Couple go halfway around the world for suicide prevention
A young Mangawhai couple are embarking on 18 months of fundraising for a childrens’ park upgrade after their two best friends committed suicide.
Emma Kent and Corey Radford are organising a community event every month for the Mangawhai Activity Zone upgrade. The park needs a further $800,000.
For their fundraising grand finale they will embark on the 2000km Mongol Rally in a beat-up junkyard car from London to Russia in July 2018.
Kent, 21, said Radford’s best friend committed suicide two years ago, and hers two months ago. They wanted to do something for their small community to stop that from happening again.
“Both of them were people everyone wanted to be. There was no answer. There’s never going to be an answer.
“It goes to show, you really don’t know what people are going through.
“With our friends’ recent death we wanted to take our passion for travel and do something that also changed our community.”
Kent, 21, said the park upgrade — which included completing the skate park, outdoor fitness area, three BMX bike tracks, a sound shell for outdoor events and finishing the cricket and soccer field — would give kids a way to grow their hobbies and meet other youth.
“It goes back to the core of wellbeing and surrounding yourself with good people in the community.
“We need this more than anything.” They’re planning to do a school disco, school mufti day, skating competition, fun run, bake off and pub quiz night so that there’s something everyone would want to be involved with. Kent said they hope to have the first event before the end of this month.
Next year the couple will travel to London in June to pick up their $300 hunk-ofjunk. Then over eight weeks they’ll traverse the Mongol Rally. It’ll see them thunder through the mountains, desert and steppes of Europe, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
Radford is conveniently mechanically minded as his dad is a mechanic and he is a builder, Kent a caregiver. The pair have already put themselves to the test with long road trips around the United States and Southeast Asia. “We just love driving. You get to see so much when you put yourself out there.
“You have the smallest, cheapest car you can find. Just to make it a bit more fun. When things go wrong you have to interact with the locals.”
Kent estimated the trip would set them back $15,000 to $30,000. They intended to pay for most of it themselves but have also set up a Givealittle page to help.