PARTICIPATING IN THE TERRY FOX RUN

On November 28, 2010, Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies  participated in the annual Terry Fox Run organized by the Consulate General of Canada at the Cresent Area, Phú Mỹ Hưng, District 7, Hồ Chí Minh City.

This is an annual run supporting anti-cancer research to commemorate Terry Fox – a normal young Canadian who had his right leg amputated due to bone cancer. While in hospital, Terry was so overcome by the suffering of other cancer patients, many of them being young children, that he decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. He would call his journey The Marathon of Hope.

Starting from April 1980, Terry ran around 42 kilometers a day in 143 days, resulting the total running length of 5,373 kilometers. When the journey was just half way done in 1981, Terry had to stop his own “Marathon of Hope” run because his cancer reached his lung. He passed away not long after that when he was just 22 years old.

Since then, to commemorate Terry Fox and make that legacy live on, a foundation named after Terry Fox was established to host the activities supporting the run in Canada nationwide and many big cities worldwide.

More than 3 millions people have participated and thousands of volunteers at over 10000 running points around the world have made the Terry Fox run the world’s biggest fund-raising event within a day. On behalf of Terry Fox, more than 500 millions of USD has been donated. The Terry Fox run in Vietnam was first organized in Hồ Chí Minh City in 1997. In 2010, in its 14th year of organization, the run attractted  more than 8,000 participants and VND750,000,000 raised for cancer research in HCMC.

Article contributed by Phan Tuấn Quốc. Photos taken by CVSEAS.

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