Tag: Drive Recap

35 Donors This Week

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VOPC College Service BM Drive

The response today from the college service was overwhelming. While I knew some of them, I didn’t have any real semblance of a relationship with most of the people in that room, and yet out of a room of 25 people or so we had 18 people register to be donors. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

Coupled with some of the people that met up with me earlier this week to register, that brings the total for this week up to 35.

Our parents’ generation is not our generation. A lack of minority donors doesn’t have to be a problem that persists in our lifetime.

I knew it was true. I knew it.

NMDP: TEDxMidAtlantic Drive

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TEDxMidAtlantic

I volunteered with the National Marrow Donor Program at TEDxMidAtlantic on Saturday in DC. Getting to the building was an adventure; I had to take in a box of supplies so I had to drive in, and every other road in DC was closed down for a marathon/walk/HORSE SHOW at Verizon Center. It was raining pretty hard too. So I parked in a garage 12 blocks away and walked to the venue, carefully holding my umbrella over the 25 pound box of swab kits since I didn’t want to get those wet. I thought my arms were going to fall off by the time I got there.

TED was really cool, and I anticipate going to one as an audience member soon. The marrow drive was somewhat of a success — we registered 21 donors which is great, but only a fraction of those were minorities. I don’t know if any of them were South Asian, which was the target group we were going for in honor of Amit Gupta.

I was finally able to meet the NMDP Northeast drive coordinator Juliette, and she is both awesome and hilarious. Very generous with her time and energy in pursuing the cause of recruiting donors, in addition to being a wealth of insight into what it takes to logistically run a successful drive. Turns out fundraising is a much, much bigger issue than I originally anticipated. It was awesome working with her and she gave me a lot of great advice about Cheekswab, which she thinks is a fantastic idea.

We ran into a couple of famous folks, which was cool. Reggie Watts was a super nice guy and tweeted our cause. Gbenga Akinnagbe, who was Chris Partlow in the HBO series “The Wire,” registered to be a donor. I consider The Wire as my favorite television series ever, so it was great to meet the guy face to face. Also a super nice guy.

First Official BeTheMatch Drive

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Greater Little Zion Baptist Church

I just got back from the first official drive I’ve participated in as a level two volunteer with the National Marrow Donor Program.  The other NMDP volunteer and I manned a table at a health fair at Greater Little Zion Baptist Church in Fairfax, VA.

I was eager to get this drive started because while I did participate in the drive at my church last Sunday, I’ve yet to observe/participate in an “official” NMDP/BeTheMatch drive.   The NMDP really is an incredible organization.  They perform 99% of the legwork when it comes to registering donors: they provide all the materials, all the training, all the coordination, and all the processing.  They just lack that extra 1% of in-the-flesh volunteers to oversee the filling out of forms and swabbing process.  After a drive we make sure the forms are filled out properly, go to Fedex, and the NMDP already has the postage paid for returning completed registrations.

The health fair at Greater Little Zion was awesome.  It’s such a great service to not only their congregants but the community at large.  There were tables for blood pressure screenings, diabetes screenings, breast/cervical cancer awareness, free health checkups, Fairfax County public resources information, environmental awareness, financial counseling, psychological counseling… the list goes on.  The people were incredibly nice, curious, and willing to help in whatever way they could.

We registered three donors today, which at first glance looks small but I’m extremely pleased with.  Every new person represents a chance at life; the numbers game isn’t what’s important.  It was also partly due to Greater Little Zion’s involvement with causes like bone marrow registration in the past, as we actually had a lot of people tell us they were already on the registry.  It really is a testament to the social awareness of the church and their willingness to engage people beyond their walls.

Continue reading “First Official BeTheMatch Drive” →

35 Donors!

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Sunday was awesome.

Working with Grace (the main organizer of the drive), we were able to register 35 new donors to the bone marrow registry. With a congregation of about 100, I think 35 was a fantastic and surprisingly large response. When Grace mentioned to her contact at A3M that we had roughly 100 congregants, he told her that a response of 10 or less was a realistic number. To see so many people walk up to the front of the room immediately after service ended was really amazing. The generosity and willingness of people to help others while expecting nothing in return is a humbling and restorative experience.

I had the opportunity to speak briefly on Sunday for about 8 minutes. It was difficult for me to prepare exactly what I wanted to say during the week beforehand, but by the time Sunday came around I felt like the words and points were right. My “strategy,” if you want to call it that, isn’t very complicated. I think if you’re able to present the numbers and facts in a clear way, they speak for themselves. But cancer begins to lose its meaning when you boil it down to focus solely on statistics and numbers. There’s a deeper identity to health, loss, love and family that cancer creates and that’s what I want to help people understand in whatever amount of time I have to speak. It’s something that I think everyone is able to understand, because it’s not an exclusively “cancer” thing. It’s a humanity thing. Anyone who has loved or lost in any capacity (and we all have) can understand. And regardless of your medical history, I think those experiences bind us all together. At the core we’re more alike than we think we are, which is why when we’re honest with ourselves, we want to be there for each other.

For some other exciting news, Timothy Song may have a match on the registry! Awesome, awesome, awesome. Alice Song is an amazing woman. Not only is she going through such great lengths to save her child, but her efforts will go a long way towards saving the lives of others long into the future. Despite the darkness surrounding her son’s sickness, she’s still able to bring light into the world that far outreaches her present circumstances. Deciding to do good in the face of struggle — there’s no better testament to the determination of the human spirit than that.