Karate team fly kicks for cancer in pink belts
Every year in October, students from Kyalami Karate Dojo swap their normal belts for pink ones to support breast cancer awareness month.
Every October, the students at the Kyalami Karate Dojo proudly swap their regular belts for pink belts in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
After this thoughtful gesture, the students embarked upon a donation drive and fundraising in support of this cancer initiative.
Kyalami Karate Dojo’s Mari du Preez explained the idea behind the initiative.
“The wearing of pink belts in support of Breast Cancer Awareness is a worldwide initiative that has been around since before 2014. In 2018, we came across a social media post about the initiative and since then, our dojo, alongside all the other Shotokan-ZA dojos, has been supporting Breast Cancer Awareness Month, by swapping our regular belts for pink belts every October.
“As a karate belt signifies your rank and your skill level, swapping it for a pink belt in October signifies that we are all equal and united in support of the fight against cancer.”
She added at the end of October, they tallied the donations and enquired if there was a family at one of their dojos who were dealing with cancer. “If we have such a family, we donate the funds to them, otherwise we donate it to a cancer charity. Sadly, since 2018, we have always had a family in one of our dojos to whom the donations go. We donate to a different family each year.
“We value the privacy of our families fighting cancer, so we don’t advertise who receives the donation, but we are very grateful that we have been able to donate to five different families since we started this annual drive. We were also very fortunate that we could even do the drive in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
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