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Cultural cooperation

I work as a volunteer director of the food pantry of the Islamic center and a few weeks prior, I received an email from a fellow student and recreational cyclist Sean, who wanted to hold a unique community event to benefit refugees and other food-insecure individuals. As an avid biker, he proposed a bike scavenger hunt –  an alleycat.

“Alleycat” is cyclist slang for a bike race with no set course. Instead, there are checkpoints set up in a certain area and the racers get to choose what route they want to take. The end of the race isn’t a finish line either –  you finish when you arrive back at the start with proof of having stopped at every checkpoint. So, Sean envisioned bikers stopping at grocery stores as checkpoints and purchasing food to drop off at the food pantry afterwards.

Bringing bikers and mosque-goers together in a race to help feed people is a novel and fresh idea. I’ve frequently attended both interfaith and cross-cultural discussions, and while these events are enjoyable, they tend to attract the same crowd –  one that is familiar with discussions between cultures. As a result, the conversations become repetitive and tired. The alleycat was different. This race engaged groups of people who likely have not spent time together. When people who don’t normally interact work together and have fun, there is more opportunity for learning and engagement.

After a couple weeks of preparation, the alleycat finally arrived. Despite the biting cold, about fifteen bikers signed in. I saw racers from different backgrounds, from the obvious students in blue and gold shirts to the average community members. But every racer had one thing in common –  an empty backpack that they would soon fill with donations.

When the race kicked off, I hurried back to my station, where racers were to come once they’d collected food from the grocery stores along the way. In light of the recent wave of refugees out of the Arab world and beyond, we wanted to make the event educational. So, in addition to providing food for refugees at the food pantry, the racers had another task –  familiarizing themselves with Arabic. It was an exciting routine. A racer would speed up to the front of the center, then drop their bike on the lawn, run through the doors and unload their backpack with the food they’d purchased at their previous stops.

After choosing a phrase or two from an array of index cards at the table, the volunteers helped them practice. Then, after a quick and sweet goodbye, the biker was off again, zooming down the boulevard towards the square. Their final test? A recall of their Arabic phrases at the finish line.

I was amazed by the bikers’ recall, first of all –  to be able to remember phrases in a foreign language is impressive enough, let alone during a bike race in the whipping cold. Many of the bikers who came to the race had never been to a mosque, let alone spoken Arabic. But by the end of their race, they all had done both. All of us involved made new friends, had fresh conversations and helped feed their community.

For the alleycat, the cause was simple –  get food for people who are hungry. But its implications reach far beyond the stomachs of those that were fed. If building bridges between cultures doesn’t sound worth it, at least it got people excited about exercise in the winter. But I have a feeling that when leaving the finish line, their sore legs were the last thing on the racers’ minds.