An estimated $25,000 was raised during a recent fundraiser in support of a blind Burnaby man who plans to climb Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro next month.
Roughly 400 people attended Bill Der’s Answering the Call event at Vancouver’s Pink Pearl Restaurant on Aug. 21, almost double the attendance than expected.
“I’m speechless. It was phenomenal,” Der told the NOW. “Our target was 25 tables, 250 people. Then it got blown out of the water. We had about 38 tables in total.”
On Sept. 10, the local resident, who was diagnosed with glaucoma in 1975 and was legally blind by ’86, will begin an eight-day hike to the top of “Kili” with his son Spencer and two others. The Der family hopes to raise $15,000 for the Down Syndrome Research Foundation and another $15,000 for the Alzheimer Society of B.C.
Sunday’s fundraiser, which included karaoke by donation, a 50/50 raffle and a T-shirt sale, has put them well past the halfway mark, Der noted, adding one anonymous donor wrote a cheque for $5,000.
“When it happened, I was like, did they announce that right? All of us did a double take. We were all sort of eating and enjoying the music. When this number came up, everybody kind of stopped and said, ‘What?’”
One of the Der’s supporters that evening was Nancy Tse, whom he met on the Grouse Grind in 2014. She had been carrying a 30-pound backpack and was training to summit seven mountains in Asia. After chatting with him about his intentions to tackle Mount Everest, Tse encouraged Der to try Kili first.
“He’s the one who inspired me,” Tse told the NOW. “We have so much to be thankful for, and with somebody like Bill and his friends, it just makes us appreciate what we have more than ever. I think what he’s doing is just amazing.”
To show her appreciation, Tse gifted the four hikers a special good luck amulet.
The multi-day climb is also a tribute to Der’s wife of 35 years, Lana, who passed away in 2015 from stomach cancer. The father-son-duo will be carrying a special staff with her name engraved into it up the mountain.
In terms of training, the Ders have completed an overnight hike on Black Tusk in Garibaldi Provincial Park near Whistler, in addition to weekly hikes around Cypress and Mount Seymour.
The public can follow their journey online by reading their blog, mysummitchallenge.blogspot.ca, or following the Twitter hashtag #BlindvsKilimanjaro.
