Join the One Team, One Dream, One CANSA Relay For Life Movement.
Join us for the CANSA Relay For Life National Launch 2021 and the announcement of the winning national t-shirt design.

Show us your best creative talents and design skills for a t-shirt that best represents our 2021 theme – One Team, One Dream, One CANSA Relay For Life.

For me personally CANSA Relay For Life is a celebration of my life and makes me thankful for my health. As part of the Survivorship committee, I love to make survivors feel special even though they may do not feel well or ‘look good’. It has taught me to be positive, believe and fight back and I want to share this with the other survivors. It is also a time to thank our caregivers who sometimes are taken for granted and do not realise how “special” they are. Caregivers also suffer and battle in the fight against cancer with their loved ones.

If it had not been for the active role that I played in CANSA, it would have been much more difficult to accept and understand what my husband was going through. The staff partner at the CANSA Pietermaritzburg Care Centre had given so much support to me during my husband’s ordeal. She was the caregiver to the caregiver.

CANSA Relay For Life gives us a chance to witness the journey that all of the cancer survivors and their caregivers are on and allows us the honour of walking beside many of them and meeting new survivors each year.
The camaraderie is phenomenal at CANSA Relay For Life!

This diagnosis really made me think that I was going to die, but once I met my oncologist and his staff, I realized that this is the beginning of the rest of my life – and what an amazing story it turned out to be.
In the chemo room I met the true angels of the oncology centre – myself and the other cancer survivors were all in the same boat – and we became family during our individual journeys.

My wife Anthea was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 and underwent a left breast mastectomy.
She received treatment in Cape Town, approximately 150km from our home in Ceres. At the time we had two children at university and two more at school.
Although, we were very fortunate to have a medical aid, we still had financial constraints with all the travelling costs and so forth.

After I was diagnosed, I didn’t really know what to do or expect as I didn’t know where to find info or who to turn to for help. A friend told me about CANSA Relay For Life and in the beginning I was very sceptical about having anything to do with it as my Cancer wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. I felt it was a personal thing and no one would understand.
I agreed to go to a survivor’s function to keep my friend happy and that was a turning point for me. Here I realized how many people was in the same boat as me and that there was an organisation that could help me with what I wanted to know. After my second Relay I decided I wanted to be a part in doing more to help educate and to help raising funds for CANSA.

Many of my family members had cancer and at CANSA Relay For Life we had the opportunity to honour and remember them. As a caregiver for many of them, I always wanted to make them feel that they are not alone and Relay For Life offered them that. It also creates the opportunity to raise funds for cancer awareness and education.
CANSA Relay For Life is a celebration of life and therefore spreads the message that cancer isn’t a death sentence and brings communities together.

As a psychologist who has been diagnosed with cancer, I have walked many individual journeys with my patients, friends and acquaintances diagnosed with cancer. I’ve cried with them when wounds did not heal properly or when chemotherapy became too much, I’ve rejoiced with them when they are in remission, and I’ve cried with them when they became sick again.

Cancer touched my life personally in 2015, when my husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was a dark time that tested my faith, but I remained hopeful and I quickly became his strength.
God prepared me for 25 years for this moment, to not only be a wife and mother but to be a caregiver as well. My amazing husband unfortunately passed away in March 2019. I have given part of myself to CANSA and those affected by this dreaded disease.
I have been a volunteer at numerous Cuppa For CANSA events and registered two teams in the CANSA Relay For Life Garden Route event, while I also host annual fundraisers for CANSA.

Alna Kraak – My caregiving journey started in 1987 as a registered nurse at Groote Schuur Hospital’s Oncology Department. Personally, I was also affected by cancer as I had lost my father-in-law and two uncles to the disease. Patient care is my main priority, but my love for people goes beyond patient services.