Students join to fight cancer

Alabang, Philippines remains a place 15-year-old Dannah De Jesus won’t forget. That’s where she met her childhood friend, or as Dannah says, her sister.

But that time with her sister was short-lived. Dannah remembers seeing her friend, barely 16, lying in a hospital bed. She died from cancer soon after.

“She didn’t have any sisters, and I became that,” Dannah said, recalling that she was 12 years old when her best friend passed away. “We loved each other.”

Years later, the loss motivated Dannah to join what has become a tradition for Herbert Hoover High School students in Glendale.

Dannah, alongside hundreds of others, participated in Hoover’s Relay for Life, part of an international effort to raise money for cancer research through the American Cancer Society. The event, held Saturday in Lower Scholl Canyon Park, attracted more than 270 Hoover High students.

The relay turned baseball fields into a makeshift campground, where students crammed into tents for the stay overnight. Throughout the event, cheer squads performed as one member from each participating team was walking around the track while other team members passed time with bounce houses, a dunk tank and various games until it was their time to walk.

The 24-hour fundraiser keeps one team member always walking to signify the fact that cancer never sleeps.

Saturday marked the 10th anniversary of Hoover hosting the fundraiser. This year, the high school and teams raised $67,000.

Kari Vargas, who teaches 12th-grade English and supervises the annual event, has seen the relay grow. Fewer than 50 students participated the first year, while more than 700 people from 33 teams descended on the park or helped with fundraising efforts this year.

“Cancer has touched too many people in our community,” Vargas said. “We get a lot of outpouring because, unfortunately, we still haven’t beat it.”

At the event, fundraising teams held raffles, sold jewelry and even offered professional massages to snag donations.

Gina Luis’ group, called Team Strength, sold pumpkin bread. This year’s event marked the third Relay for Life that Luis had attended with her team, comprised of close family members. Luis and her siblings donned shirts with the words “For you, Dad.”

Their patriarch, Glenn Miyagishima, passed away in 2011 from stage 4 gastric cancer. His death wasn’t the only loss that impacted the team. A poster hung on the team’s booth with 37 names of family and friends. Each had lost their battle with cancer over the years.

“You realize how many people it touches,” Luis said. “This event makes me feel more humbled. We’d like to keep it growing.”

At nightfall, participants took part in the luminaria ceremony, placing lit bags around the track while sharing stories to remember and honor those who lost the fight to cancer. Joining Dannah and others was Nairi Hartooni, a Hoover alumna working toward her doctorate degree in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California San Francisco.

She lost a grandfather and uncle to cancer in 2002. It was Hartooni who suggested Relay for Life to Vargas 10 years ago. It was a way for the now-graduate student to deal with her losses, and in response, learned she wasn’t alone.

“I can’t believe more than 200 students are here,” Hartooni said. “It’s amazing and incredibly rewarding. It’s an amazing feeling.”