Makivik Magazine Issue 101

ᑐᑫᓛᒍᑎᓂᒃ ᐱᓯᑎᐅᓵᕈᑎᖃᕐᕕᒃ.
The bike stunts circuit in the park.
Rescuing Bicycles in
Salluit
By Lautaro Xavier Ovando, Québec en Forme
A bicycle repair course was conducted in
Salluit from July 29 to August 17, which just
might be the beginning of a new kind of sustainable
community development project.
Salluit kids, like everywhere in the world,
love to ride bicycles. I can certainly relate to this
as I’ve loved bicycles for as long as I can remember
and done my own repairs since age eight.
Kids here love bicycles and every year many
of them get shiny new bicycles but sadly, every
year, too many of them end up as roadside pollution,
in the river or on the shore, after very
little use because of “minor” problems like a
warped wheel, a broken gear changer, missing
nuts and bolts, etc.
Every time a bicycle ends up this way, it
means one or more kids have lost a source of
healthy summer fun. What’s worse, it creates
acceptance of a sentiment of recurring loss
that teaches kids and parents that this is just
the way things are.
At the end of summer 2012, the project
coordinator for the Salluit Summer Camp,
Juliana Léveillé-Trudel, and IPL teacher at Ikusik
High School, Maggie MacDonnell, noted that
a surplus was available from the camp budget
and decided, with collaboration from NV Salluit
and Quebec en Forme, to organise a bicycle
repair course to empower them for their own
repairs. A professional gave the course to IPL
students in September 2012. That one-week
training session became the groundwork for
the 2013 project.
Last August, myself and another professional
went to Nunavik to continue what
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