Help Maya get a Tandem to keep enjoying her family bike rides.

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Unfortunately our precious daughter Maya passed away on the 20th of July totally unexpectedly.

We have decided to continue the fundraising efforts to get the Tandem and hopefully some more adaptive bikes and trikes to provide them on loan to our community for families who cannot afford to purchase these adaptive bikes and trikes themselves. We will be looking into creating a charitable trust or something similar to continue the work after discussing with a lawyer which way is the best to go forward. Thank you to everyone who has donated so far to help our little girl.

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Maya has been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) when she was 2.5 years old

For the first 5 years of her life Maya has been more or less fully nonverbal. Her language has improved since she started school and the can now say 2-word sentences. She can get very frustrated when she is not understood or when she thinks she is not understood.

Our main family activity has always been cycling. From when Maya was about 1 year old, I would take her on bike rides in a trailer, which she always enjoyed. It enabled me to take her even on some simple mountain bike rides around Dunedin and Wanaka. When Maya outgrew the trailer we found the Weehoo, a recumbent tag-along bike which Maya could get strapped onto so that she would not fall off. This is what we still use nowadays when we go mountain biking. When Maya uses the Weehoo we can go for longer rides as she enjoys it and can relax whenever she wants to. Unfortunately she is slow outgrowing the Weehoo and we can't go on multi-day rides as we cannot transport luggage with us. She has her own little bike with training wheels, but Maya does not understand how to break or how to take her foot of the pedal the right way and at the right time. When we go for a little ride, Maya only enjoys it for a very short time and then wants to turn back. This can be very frustrating for the rest of the family and causes frequent melt downs for her if we try to convince her to continue.

The Hase Pino is a specially designed Tandem Bike on which the passenger sits at the front in a recumbent seat and the pilot sits upright behind. Due to Maya’s difficulties with pronunciation and her limited range of words it is often difficult to understand her, especially when she is located 2 meters behind me on the Wheeoo. This will be much improved on the Pino. Because Maya will be right in front of me, basically between my arms, communication between us will be much easier and more frequent and Maya will have a full view of the world instead of just seeing my back.

This will give Maya and me the chance to spend a lot more quality time together, doing what we both enjoy. We could go on longer and even multi-day rides along the New Zealand cycle network as the Pino Tour is build to be loaded with all the necessary equipment for travelling.