What is leadership? In my eyes, a leader is someone who can leave his footprint everywhere he goes and knows how to lead a group of people to make something better and how to unite them together into one organized working team.

In the summer of 2023, I dedicated a month of my vacation to volunteering at a Russian cancer rehabilitation center called “Dmitry Rogachev National Medical Research Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Immunology,” which helps children suffering from cancer to recover better and get back to normal life. When I went there, I saw the hopeless eyes of the children, as if they didn’t believe they would ever get out of there. This made me realize how blessed I was and I thought myself to be sent by god himself to help these children. From the first day, I set a goal to become the leader of the volunteer team and truly make a long-lasting impact on the community and give those children happiness and hope. 

I noticed that while the rehab complex had the latest medical technologies and machines to ensure the physical health of the children, their mental health wasn’t attended to that much. They would have a monotonous and tedious schedule that would include the same number and order of painful procedures every day. After getting to know my peer teammates and establishing myself as a leader by expressing ideas and showing my dedication to the process, I suggested we survey the children during their breaks to get a sense of the activities they would like to do or something that they dreamed of doing again. After asking over 200 kids of different ages, one thing that their answers had in common was sports. This made sense since they couldn’t move as freely with their sickness; of course they wanted to run and jump around just like their peers. 

Representing the whole volunteer collective, I proposed to the director to establish a sports club at the center that some of my teammates and I could work at to offer the patients different sports and unique ways of entertainment. The director was thrilled with my idea and ordered me to execute it the next day. So after a night of planning out different programs and buying various equipment, I had 6 stations set up the next morning including soccer, basketball, ping pong, tennis, badminton, and volleyball. I assigned 2 members to each station, including myself on the soccer station, where we would teach children the basic skills, let them have entertaining competitions, and even play full games with each other. I explained to each member exactly what they were responsible for, considering their skills, so we would operate smoothly and cooperatively throughout the day. Although it was quite hard to manage over 200 children with 12 people, my team was still able to keep everything organized and under control. I was delighted to see the genuine smiles on the children’s faces again and most importantly, see hope to be back into the normal world again. 

I am extremely grateful for my team and this opportunity to fulfill my life potential and purpose. I am definitely planning to come back to the center next summer, and I even got most of my teammates to join me on this journey again to make the rehab center a better place. This experience has inspired me to start a nonprofit organization called Lifeline Luminaries, bringing joy to children with cancer through sports.