Gift of Life

Sydney, Zoe (author), 2015. 

My best friend Sydney has always had a passion for helping and working with people who have cancer. She is the type of person who will do everything in her power to raise awareness for a cause, and run fundraisers just to get the word out. This semester Sydney got an amazing internship, with the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation. 

It is sad to say that we now live in a world where cancer has affected our lives in some way. But we do live in a world that is advancing everyday, and have people working everyday to try find a cure for cancer. This month goes to the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation. 

Leukemia is known as a "random killer"; anyone can get it, at anytime. For many people with Leukemia the cure is a bone marrow transplant. 1 in 200 Americans will receive a bone marrow transplant at some point in their lifetime. 

Hearing this I began to wonder, do I really know what Leukemia is. I always knew that it was a form of cancer that affected the blood, and the bone marrow. But that was really all I knew, so I decided to do some research. I went through hundred of links, and read through them to make sure I had clear understanding of what Leukemia was. I found the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society website, which answered a lot of my questions. 

Leukemia starts in a single cell in the bone marrow, and then that cell changes to eventually become a Leukemia cell. Once the marrow cell has changed, Leukemia cells begin grow and have a better survival rate than the normal cells. The Leukemia cells reproduce incredibly fast, and start to crowd the normal cells, suppressing the development of the normal cells. There are 9 forms of Leukemia, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), then  Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL),  Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML), Hairy Cell Leukemia (HCL), Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML), Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia (JMML), Large Granular Lymphocytic Leukemia (LGL), and Blastic Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cell Neoplasm (BPDCN).

The Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation has over 200,000 registered donors, they have made 12,634 matches, have facilitated 2,951 transplants, have 8 collection facilities, have serviced 45 countries, and held over 7,000 donor recruitment drives. 

When someone registers to be donor, they will have their cheeks swabbed and fill out some information bout themselves. A donor will stay on the registry for about 30 years. When someone is called to be a match the procedure is virtually painless. Back in the day the most common way to get bone marrow was to go to the source directly and get the marrow; they would usually drill into ones hip bone while they were put under and get the marrow directly. Now its usually done through a peripheral stem cell collection, which means the donor is hooked up to a machine that filters out the stem cells; this means no down time, and no surgical procedures need to be done. 

I have decided to support Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation in a few ways. In December I made a small donation to them. This month I have purchased a hat, and made another small donation. Proceeds from the hat, and my donation will go towards processing swab kits. Each swab kit costs about $60 to process, but that is a small amount to save a life. 

Stop, Swab, Go hat (front and back). 
  
You can support Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation by purchasing a hat from https://www.booster.com/giftoflifecsun?type=1&side=front or going directly to their website https://www.giftoflife.org/Public/ContribOnline.aspx



Sources:
https://www.lls.org/leukemia
http://www.giftoflife.org
https://www.booster.com/giftoflifecsun

The Savannah Project

 Beverly in Africa, 2006. 

This month is honor of my Aunt Beverly. Someone who had a love for Africa, and all the animals there. One of the last trips she took was to Africa with my Auntie Shelli, Uncle Herbie, and cousin Aly. While in Africa they went on a safari where they saw tons of animals. When they got back from their trip my Aunt Beverly showed me tons of photos of Africa, and tons of photos of the safari. While they were on the safari they saw some lions. This months charity goes to help the lions in Africa. 

Beverly with a tribe in Africa, 2006. 

I decided to research the lions and found interesting facts about the lion population in Africa now. A century ago there were more than 200,000 lions living in Africa and now according to Panthera, there are 20,000 lions left in Africa. They have completely vanished from 90% of their historic range, and are extinct in 26 African countries. The lions have made their way on to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) "Red List of Threatened Species" because they can now be thought of as critically endangered. Lions habitats are being threatened by illegal bushmeat trade, trophy hunting, and fragmentation. 

Photo of lioness taken by Beverly in Africa, 2006.

    

In doing research on lions I stumbled upon Savannah Co., this is a company that makes handcrafted bracelets with a lion head bead in the middle. The bracelets are made out of stone, and have a single gold, silver, or rose gold lion head bead in the middle. 

Bracelet from Savannah Co. 

    

Savannah Co. gathers 10% of their profits at the end of each month and gives it to the Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN). WCN works to help save wildlife by helping conservationists build lasting connections with established organizations. WCN has set up a specific project called Nissa, to help the lions in the National reserve of Mozambique. Donations to the project help provide radio collars to track the lions, vehicles, and education so everyone has the appropriate training necessary to work in the reserve.  WCN has another project set up in Kenya called Ewaso to help the lions. Donations given to Ewaso go towards equipment (GPS to detect human-predator conflicts), operations (providing internet to those working in the field), providing education to local secondary students. 

I chose to support the lions by purchasing a bracelet from Savannah Co. Wearing the bracelet will be a reminder of lions, and how much they now need help in order to survive in their natural habitats. 

The bracelet from Savannah Co. 

    

The bracelet from Savannah Co. 

You can help by purchasing a bracelet from http://savannahco.com or you can make a donation directly to http://wildnet.org. 

Sources:
http://savannahco.com/pages/about-us
http://wildnet.org/what-we-do
https://www.panthera.org/cat/lion

Welcome!

I would like to start by welcoming you to my blog. This blog is called “ Bigger Than Me”, and in this blog I am going to share with you different charities that I have found, and how I have chosen to support them, and how you could support them in different ways.  

I have decided to call this blog “Bigger Than Me”, because we live in a world where it is easy to forget what we have and lose sight of what is really important. I was and am fortunate enough to live a very privileged life, and I forget to take time to be thankful for what I have and appreciate it all. I feel like there is more that I can do for the world, and more I can do to help the world.  

My New Year’s resolution is to support different charities each month in different ways, whether it’s buying merchandise from their website or making a donation directly to the charity.

This is my way of doing something more for the community, and the world in which I live. This is my of doing something “Bigger Than Me”.