Today, Monday, was my eleventh day volunteering at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Ukrainian Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center in Przemyśl, Poland. A high point for the day for me was watching the entire process of a young boy learning to ride a bicycle. Maybe it’s the first bicycle he ever straddled, as he is still very small — he only looks to be about 4 or 5 years old. One of the other volunteers got him started on the bicycle. I thought she was destined to fail, because the bicycle seemed too big. The boy could barely touch the floor with his toes while seated on the bicycle. But she carefully held the bike upright as she pushed it around in big circles with the boy sitting on top and making proper pedaling motions. Then the chain came off the sprocket, so they stopped playing. I put the chain back on the sprocket (special technique) and left the bike parked there. When I came back a little while later, there was the same boy, by himself, teetering back and forth on the same too-big bicycle and straining to work the pedals. I started giving him some little boosts to help him get rolling, and after a while he was able to trundle across the room under his own power. But he invariably ended up running into something, because he hadn’t learned to turn — he could only go forward in a teetery straight line. Then he would climb off the bike, turn it around and be set out to trundle back across the room. He was persistent and he kept trying. He knew he wanted to turn because he was tired of running into walls, and he could see the older kids swooping around in big circles. And by the end of the afternoon, he pretty much had figured out how to do it. I was impressed, because I remember when I was first learning to ride a bicycle, it took many weeks of practice sessions.