I am personally invested in the University of Iowa's Dance Marathon mission, which is childhood cancer and all things related to it, that I sometimes forget that there is a broader message to be learned by the thousands of dancers who participate each year. They have the opportunity to do two things--they are giving of themselves for the benefit of others, which is a good lesson to experience, even if you don't learn much from it. The other is that they acknowledge that bad things happen to people, some of them children. They get a chance to talk to families of children with cancer and hear what their experience with illness and trouble has been like.
Pictured here are two of this year's dancers. On the right is my youngest son, himself a childhood cancer survivor. This year is his 13th Dance Marathon as a survivor, but it is his first year as a dancer. He raised a reasonable amount of money and he usually stays up all night anyway, so I don't think the experience of dancing will have the impact that it does for many participants. On the right is my daughter in law--she has danced before, and she has a long standing relationship not just with her husband, but with the whole family, so the impact is not so great for her either.
There are many college students who have not had a personal brush with serious illness. You can't learn in 24 hours what that is like, but it at least opens your eyes. Then there is the work that the students who get involved at the leadership level do--they really work year round on the effort to not just raise and distribute money for the greater good. They are also exposed to what it is like to be a child in the hospital, what that is like for families, and I think you can't help but come away from that experience a better person. It is true altruism--you get as much as you give.
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