AS TEENAGERS, Nicholas Todd, Richard Akcayli and Andrew Rose might be the first to admit that many in their age range take life for granted.
But a visit with a teenage terminal cancer victim has further opened their eyes to another world in which the latest gadgets are of secondary importance.
“On Tuesday three of us did a house visit to a teen who has terminal cancer,” said Todd.
“And I think that visit kinda impacted us because it shows us that in life we kinda think that as teenagers we are invincible but [Tuesday] we saw that we take things in life for granted because we always worry about having the latest gadgets, but he’s there fighting for his life and we always complain about the tiniest things and it shows us that we should count our blessings,” he said.
Not that their eyes were closed before for the three St Winifred’s fourth form best friends have been spending the last few months juggling pre-CXC work with cancer awareness and fundraising through their Teens Against Cancer initiative.
Richard explained: “We would balance it. We would sell t-shirts on the weekend and leave the rest of the week for school and our teachers have been very supportive.”
“Especially our principal Mr McConney,” said Andrew.
Since they launched their project, their efforts have been so successful that the three boys have been able to make two donations and are getting ready to make a third this week.
Todd, the most vocal of the three and apparently the unofficial spokesman, explained the initiative started out as a school project and snowballed from there.
“We had an original idea, but that idea didn’t work out so we came up with the idea that we wanted to do something charitable.”
That was eight months ago and Teens Against Cancer was born.
They moved from selling T-shirts and ribbons to partnering with the Cancer Society, last November, in the society’s Movember initiative.
In two months’ time, at two days a week, they were able to raise about $10 000. So far they’ve raised at least $20 000.
“We just did a lot of fundraising together,” Andrew said.
“Every day we would just plan what we would do and we strive to become bigger and bigger,” he added.
Todd admitted that teenagers and cancer awareness were not usually linked.
It’s usually adults, said the fourth former.
“When someone thinks like cancer, you never really get the awareness coming from teenagers [and] I guess we wanted to fill that age gap and we wanted to show that our generation isn’t as negative as everyone sees it – that we can actually do something positive,” he said.
Their efforts have apparently encouraged others to join their cause. Three more teenagers have recently joined and more are waiting in the wings.
