year-old intern, agile as a monkey, moves on a row of tightly packed bicycles whose pedals and seats have been removed to overlay another row of bicycles.
“It’s a huge 3D Tetris game and the organization has developed expertise to maximize the number of bikes in a single container,” says Mr. Aït-Âarab.
Photo Louis Philippe Messier
Alert at her post (except when I distract her with my questions), Lynne St-Jean counts the types of bikes being loaded into the container.
Alert in front of the container, volunteer Lynne St-Jean counts the types of bikes and parts that make it to Togo in the container: 538 to be exact!
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