Cool Features

The founder of Skate4Cancer has evolved his vision. Rob Dyer, the 27-year-old Newmarket, Ontario native who has skateboarded across the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and parts of Australia to raise awareness about cancer, has a new goal in mind: the Dream Love Cure Centre (http://dreamlovecure.org/).

“It’s basically going to be a support centre for kids who are going through cancer, or kids who have been impacted directly or indirectly by the disease,” Dyer told Samaritanmag.  “There aren’t a lot of places available for kids to go and talk and share their emotions and stories, especially on the counseling side of things.

“When you lose someone to cancer, I find that there’s not really many places for you to turn, because it’s a life-changing experience. And if you don’t have a place that’s non-judgmental, it can be really hard on kids.”

Dyer knows from personal experience: within a year, he lost his mom, Wendy, his grandparents and his best friend Matt McInnes to the disease.

And he’s not alone: according to stats published on the Canadian Cancer Society website, an estimated 1 in 4 Canadians are expected to die from cancer, with an estimated 173,800 new cases being diagnosed every week.

Dyer’s loss occurred eight years ago, and he admits he fought depression, crediting his friends with bringing him out of his funk and keeping him positive.

Children’s Wish Foundation of Canada can’t grant trips to the moon, but some 16,000 other wishes have been fulfilled in its 25-plus-year history. Its mandate is simple — kids aged three to 17 living in Canada who have been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness are granted a special wish as a means of lifting their spirits during painful symptoms and medical treatments.

And while there is no evidence to suggest that wishes granted impact children’s physical health, the mental health benefits are abundant and obvious, according to communications director Paul St. Germain.  “We have had countless testimonials about how much impact these wishes have had on the children,” he tells Samaritanmag from the organization’s headquarters in Pickering, ON.

Children’s Wish has a local chapter in every province and territory and is the largest and only all Canadian wish-granting organization in the country.

Wishes run the gamut from travel to meeting celebrities, but are sometimes much more complex. One child, for example, wished that his Edmonton-based grandparents lived closer to his home in Atlantic Canada. Children’s Wish moved them.

Sometimes losing something that means everything can lead to a calling that means so much more. Such is the case for Wendy Huntbatch who in 1993 founded the World Parrot Refuge in Coombs, British Columbia, after four of her parrots were stolen. She now cares for hundreds of these gorgeous tropical birds, all of which are on the Endangered Species List.

“Starting a parrot refuge was something that was never in my realm of thought,” Huntbatch says, but the night her birds were taken changed everything. She and her husband regularly took the birds with them to the office and, she explains, “the only night we didn’t go back to work someone broke in and stole four of the six birds.”

Heartbroken, Huntbatch, an animal welfare advocate, put the word out, hoping someone would be able to help recover their birds. Instead, people started offering her their own parrots, for which they could no longer care. “Within two weeks we had 15 large birds,” she says. They have since recovered one of their stolen parrots, which eventually turned up at the sanctuary, but the other three have yet to resurface (one of the original six, the mate to one of the stolen birds, never recovered from its loss and passed on as well).