Journey to raise funds for fellow students
A TEAM of medical students from Stellenbosch University will embark on an extraordinary feat with the aim of raising awareness and combating challenges that fellow students face.
Called the Hippocampus team, the group of 30 men will be cycling about 1 000km from Northern Cape to Cape Agulhas in a bid to raise funds for friends and fellow students to reduce their financial burden.
This is the second team that has undertaken this trip after the first team raised R60 000 last year.
Glen Thatcher, from the Hippocampus team, said the idea for this project came from personal experiences in their community where they realised that all students had equal opportunities, but not equal resources to benefit from those opportunities.
“We realised that most students had bursaries which usually cover accommodation, books and food allowance but what we saw was that they did not cover things that increase one’s quality of life like a flight or bus ticket home, airtime, gym membership and more,” Thatcher said.
The cycling trip, which was started last year by a team of seven students completed a cycling trip, just shy of 1 000km, from the border of South Africa in the Northern Cape, all the way down to the southernmost tip of Africa, Cape Agulhas, managing to raise just over R60 000 that was placed into a bursary fund.
Named Nkululeko Fund, after one of the first cyclists who bravely completed the journey after cycling for the first time in his life, the fund combines the lived experience of students with the professional experience of staff members in the management and allocation of funds.
“Our route may be the same, but our vision has grown and now that the Nkululeko Fund has been established, we have decided to address an additional need in our society – the need for good men,” he said, adding that they planned on raising more funds.
“Going through a challenging experience, in a space where we can be vulnerable, allows us to encourage each other to be better men for our society, which is a rare thing.
“We want to put our best effort in to be part of a solution,” said Thatcher.