April 24th 2016
Lillian Zhang and Katie Schittina from AHS are ready to recruit donors
The weather this morning was colder than the past few mornings. My mom and I arrived at at 6:50am at Cheshire High School and looked for a parking space in the VIP parking area. There was a limited number a parking spaces even though it was “VIP” for the vendors and sponsors at the event. When we couldn’t find one, I took my swab box with info sheets and went out to find our table. This year our location is much better compared to the event we went to two years ago in 2014. We were situated at the end of the crowd for the festival, but we weren’t the absolute last table and this enabled us to be with the crowd. The only drawback to our location was we would face the sun the entire 5 hours there.
Today there were many spectators and runners- close to 4,000 runners running either the Half marathon or the 5K and around 1,000+ spectators. The atmosphere was amazing- people were getting ready for their race and visiting families were wandering around the festival area. There was even a live band that would play some select songs from The Killers, Blink-182, and Maroon. There was even a VIP Hospitality tent for us vendors/sponsors and provided us treats like bagels and coffee (and I needed that after skipping breakfast)!
The 5K began at 8:30am, a little off than the supposed 8am start. Although there were more people who attended this year, not a lot of people stopped by our table. Reflecting on this, I think by not bringing the usual “Give A Spit-Help Cancer Patients” sign may have been a cause for this. Usually, the sign would draw attention and those who come by would inquire what the sign meant and would be intrigued by the project of mine enough to join the registry. I also noticed most of the people who did come by the table had already signed up with Be The Match and already knew about the donor registry. I even learned one woman’s brother’s life was saved by a bone marrow transplant from Be The Match!
Results:
In the end, we had 4 interested people sign up and swab!
And we sold $8 more worth of cookies and donations! (read more about the bake sale held the day before: Post April Bake Sale)
That means we have raised a total of $100 for Be The Match, and will be able to provide funding to do HLA tissue typing tests for a potential donor to be added to the registry and thus giving blood cancer patients another set of tissue type DNA to match with!
Today was a great experience! I’d like to give a shoutout to my mom for helping me as well as Katie S. from the AHS Give A Spit Club for volunteering.
Thanks for reading!
Lillian Zhang
Give A Spit, Amity High School
Give A Spit 