By: Dave Abrahams
Cape Town – It’s not even certain that all of the 1000 or so riders and several hundred pillions who attended the fourth annual Bikers4Bandanas party at Killarney racetrack on Sunday 18 October even knew what a stem cell is, or exactly what the Sunflower Fund actually does.
But they did know that brightly printed bandanas are the worldwide badge of honour worn by victims of cancer, and that one of the cruellest cancers of all is leukaemia, because it so often strikes children. And if you want to get a biker revved up, attack a child.
Most riders have an inbuilt sense of family that stems in part from their desire to live life to the fullest, to make every day count and to leave behind something of value. So a fundraiser to help save the lives of people struck by a deadly disease that so often targets children, will always appeal.
The most successful treatment for leukaemia is a bone marrow transplant – but for it to work the donor’s blood needs to be an exact match to that of the recipient. The chance of that happening between two strangers is about one in 100 000, so the more volunteer donors there are whose blood has already been tested, the better the chance that a leukaemia victim will find a match.
LOUD BIKES AND LOUDER MUSIC
But each set of blood tests costs R2000 - and that’s where the Sunflower Fund comes in. Its work is twofold: firstly in recruiting healthy people between the ages of 18 and 45 to register as possible donors and secondly, to raise funds to pay for the tests.
It also helps that in only four years Bikers4Bandanas has become one of the Cape’s premier one-day biker gatherings. The organisers – the M.O.T.H. Motorcycle Club – have perfected a balance of loud bikes and louder music with food and drinks galore, a well-marshalled mass ride with a total lack of pomp and ceremony – and the opportunity to get your hair sprayed all sorts of weird colours or even shaved, in solidarity with victims who lose their hair to chemotherapy.
The day began officially with the mass ride at 10am – although most of the stall-holders and many of the riders were there much earlier. The M.O.T.H. marshals led the huge group of riders on a decorous lap of the circuit and then out onto the road for a mass ride of a little more than half an hour, ending back at Killarney where the party really got going.
They pored over stalls selling biker bling, and danced to hard-driving live biker rock; they ate, they drank and they were merry and, to the raucous encouragement of friends and fellow riders who’d already done it, lined up to have their heads sprayed or shaved – happily paying for the privilege because, even if they didn’t know exactly how it worked, if it could help to save a life that would otherwise have been lost to a deadly blood disease, it was worth it.
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