Hair for Hope is Children’s Cancer Foundation’s signature fundraising event – the only head-shaving event in Singapore that serves to raise funds and awareness of childhood cancer.
Through the symbolic gesture of shaving bald, the event aims to:
Create awareness of childhood cancer in Singapore
Show children with cancer and their families that they are not alone in their fight against cancer
Tell children with cancer that it is OK to be bald
Raise funds and help children with cancer and with their families
Build a community of support for children with cancer and their families
Every shaven head in Hair for Hope represents the understanding by an individual of the ordeals that a child with cancer is subjected to. By volunteering to shave, shavees become CCF ambassadors in helping to raise awareness of childhood cancer among their family and friends. It also provides an opportunity to garner support from the public in the form of donations.
Hair for Hope 2014 saw 6656 shavees coming together for a good cause, raising more than S$3.29 million
Hair for Hope is in its 13th year running in 2015.
I signed up for Hair for Hope 2015 and will be shaved bald in public on July 26th.
My intention is to help create empathy for children cancer patients and at the same time, raise a token, symbolic sum for Children’s Cancer Foundation. But in less than two weeks after announcing my target, I was humbled to learn that I have raised more than ten times the amount I had intended. (Donors use an online form and funds raised go directly to Children’s Cancer Foundation – no cash pass through my hands.)
People whom I least expect came through with generous donations. Even a student from Belfast who interviewed me once for his thesis donated, so did people from Australia and some other friends based overseas.
The behavior of some members of a WhatsApp group I belong to was an eye-opener, however. This is a group who is dominated by a couple of very verbose and rambling members who spend an inordinate amount of time hogging bandwidth trolling others when not sending out countless preachy, textbookish WhatsApp messages on a daily basis pontificating about love, charity, the bountiful blessings each and everyone in that group have supposedly received from their great, good, gracious and almighty god, blah, blah, blah. These couple of loudmouths donated not one cent despite my repeated appeals on behalf of the children suffering from cancer. (Yup, some people who hawk fruits and vegetables for a living won’t even part with one grape. Maybe that’s how they stay wealthy.)
To me, hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have beliefs, opinions, virtues, feelings, qualities or standards that one does not actually have, claiming standards to which one’s actions do not conform. These people should modify their behaviors to match their words. They didn’t and I felt betrayed.
As they say, when your closest allies betrays you, it is time to reach for your Shakespeare. Someone else put it this way: To understand how remarkable such acts of betrayal is, imagine Pearl Harbor as an inside job.
Am I disappointed?
No, not really.
I have half suspected that this would be how some posers whom I had mistakenly consider friends would behave. I’ve long enough to detect BS.
There is a Latin saying that goes: “Vasa vana plurimum sonant.”
Translation: Empty vessels make the most noise.
What is inside you will be manifested outside you.
My suspicion has been confirmed – I have finally seen the group’s true colors.