On Saturday, June 18, at the Bucharest National Theater, 80 young footballers, aged between 14 and 16, from 5 countries – Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Lithuania and Romania – joined the cause of the Blondie Association and contributed to the filling with pink of the longest infusion ever seen, a symbol of the long road that seriously ill children have to go through to get well.
The young footballers are part of the Football for a Better Chance project, a project of the European Commission, coordinated by the Romanian Football Federation. They participated in Romania in the tournament that marked the completion of the project.
“All the children you saw here in Romania have different problems integrating into society. Either they are from disadvantaged areas, or they are from a high crime area, or they are orphans – so all of them, at this age, have already gone through life problems, and our program made together with Unimore University (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia) was to give them a chance, through football, to integrate into society” said Răzvan Mitroi, project leader from FRF.
The “Road to the Pink” project is one week away from launch, during which hundreds of people have chosen to donate and help fill the longest infusion ever seen with pink. Until June 30, for each donation worth at least 10 euros, 1 meter of infusion will be colored in pink, until the entire length of 1 km will be covered.
“It’s been a week since we inaugurated what we believe to be the longest infusion ever created and how we show how things are for seriously ill children. We were glad to have with us the children enrolled in the Football for a Better Chance program coordinated by the Romanian Football Federation. There were children who, in turn, come from disadvantaged backgrounds and who struggle with life in order to be integrated and accepted” said Adelina Toncean, founder of the Blondie Association.
After being colored in pink, the infusion will remain at the Bucharest National Theater until June 30, after which it will be transformed into 5,000 bracelets that will be auctioned so that those children in need can benefit from a flight to healing. The event was made possible with the help of the main supporter, OMV Petrom.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Blondie Association has organized 121 medical flights for more than 300 children who needed to go to clinics in Europe because their illness could not be treated in the country.
About the Blondie Association
The “Blondie” Association was founded in June 2019 to give a chance to life to sick and lonely children. It all started with Cristi, a blond boy, abandoned in the hospital in Constanța. Caressing Blondie, Cristi was seriously ill, with a heart defect in which two large arteries were inverted. His chance at life was an article in the newspaper “Ziua”, with the headline “Little Cristi needs an operation in Cluj”. Then, Adelina Toncean, who would later found the association, knew that it would be her child. At the age of two, Cristi was placed in foster care and for 11 years he did not live like a sick child. On October 25, 2014, Blondie died at the age of 13 and a half because the operation that was supposed to save her life was not done in time.
For children like him, the association has created a staged framework to solve the most important problems of children with serious illnesses abandoned in hospitals:
- Prenatal monitoring of pregnant women at social risk for the timely identification of newborns with serious illnesses (Caravan Blondie)
- Creating a mobile solution for the identification in the maternity ward of newborns with serious illnesses at risk of abandonment or being abandoned by their parents (BlonTHE APP)
- Creating a hospital volunteer program for single hospitalized children (I’m Blondie too)
- Creation of a post-hospital medical recovery center for children with serious illnesses at social risk (Căsuța Blondie).
