Jesus gets a bike for Christmas

Brian from World Relief (organization that works with refugees in Clarkston) called me yesterday. A Cuban refugee named Jesus with whom he has been working was robbed of his bike yesterday and Brian wanted to help him get a new bike. Jesus just started working at for a tech manufacturing company and his shift ends late at night, meaning he has to walk home in the cold and dark for a few miles.

I went to the Communicycle bike shop and picked up an old Schwinn mountain bike that I had just given a brown/ orange Communicycle custom paint job and fitted it with reflectors and a kick stand. I am really proud of this bike as a donation, as one of my best paint jobs, and as a commuter. It has pavement-friendly smooth tires, a steel lugged frame, and nice aluminum rims. I also picked up a u-lock and a decent front/rear light set.

I met Brian at Jesus' employer to drop off the bike, but unfortunately Jesus was busy working, so I could not meet him. We left the bike with his supervisor and he'll have a nice reliable bike to ride to and from work now.

I will do my best to tell the stories of the people Communicycle serves in the future, Jesus is just one of many and as important to us as every person whose life is touched by the gift of transportation.

vote for Communicycle!

the bitter taste of wheat paste under your fingernails

Today I learned a few lessons about planning ahead, jumping the gun, the inefficiency of bureaucracy, and cleaning up your own messes.

Communicycle engages in outreach activities throughout the year that we call Mobile Shops. We gather our bike stands, pumps, tools, a few spare parts, and a bunch of friends and set up shop on a Sunday afternoon to repair bikes for the neighbors and anyone who happens to drop by. We usually set up mobile shops at apartment complexes (with management's permission of course) but we decided to pursue something more daring this month. We chose the parking lot in front of a busy store that is within one of the local city's jurisdiction (I will make this as general as possible so I don't burn any bridges).

We made initial contact with the management of the store and received an OK to proceed, and proceed we did. For weeks we have been telling people that Sunday, November 14 the mobile shop would be hosted by a wonderful local business, bringing us lots of exposure and new customers for free bike repairs and discount parts. Josh designed a new flier for the event, and I made dozens of copies of the flier. I spent the first three hours of my day distributing fliers.

I didn't just distribute fliers, I went hardcore on these fliers with a clandestine tub of wheat paste (glue made from boiled water and flour) and a paint brush. I decided not to fool around with tape and staples this time because people tore down the fliers I posted that was the last time. I realized I would be responsible for taking these fliers back down after the Mobile Shop but I found the effort to be worthwhile. I even added a pinch of sugar to my recipe for added potency.

After pasting up dozens of fliers around the neighborhood, I went to the host store to ask them how I could promote the event near the store and get final details on how and where we would set up. I was under the impression that everything was squared away, but somehow the communication had broken down and nothing was certain. After a long discussion, the store manager told me that if I could get him some documentation making this event legitimate in the eyes of the city and relieve the store of all liability, it would work. Off to city hall!

I was bounced from one city official to the next, running from one building to the next for a while. I met some great city employees (and one very rude one!) and finally came to the conclusion that Mobile Shop at this location could not be done legitimately, which means it would not happen at all. It has something to do with the city's zoning ordinances and they are working on solving this, but this does not help us right now. Maybe it will be easier to set up in a few months when the council has gotten together and hatched a plan to make it ok for people to fix other people's bikes for free in a parking lot.

I am half tempted to just show up somewhere else, direct-action Food Not Bombs style, and do it anyways, but the risk of ticking off public officials might compromise some important relationships. However we do this, it did not matter when I remembered all the fliers I had just glued to telephone poles, walk signals, and concrete pillars around the city. They had to come down. I spend the following two or three hours tearing at any loose edge of every single flier, trying to make them disappear before we and our intended host business get in trouble for littering the city with obnoxious fliers for a non-event. Splashing a little water on them helped to soften them up, but it was still hard work. After scraping the last flier, and my fingernails, into oblivion, I had just enough time to drive home, eat an energy bar and a fistful of sorghum and ride my BMX bike back to the shop for Tuesday night shop hours.

While undoing my mess, I encountered a curious sight. A man in a chicken costume was dancing in a parking lot outside of a Mexican chicken restaurant, and a random woman passing by had decided to join him. They were dancing in a parking lot, in the midst of Atlanta rush hour traffic, a man in a chicken suit and a woman. The woman then approached me, introduced herself, and told me to "behave in this neighborhood." I smiled and waited for her stern expression to crack, but she just stared at me, scowled and said "I mean it." I think she saw me tearing down fliers and assumed I looked like a hoodlum and I was up to no good. But as weird as this encounter was (I am not sure if this woman is entirely lucid), she stopped and talked to me when I would have just walked away.

This lead me to question my methods of advertising. How many people would have actually noticed those fliers and come to the Mobile Shop? More importantly, if Communicycle is about forming relationships with people in the community that we can help them and learn from them, is there anything wrong with using the same approach that corporations and politicians use to sell soft drinks, super stores, and slogans? What if we subverted the economic paradigm of exchange in the way we spread our word about services? Perhaps relationally?!

Rest assured, we are working on a new location for this month's Mobile Shop and it will go down one way or another. Stay tuned.

However, I have a new challenge for myself: no more anonymous fliers and posters. If I cannot talk to a person, look him in the eye, and tell him we want him to join us in fixing bikes, then it's not on the terms that I want. Maybe I'll put some slick tires on my mountain bike and cruise the neighborhood all day this week with a back pocket full of fliers and a face full of smiles to be distributed not with wheat paste and secrecy, but a handshake.

putting Communicycle on the map!

Communicycle officially exists now, at least in the eyes of Google Maps. Try it. Go to Google and search for "communicycle" and click on "maps." there we are under several categories with a phone number and shop hours. Now anyone in the world can locate us on one of the most widely used internet maps in the world.

In other news, open shop night went great tonight. A lot of kids came in and built some new bikes, worked on their old bikes, and had some laughs. At one point, a boy will call Sprocket was asked how to loosen a particular bolt, to which he absent-mindedly responded "lefty-loosey, tighty-whitey." We all had a good laugh and Sprocket might have just earned a new nickname.

Word Getting Out

As if an urban Atlanta ride with Communicycle volunteers Josh, Ai-Ping, and Jonathan was not awesome enough, I had an interaction with a community member on the ride home that made my day.

I stopped into the local health food store (read: convenience store) for some protein supplements and electrolytes (read: candy bars and soda). I did not want to haul a heavy u-lock around on today's ride, so I waltzed into the store with my bike perched up on my shoulder.

"You can leave that up by the ATM over there; I'll watch it for you," a cheery, burly counter worker called across the store. Thankful not to have to haul my ride as I made my selections, I placed my ride down at the front of the store.

As the man totaled my purchases, he asked me where I bought my bike. I told him that I started with the frame and built it up part by part.

His response: "Oh cool! Hey, have you heard of the place over there on Chamblee Tucker? They fix bikes. Help people out. Have you heard of them?"

A little red in the face, I told the worker that I had started the Communicycle Co-op.

"Communicycle! Yeah, that's it. You started that?"

How about that? Someone in the community who did not know me at all had heard of our shop, and was spreading the word. That is a beautiful thing.

Dear convenience store worker,
In case you are reading this, please know that you are welcome to come by the shop anytime to build yourself a bike. And as you mentioned, we would love to have you join us in volunteering at the shop. Thanks for connecting with me today!

And to anyone else reading, you are all welcome at the shop as well, both as participants and as volunteers.

the great purge!

Today Josh and I picked up the remainder of a large bike donation from Clarkston. It took two trips but it was worth it to get the bikes out of someone's back yard, as promised, and we got some more bikes are parts for the shop.

I then feverishly gathered every rusted wheel, every bent fork, and every road-unworthy bicycle and dragged them outside. I called a local scrap collector and he gladly carted away several hundred pounds of useless bike parts to be melted down or whatever a metal scrapper does. We now have a lot more room for decent bike parts and a lot of stuff was saved from being buried with trash.

(photo to be uploaded later)

I spent some time on the phone with some auto tire shops to see about recycling tires. Why recycling and environmentalism are not primary goals of Communicycle, we try to reuse and recycle everything we can. pounds of rubber, nylon, and metal in bicycle tires add up quickly in the dumpster. I got the number of a rubber recycling company and I await a call back. Most auto shops charge one to two dollars for each tire to recycle it, so I am hoping some company will do it for free or for a nominal charge. Any ideas folks?

Two guys from a nearby apartment complex came in later in the evening. Miguel and Jason had a very nice mid-1980s Japanese road bike with some problems. I trued the rear wheel, replaced the tubes, and replaced the Look pedals (requires special shoes and cleats to use, which Jason did not have) and got him back on the road. Jason gave me a nice donation to the shop for the work and parts and I was glad to help him.

We may have an event announcement coming soon, so stay tuned!

Jonathan

storage space updates

I finished the wall-bike hanging system the other day. We want to continue this across this whole wall to hang lots of bikes.

Natnael came again today to help with with some projects. We cleared the bike storage room of tarps and installed the hanging wheel system.

I responded to an ad on Craigslist today for some "free firewood." I had not idea he would unleash a 15-foot truckload of logs on me! The driver dropped this at the back parking lot of the church and drove off.

Natnael and I spent the next hour stacking this stuff for future use. My body aches all over.

September Mobile Shop success!

Communicycle offers it's services outside of the shop on a regular basis in what we call Mobile Shop. We collect all of our tools and many spare parts and set up an outdoor bike shop in a neighboring apartment complex for a Sunday afternoon. We announce the shop with fliers and community announcements about one week before the shop day. We were serving Mobile Shops every few months earlier this year, but from August until the end of the year, Mobile Shops will be held on a monthly basis until the end of the year, with plans to resume in the spring.

We held this month's Mobile Shop at Wynscape Apartments, about 1.5 mile from the shop. Over the course of four hours, we serviced twenty bicycles with the help of five mechanics and a half-dozen other volunteers. Many of the repairs were not mere flat tires, but major mechanical surgery: bottom bracket overhauls, derailleur resurrections, brake replacements, etc. Overall it was a great day. We met a lot of neighbors and potential "customers," served a lot of people, and had a fun time. The weather was hot but we had a perfect shade tree to cover us.

We are working on a time and place for next month's Mobile Shop on Sunday, October 10. Stay tuned!

pinkslip providence

Last night, I spent several hours in the apartment of some Eritrean refugees, chewing sorgum, listening to Tigrinya music and helping them with their citizenship class homework ("What is the Star Spangled Banner?"), and I realized the distance I have come along this tradgectory. Six months ago, I did not know where Eritrea was, let alone imagine I would be helping one of its former residents build a bicycle and eat food from his country in his own home. So I may ask myself, well, how did I get here?

When I was 12 years old, my family rented a house to live in for a summer. The landlords cleaned out the garage just before they got there and two bicycles were in the trash heap waiting to be picked up for the dump. (For those of you privy to literary devices, this is Foreshadowing!) I scavanged these bicycles out (also forshadowing for my many dumpster-diving ecapades) and managed to cobble together a single bicycle out of the two. It was a horrible, outdated beast of a BMX bike, but it rolled and that's all I cared about. I had a lot to learn about making a bicycle work, and I learned the hard way.

Fast foward a few years and you can skip middle school and riding around the neighborhood alone every day and trying to learn flatland riding with no outside knowledge of what I was doing. When I was a freshman in high school, my family moved from Wisconsin to Indianapolis. I hated the move, but it turned out that, out of the thousands of students at my high school, three were fellow BMX riders, and they all lived within spitting distance of my new house. There was an empty parking lot across the street from our house where I would spend countless hours riding my bike, alone, with headphones on, and a workbench in the garage where I probably spent even more hours working on and experimenting with my bike. Living in an urban area, unlike my former rural home, allowed me to explore street BMX riding with friends. Riding led me to become a photographer, which led me to college and a short career in Journalism. It also led me to my wife, whom I met when she sent me an IM to ask about bike parts.

In 2007, I got a job at a newspaper and worked there for a year honing my skills in interviewing, writing, and photography. This led to a better paying job editing a magazine, which allowed us to get out of debt quickly. Around that time, Kelly and I started exploring a future in international missions and pined a sign that read "August 2010 or bust" above our computer screen, indicating that we would be somewhere else, living intentionally by that date or we would be homeless. The best thing to happen to me at that job was being laid off. After only six months with a decent salary, a leisurely bus commute into downtown San Antonio, and good benefits, I lost all of it. We persevered to get out of debt and do something meaningful. I spent months agonizing over the lack of a "career" and explored dozens of routes with no success. Metaphoric doors were slammed in my face again and again as I tried careers and jobs. No one wanted to hire me, an honest, college educated, hard-working young man willing to work for peanuts to do just about anything. I always wanted to go back to working at a bike shop but I did not think anyone would hire me or pay me enough to stick with it.

In June 2009, a bike shop did hire me and I spent the subsequent year learning everything I could from some of the best wrenches in San Antonio. A friend who was working there helped me get my foot in the door and I was off! In fact, I learned a lot from the Best Mechanic in the Universe and another who's just a Big Deal.

I had taught myself a lot about fixing my own bike over the years, but most of my knowledge was limited to BMX bikes. With a year (hardly enough to be an expert) of experience under my belt, I was much better prepared for the next phase.

In January of this year, Kelly and I visited South Africa to minister to prisoners, squatter camp dwellers, and school kids for one week, leaving a dear friend behind to continue that work. We decided shortly after returning that we would return to Joburg to continue that work, but every door was slammed in our faces again. It seemed hopeless and unfair that passionate, energetic young people such as ourselves should have such a hard time being sent across the world as missionaries, but no one would budge. We decided to go back to my old standby, bicycles.

We have a notebook with all kinds of notes about pursuits in my life. One page was to be devoted to bicycle-related ministries. There are one or two organizations listed, then "Communicycle, Josh Feit." There are no further entries on that page because shortly after I wrote that, Kelly and I visited Atlanta and decided to move back here in August. So here we are are. I am back to pulling bikes out of the trash, spending whole days with my hands covered in grease and ground-up chromium molybdenum, instructing people to replace tubes and adjust derailleurs and admonishing them for the use of WD-40 on their bicycles. (WD-40 is not a lubricant! Stop using it on your bikes!)

We might not have ended up in South Africa or Northern Ireland (yet), but all those people from broken parts of the world have come to us, often with their bicycles, and I am able to serve God by serving them (or am I serving them by serving God?) I could not be more content with my situation now, and pray only that I live in such a way that is worthy of this kind of satisfaction.

Welcome to the Official Communicycle Blog

Welcome to the official blog of the Communicycle Co-op in Chamblee, GA. Check back often for our latest news, great stories, photo galleries, and other announcements.