Festivals etc

It has been a while since we updated this blog. We have been terribly busy and the project is really taking off now. We were at the Irish Green Gathering and it was a great experience. First of all the festival is tremendous. There is a nice crowd aiming towards the same goal: community, return to a real dialogue with the natural environment, solidarity. The music, the workshops, the films etc were great too and we would like to be there again. I really recommend it to everyone.

Last weekend we were kindly invited to the Cool Earth Fair (picture) which was taking place beside the Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire. The atmosphere was fantastic and it was a very good operation for Rothar. It made people of Dublin realise that such an initiative exists and we are already swamped with offers of bicycles, volunteers and maybe premises. We will keep you posted on this. We were helped by our lovely volunteers and they did the whole difference allowing us to take breaks and showing a great enthusiasm for the project. Thanks guys, that was highly appreciated.

The workshop with the kids in Ballyfermot is coming to an end, and we will start another one mid September with the Rathmines Community Partnership.

In short, we realised that the project can be successful and that we will probably have to give more time to it in the very near future. In order to do so, I decided to work part time and I will available a day and a half per week for Rothar from September.

Until then, because we have been spending all our energy the whole summer and because we need to rest before Autumn comes, we will put our activities on hold for a couple of weeks. We are moving house too and we need this time to settle down. I will see you then by September 15th!

Bicycle workshops

We have started our first bike workshop with a youth group 3 weeks ago. We were contacted by The Base, a youth group situated in Ballyfermot, a disadvantaged area in the South West of Dublin. Our six "lads" are all between 14 and 16 years old, from the area and the objective of the workshop is to encourage them to give them a taste of manual work and possibly have them joining an apprenticeship when they reach the appropriate age.

The first meeting was to discuss about what we should do during the workshops and what the guys were expecting from us etc. The second week we brought different bicycles and made them name the different parts and try some bikes so that they would know what type they would like to work on. We had been given new frames from a bike shop on Dorset St, and the majority of them chose a frame and made a list of parts to complete the bike. The idea is also that once the workshop is finished, we will do an outing in Phoenix Park and they will keep the bicycle.

Last week we brought the first load of spare parts we have bought. That was mainly wheels, tubes and tyres. We thought it would take a bit of time for them to learn and to put the wheels on the bikes, but after an hour the wheels were complete and they started working on something else.

So far it has been a very good experience. The kids have a passion and a talent for the bicycles, and they do listen to our advice and are eager to learn more. We have four weeks left and we are now pretty sure the bikes will be all ready and shiny for the outing. We hope to make go on in September, for the most motivated ones, so that they can learn further skills about bicycles and get themselves into technical colleges. This is a very rewarding experience.

PS: we will be at the Irish Green Gathering this weekend. This should be all good.