By: Dave Abrahams
Cape Town – If you want to make your charity fundraiser into a major event, get bikers involved.
Whether it is because community commitment among mainstream motorcycle clubs is so strong, or because riders have a permanent chip on their shoulders about being seen as noisy, antisocial misfits, or whether we just can’t resist a good party, nobody knows.
But the hard-working, permanently cash-strapped volunteers of the Sunflower Fund, who need R2000 to process each candidate for the South African Bone Marrow Registry and who depend entirely of corporate and public donations to get it, are very glad that it is so.
Just the huge smiles and contagious excitement on the faces of the yellow-T shirted crew at the South Gate of the Killarney racing circuit on Sunday 23 November as more than 1000 riders and several hundred pillions lined up to fork out R50 each for a little metal badge, an earful of live rock music and the privilege of taking part in a 60km mass ride, was reason enough for being there.
They were on machines of every shape and size from 110cc scooters to boots-‘n-all adventure tourers, from a classic BSA single and sidecar to a 2015 Suzuki DL650, the pride and joy of one of the convenors, so new it wasn’t run in yet.
The third annual Bikers4Bandanas mass ride and fun day was organised by the M.O.T.H. Motorcycle Association, and it is to their credit that a number of motorcycle dealers, rock bands, food vendors and purveyors of bikewear and motorcycle orientated jewellery, were willing to come out to Killarney at an indecently early hour on a Sunday morning to make this a party to remember.
SENSORY OVERLOAD
Then suddenly it was 10 o’clock and, after an appropriately irreverent safety briefing from the leader of the M.O.T.H. marshals, the mass ride departed… and departed… and departed. It took nearly 10 minutes for all the bikes to get going, in a sensory overload of bright colours and joyful noise.
There was just time for a quiet latte before they were back, standing three deep at the bar, dancing to biker favourites such as ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘Born to be Wild’ trying on jewellery and jackets and happily giving the Sunflower Funds ladies even more money for the event’s signature bandanas, symbolic of the treatments for leukemia and other life-threatening disorders that cause patients to loose their hair.
The Sunflower Fund was founded in 1999 by parents of children suffering from leukemia, whose only hope was, and is, a bone marrow stem cell transplant. At that time there were 1200 registered donors in the SA Bone Marrow Registry; since the chance of finding a compatible donor outside the patient’s family is one in 100 000, it simply wasn’t working
Fourteen years later the Registry has 67 500 donors on its books, more than halfway to its target of 100 000, but there’s a long way to go, and all the funding for tissue-typing of samples from new donors – at R2000 a time - comes from events such as Bikers4Bandanas.