Chris and I with his 92 year old dad Tom, at our farm auction.
I woke yesterday to discover that the funds on the Ice Bucket Challenge page had broke the £100.000 barrier, that was incredible !! I can`t tell you how good that felt. After breakfast I loaded up Chris`s scooter in the car and off we went to our machinery sale, all dressed up in our MND T-shirts and with their fund raising bucket on board too. Now I`m quite shy, but I `sucked it up' and set about asking the farmers that were there already for donations. Some did, some said they didn`t have any cash, so I gave them a leaflet I had made up with the text link on it, so no excuses after that. After a while, I found I was asking the same people and I joked that `All farmers look the same`, I chickened out a little then. The auction was about to start so I left people alone. During the couple of hours the sale went on though, people were coming up to me and putting money in the bucket. We actually collected £223 which we were pretty stunned with. The auction itself went really well and everything was sold. There were certainly a lot of people there.
Quite a few people asked about MND and quite a few had already been touched by it in some way. I had to keep telling Chris to sit down as he, being polite as always, had to stand up to shake hands with people. I could see him wobbling from afar, so I had to nag a bit. I think we raised some more MND awareness yesterday as well as raising some funds. I did mention the Ice Bucket Challenge to people, but most farmers are too busy this time of year to even have heard of it. We were happy to settle for a quid or two in our bucket.
Chris was really tired when he came in last evening. I saw him after he had returned with a tractor from the auction field. The shed wasn't that far away, but he looked like he was wading through treacle or had heavy weights attached to his legs. That's the first time I've seen him walk that far for a while. The purreed meals seem to be going down OK, though sometimes it is a bit of a guessing game for Chris to find out what he is actually eating.
Yesterday was a pretty amazing day really. The auction went well, we raised a good amount of money for the MND association, Dr Who was on the tele and the Ice Bucket Challenge was over £230,000, by the time we went to bed.
The money raised is such a big deal, but it is the awareness that has happened, that is the really big thing. MND and the people who have it, their family and friends, those touched by it, were as if trapped inside a bubble. The fundraising, the awareness, was mainly done by them. They would shout out loud about this disease, rarely getting heard. Suddenly this Ice Bucket Challenge phenomenum took off and that bubble was burst. At last everyone could see what was inside, could hear their shouts and could learn about MND. They started to understand a bit more about it and it moved them enough to donate. Thousands and thousands of people have texted the Just Giving page and many of those will have learnt what MND is all about for the first time.
This is what we mean by MND awareness. I write this little blog mainly for myself, the number of people who actually read it is not that great, I never had any expectations of it reaching any further, but hoped to raise awareness in a small way. What has happened in the past few weeks with these Ice Bucket Challenges, would have been impossible to imagine before then, the awareness created and the funds raised are truly, bloody amazing. The burden of the few has been passed on to the many and we are so very grateful. Long May it continue.
