Doug Fattic 

in the year 2000, the church on the campus of my alma mater (Andrews University) made a plea for members to donate bicycles for a college in Russia. Somebody had arraigned for a shipping container to go to Russia so students could get around better. I got involved to help out. What was donated were a lot of lower end bikes with 26 X 1 3/8" or 27 X 1/4" tires. Among them were old Chicago made Schwinns. They were awesome compared to the others in that most of them could be maintenanced to be almost like knew again. Because of problems with Russian customs, the shipment went to Ukraine instead.

Of course used bikes with those old tire sizes requiring a lot of time and expense fixing up wasn't practical. Instead we raised money to buy bicycles made in Ukraine at the XB3 company in Kharkov. These were donated to pastors that could use a bicycle to better get around. Eventually the XB3 company quit making the kind of bicycles we needed (and eventually quit making bicycles altogether). We started making the bicycles on a college campus in Bucha just west of Kyiv. This project has lots of interesting stories.

One way we raised money between 2001 and 2008 for our project was to do a week-long bike ride somewhere in Ukraine. We would be feed and stayed in churches.along our route. I was surprised one time when parked outside a library in a town in the boonies in Ukraine was a yellow Schwinn Continental. I sure wondered at the time how it got there.