Group’s charity event aims to donate bikes to orphans

In 2012, St. Francis High School’s Sebouh Bazikian made a promise to raise $5,000 to provide orphans in Kenya with bicycles that would get them to school safely and potentially change their lives forever.

He created a blog, Bikes 4 Orphans, to raise money and reached out to family and friends. With help from the aid organization World Bike Relief, the high school senior traveled in 2013 with his family to the Machao Orphanage in Makueni County to make the delivery.

He watched children’s faces light up as they learned to ride a bike for the first time, and vowed to keep the momentum going.

Today, the charitable organization Bikes 4 Orphans has arranged for the delivery of 174 bikes to impoverished children living in Kenya, South Africa, Armenia and Ethiopia according to Shawnt Bazikian, Sebouh’s brother and a St. Francis junior who started a Bikes 4 Orphans club on campus this year.

To keep the wheels of change rolling, the group will hold its second bike-a-thon and hike-a-thon Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon at the Glendale Sport Complex. Tickets cost $20, with 100% of the proceeds benefiting Bikes 4 Orphans.

“We thought that would be a fun and relatable way for the organization to raise money,” Shawnt said in a recent interview with fellow St. Francis juniors Alex Harutunian and Tommy Christopoulos.

“And we’re also promoting the idea of biking,” Christopoulos added.

The group’s efforts have grown organically over the years as donors step up to contribute to the cause and more groups who work with orphans globally hear about its accomplishments and request deliveries of their own.

In addition to the club at St. Francis, another was started at Clark Magnet High School in La Crescenta and students at Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy are pondering a chapter. Sebouh, now a freshman at UCLA, said he’s planning on starting a club there, too.

The appeal? Maybe it has something to do with the effectiveness of a well-placed bicycle, Sebouh says.

“Where there is a will there is a way and bikes provide that ‘way,’” he said in an email interview. “With bikes, orphans can go to school much faster and travel to other villages to find better opportunities that their current home might not provide.”

Shawnt Bazikian and Harutunian, who traveled to Armenia last summer to make deliveries and help assemble the bikes, said they were both amazed at what a difference it made to the children they met.

“It was absolutely incredible, just meeting the orphans and seeing how the bikes changed their lives” Harutunian said. “They were weeping when we left.”

Shawnt remembered another teen who, upon receiving his first bike, immediately rode hours just to visit a friend he’d lost contact with years before.

“If you give a bike to someone here, they’d be happy. But to [the orphans], it’s a house. It’s a car. It’s a big deal,” he said.

The Bike 4 Orphans Bike-A-Thon/Hike-A-Thon takes place Saturday, from 9 a.m. to noon, at Glendale Sport Complex, 2200 Fern Lane, Glendale. To learn more, or to make a donation, visit www.bikes4orphanages.blogspot.com or email shawntb@me.com.