Today’s the big day…

the bikers have arrived and I feel almost as if I’m back at my first day of school, getting thrown into the mix with a new teacher, a new person to learn from and grow with.  I guess that’s what it really is, when you think about it - new teachers riding from the inland, racing to feel the touch of the ocean with fresh minds ready to learn.

Remembering the day the bikers started and looking back on the excitement that we felt and the envy for the journey they were about to embark on seems so surreal. Day after day we watched as the little hand-drawn bicycle on crinkled paper moved across a makeshift map, trying to comprehend the distance covered, the relationships formed, the inspiration left behind.

and now they’ve reached their destination.

2 months, 60 cities and 2,300 miles later.

I haven’t felt the office so alive with excitement since the day my intern class arrived. I can feel that same exhilaration flowing from each of us as we sit here imagining the five of them pedaling through the streets of Los Angeles, the ocean breeze beginning to fill their lungs.

I cannot begin to fathom the amount of lives that these guys have changed.  After all of the conversations had, stories told, and love shared… I know that their mark has been permanently left in 55 communities across America. They are the ones shifting the trajectory of history, filling us all with hope for a brighter future and the strength to make it happen.

Will, David, Andrew, Connor, Justin… these are the true whistlebowers, the brave ones, the reasons that we believe peace in Congo is within our reach.

Join us in our celebration of their journey tonight at Dockweiler State Beach.  These amazing, self-sacrificing, idealistic college kids have changed the lives of thousands across America.  It’s their love, their hope, their passion that will keep this movement going forward.

From our hearts to yours, thank you.

Nick, Brittany, and the Falling Whistles Team

this week’s recipients of the Bold & Ballsy award!

“At its birth, violence acts openly and even takes pride in itself.
But as soon as it is reinforced and its position is strengthened,
it begins to sense the rarefied atmosphere around it,
and it can go further only when fogged about with lies,
cloaked in honeyed hypocritical words.

It does not always nor invariably choke its victims;
more often it demands of them only the oath of the lie,
only participation in the lie.

Simple is the ordinary courageous human being’s act
of not participating in the lie,
of not supporting false actions!
What his stand says is: So be it that this takes place in the world —
that it even reigns in the world —
but let it not be with my complicity.”

from Beauty Will Save the World: The Nobel Lecture on Literature
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1972