We really made it! The third ORBIS–Bupa Moonwalkers event in Hong Kong

Midnight on Saturday November 15, 2008, saw the kick off of the third ORBIS-Bupa's hugely successful annual Moonwalkers event. It was an unforgettable night for all participants, volunteers and Hong Kong staff. We spent almost a year preparing for the event and are pleased that it was such a great success. Around 8,500 participants joined Moonwalkers this year, raising over HK$5.8 million for our sight-saving work.

  
Moonwalkers gather at midnight to walk 20km in support of ORBIS

Moonwalkers participants are required to walk 20km at night. This year, they started walking at midnight in Mong Kok and took almost six hours to reach the finish line at Sai Kung Pier in eastern Hong Kong.

Participants arrived at the starting point at around 10pm. Around 500 participants dressed up as their favorite superheroes, having enrolled in the “Hero Image Contest.”  It brought much happiness to everyone involved on the 20-km journey. The opening was like a carnival and people were busy taking photos, doing warm-up exercises, and cheering for each other. The blindfold session at Kowloon City was another highlight of the event. Participants were requested to be blindfold and walk hand-in-hand for approximately 10 minutes. The ultimate idea was to give everyone a taste of just how difficult – and sometimes dangerous – life can be for the blind. Many people said they felt very scared when walking blindfolded and it helped them understand more about the life of a blind person.

Moonwalkers put on their blindfolds to experience the difficulties of being blind 

We had several supporting points over the route. Besides providing water and snacks, we also organized two volunteer cheering teams to give participants a surprise! This gave the participants a lot of courage when they were tired from having walked for hours. Most of the participants arrived at the finishing point at around 5am and stayed at the pier and waited for the beautiful sunrise. We finally left the finishing point at around 9am and felt totally exhausted after all participants left.

Though it was already our third Moonwalkers event, we did experience a lot of preparation challenges in the months leading up to the event. This year, we changed the route from Hong Kong Island to the Kowloon side, which meant we needed to re-plan all of the logistics e.g. where the best location was for resources supply and where to put the signs etc. Besides the routing, we underestimated the feedback. The application quota was full one week earlier than the deadline and we needed to suspend the online enrollment page. The donor service department received calls almost every minute for application requests until the event week. Fortunately, we had created a blog and a Facebook group for the event. It served as a very good interactive platform for us to know the participants’ thoughts and expectations for the event. In other words, it facilitated the communications between ORBIS and donors and we found that some donors gave us very interesting suggestions on the event arrangement.

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all donors, volunteers, staff and supporting organizations, especially the Hong Kong Police Force. They provided much manpower on the event night. We saw so many policemen along the route to help us on crowd control and the event would not have been such a success without their support.

Looking forward to the fourth Moonwalkers in 2009!

8,000 Moonwalkers enjoyed the gorgeous sunrise at 5AM

Comments

[Jennifer Tsao]

Many congratulations HK team! Hope we can replicate your success for the walkathon event in 2009..

Best wishes from Taiwan,
Jennifer