Manchester City soccer team meets children having fought cancer in Romania

The Manchester City soccer team, which has recently played in Romania against FC Timisoara, has met several children, former patients of the Louis Turcanu hospital in Timisoara, treated for leukemia. The children and their families got VIP tickets to the game and met soccer players in the Manchester City team, such as Carlos Tevez, Shay Given, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Gareth Barry, Emanuel Adebayor and Joe Hart. The soccer players have worn the yellow bracelets which are a sign of support for the campaign initiated by The Little People Romania, called 'Poti si tu' (You can too), which supports children and young people who are fighting cancer in Romania. A video from the meeting between the soccer club and the Temerarii teenagers here. The "Wish Band" campaign was created by Romanian teenager cancer survivors and the goal is to draw attention to the needs of current patients and to bring hope to all those currently fighting. “The Manchester football players all wore our wish bands during the game against Timisoara - they wore them back home in the UK when they played Liverpool,” said Shajjad Rizvi of The Little People Romania. The campaign and the meeting between the children and the Manchester City players were organized by The Little People Romania. The organization started the Temerarii club in 2006, a club which brings together Romanian adolescents having survived cancer. The club has 150 members from 30 localities across Romania. The association organizes a patients support program in Timisoara, which was started in 2010. Volunteers are visiting the oncology – pediatric ward of the Children's Hospital in Timisoara and help children overcome fear, while offering them opportunities to play and express themselves. The association runs similar programs in Cluj – Napoca, Bucharest and Iasi.

"Razvan is the young man who has just completed his bone morrow transplant. He has been playing football since he was 9 and for the past 2 years as a professional for a lower league Romanian team. Razvan had his transplant on the 10th of August and he is now currently in intensive care, which means he is completely isolated . All visitors including his parents are only allowed to see him via a large window. When we saw him he really was not feeling well. His body is in a complete state of shock as it is adjusting to the new bone marrow, the nurses told me that he hasn't smiled for a long long time... He finds it hard to speak and only mutters, so we used a laptop and wrote some messages to him! We showed him the paper with all the autographs and....he smiled. His face was shinning. We put the laptop very close to the window and we showed him all the pictures with the Manchester City meeting. He whispered the name of every single player... he knew them all! When asked if he watched the game he nodded yes and was very happy Manchester won, "according to The Little People.