The Power of One

The Power of One
Of all the extraordinary people featured in our pages this past year, the editors have chosen Christine Wandzura as our Hero of the Year

BY BONNIE MUNDAY

In memory of her son, Christine Wandzura gave something special to a community in need.

The sounds of kids at summer camp, laughing and splashing in the Pacific surf, danced in the warm July air that day in 1990 as a smil-ing Christine Wandzura stood on the shore and watched. It was a welcome break for the 32-year-old mother of three whose past four years had been the worst of her life: Her eldest child, Derek, had been diagnosed with brain cancer at age five. She, her husband and their two other kids had been strug-gling to help Derek through radiation, chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant. Christine had just travelled from the family’s Calgary home to British Columbia to take a look at the free children’s cancer camp that Derek was to attend the next week.

The prospect of coming here and getting to play like a real kid again had kept eight-year-old Derek going throughout his transplant recovery. Christine would sit next to Derek’s hospital bed, holding his hands as he grimaced from the pain caused by the transplant, and tell him, “You just get through this, Derek Bear, and camp will be right around the corner.”

She’d heard of the B.C. camp run by the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) from her sister and knew only a dozen kids a year from Alberta got to go. So many more could benefit, Christine thought.

When Derek was discharged three weeks later, she phoned the CCS. Would they be willing to discuss setting up a camp in Alberta? Indeed they would.

The next step for Christine was to go and see what a camp for kids with cancer was all about. So here she was, watching amazed as kids—some terminally ill, others in remission and a few who’d become hearing or vision impaired as a result of cancer—ran and played as if they didn’t have a care. This camp has got to happen in Alberta, Christine thought.

For weeks after Derek got back from his week at camp, he babbled nonstop about the fun he’d had doing arts and crafts, and performing skits around the campfire. “The best thing for Derek was meeting other kids like himself,” Christine says. And she and husband Michael had the luxury of a week off from caring for their son, knowing there were cancer specialists and nurses at the camp.

Sadly, Derek died the following spring. Despite her grief, Christine helped the CCS plan its Camp CanCare, organizing a committee of parents and nurses. And for a week that summer, 43 Alberta kids got to go to the CCS’s new camp in the mountains of Kananaskis Country, 30 kilometres west of Calgary. Meanwhile, Christine returned to full-time work as a legal assistant and helped plan the next summer’s camp.

Even though her idea had been set in motion, the summer camp wasn’t what Christine had hoped. The funds allocated weren’t enough to cover siblings attending—essential, in her mind, to making the camp experience as close to normal as possible—and one week didn’t accommodate enough kids. She asked for more CCS funding, and by the summer of 1993, the camp had expanded to two weeklong camps that included siblings. Still, Christine felt more could be done.

On the second-last night of camp in 1994, she and camp volunteer Dr. Max Coppes, then a children’s cancer doctor and researcher, spoke quietly after the kids had retired to their log cabins. “Christine, why don’t you start something?” he urged. “A new organization just for kids with cancer could flourish.”

Christine knew he was right. She wanted to do something that would make sense of losing her firstborn. She quit her job as a legal assistant and jumped into the project full-time.

That August, in a basement home office equipped with an outdated computer and a rotary phone, Christine set about gaining a charitable designation of her own. Adding to some CCS funds that had already been allocated for next summer’s camp, her mother started her off with a donation in memory of Christine’s dad, who had died of cancer in 1993. Family and friends asked their employers for donations and passed the hat at their workplaces.

Christine’s Kid’s Cancer Camps of Alberta was launched at the Kananaskis site in the summer of 1995. Three weeklong camps have since grown into five and have hosted thousands of kids. They canoe, swim, shoot the rapids in rafts on the Bow River, hike, climb, sing around the campfire and go on overnights. There are on-site treatment facilities and medical staff for those who need chemotherapy and other treatments while at the camp.

For Christine, who works 60-hour weeks, the camps’ greatest benefit is that kids learn to push themselves to the limit. “It gives kids back that piece of their childhood that cancer takes away,” she says.

In 1997 Christine’s organization created summer day camps in both Calgary and Edmonton for kids three to seven. Then came a program for teens, followed by a year-round activity program for kids three to 12 and their families.

In 1999 Christine expanded the camps’ mandate to include raising funds for pediatric oncology research and clinical support. Now known as the Kids Cancer Care Foundation of Alberta (KCCFA), it issues research grants annually. For 2003 it has given $318,000 to Alberta researchers who will look at, for example, a potential new treatment for brain tumours like the one Derek had.

But its biggest achievement to date is the establishment last year of a chair in pediatric oncology. KCCFA is committed to raising $3 million, which will be matched by other major donors to total $6 million. To be administered by the University of Calgary, the chair will be a senior research position devoted to children’s cancer.

The foundation has a 14-member board, seven full-time and two part-time staff and some 250 volunteers. Dr. Max Coppes, now director of the Southern Alberta Children’s Cancer Program at Alberta Children’s Hospital and the longest-serving KCCFA board member, says Christine deserves any accolades she gets. “I love her attitude: ‘Don’t tell me why it can’t be done; tell me how we can do it.’ Very few people can translate ideas into reality. Christine did.”