Scores of volunteers of all ages filled Maui Marketplace in Kahului on Saturday with one mission: building 750 bicycles to be donated to children throughout Maui County.
The annual Christmas event, now organized by Aaron “Moose” Reichert of Krank Cycles Maui, originally began nine years ago when Jim Falk donated between 75 and 100 bikes to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Maui.
Reichert got involved two years later, and the program grew to include a community bike-building event, leading to donating between 300 and 500 bikes each Christmas, to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Maui, as well as to churches and various organizations like women’s shelters and orphanages.
This year’s recipients, however, are a little bit different — with most of the bikes going to families displaced by the Aug. 8 wildfires on Maui.
“This year is different. This year is special,” said Rick Avila, who works with Reichert on the bike builds. “It’s always heartwarming to see all different age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds. There were tourists there that had just seen the (event) on social media and showed up.”
Another common group of volunteers were people who were affected by the wildfires themselves.
“There were a lot of people (at the build) who had been affected by the fire, who had lost everything. I had a young man with me who lost everything, and he was there helping,” Avila said.
A few of the high school students who participated in the event were also victims of the wildfires — and they would be receiving some of the bikes being built.
The bikes built Saturday add to the over 1,000 that Krank Cycles donated since the fires, and the event was the most recent bike build organized by Reichert, following mid-September’s Maui Bike Mission. While the bike-build events have been occurring for years, September’s event — like Saturday’s — saw about 150 volunteers, an increase from previous turnouts.
“There were people everywhere, it was just crazy,” Avila said about September’s event. “We built 400 bikes in a little over two hours. That might be some kind of record. We’ve never done anything like that before.”
To donate the bikes after the wildfires, Reichert has been going into neighborhoods on the west side “like an ice cream truck with my big van, giving away bikes,” he said.
“Every time we give bunches of bikes away, watching these kids light up, it’s just magic,” he said. “In that moment riding their bike, they didn’t care that their house was dust, they didn’t think about the people that were lost. In that moment, they were just dropping into themselves.”
Reichert remembers a man coming to his store a few days after the fire who had worked at a bike shop that had burned down. He and his family were living with another displaced family and his kids were just “going crazy,” Reichert said.
“I gave them all bikes, and then three days after, he called me crying and he said, ‘I can’t believe it … all that (craziness) subsides when they get on that bike,’” said Reichert. “I realized even more so each time we do it the impact is more than just giving away something and people being cheerful and joyful of getting something for free.”
Krank Cycles asked volunteers to bring tools or tables to the build if they had them, but participants didn’t need mechanical skills to contribute. Avila said most participants have never built a bike from a box before. Volunteers spent the day putting together handlebars and wheels, and adjusting gears and pedals, guided by Reichert, Avila and other Krank Cycles crew members.
“The community has come to enjoy these events because they feel empowered, and I think they feel like they’re contributing and they know (the bike) is going to a kid that probably wouldn’t get a bike, or has never had a bike,” Reichert said.
The help of the community greatly increases the efficiency of the bike-building process. According to Reichert, building the 750 bikes full time between his two store locations with 10 to 12 employees would take a couple of months. With the volunteers, the same number of bikes can be built over the course of two to three days.
This year’s event is the largest yet, with donations from both Falk and Jacob Heilbron, and Daniel Gerhard, the founders of Kona Bicycle Co.
Heilbron said he and Gerhard have an affinity for the islands, and Maui in particular; Gerhard owns a house in Kihei, and Heilbron visits annually to ride his bike around the island.
“This year it didn’t seem right to do that,” Heilbron said, “but it seemed like the right thing to give some relief to the people of Maui and help out with some bikes. I’m glad that we can contribute in our own little way.”
“When the fire hit, it was like, ‘What can I do?’ We do know that quite a few people who were displaced, they don’t have a way to get around, so (Heilbron) and I arranged to have a container of bikes shipped from our factory in Indonesia to be distributed by the mountain bike community,” Gerhard said. “There’s not much you can do when you’re on the sidelines of something like this. It was the least we could do to help out.”
After the bicycles are completed, Reichert and his technicians double check each bicycle to ensure its safety before they will be distributed at the end of the month. Krank Cycles will partner with Jim Falk Automotive Group, several churches and other agencies to distribute the completed bicycles. Additionally, Krank Cycles will continue its donations to families displaced by the Aug. 8 wildfires who requested a bike through a registration system on the store’s website. Every child receiving a bike will also receive a helmet.
“You give a kid a bike and you see a big smile, and even if it only lasts for a week or a month or six months, they’re going to be happy for a little while in a way that they might not have been happy before,” Avila said. “This year especially, we’re going to do the best we can to try to put some smiles on some faces.”
Organizers said around 400 of the 750 bikes were completed Saturday. The Keiki Christmas Bike Build will continue next Saturday at Maui Marketplace from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. as well, and run every week until the 750 bikes are complete.
