ABU DHABI // Fadila, Nour and Farah were not always close friends. Their first impressions of each other when they started high-school were actually negative.
But as they got to know each other, their friendship grew and Fadila, 14, eventually revealed to her friends that she was a two-time cancer survivor.
The three pupils have now started a club, Protect Our Fighters, to enrich the lives of children who have cancer.
"We want to make the kids feel better while they're in treatment," said Nour Ramzi, 15, a Syrian-Lebanese pupil who was born and raised in Abu Dhabi.
They started in January working with their school, American Community School of Abu Dhabi, and Fadila's doctors at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City to establish the club, which they hope to launch formally in the autumn, at the start of their second year.
Their major project is to work with the children to decorate the paediatric oncology ward.
"We want to brighten things up," said Farah Al Mutawa, 15, an Emirati pupil.
The plan is to fundraise for supplies and involve pupils in the decorating. They also want to organise activities, help the patients with schoolwork and help them "understand what they are going through".
"We want to start by getting to know the patients and having the members of the club get to know the patients," said Fadila Farag, 14, an Egyptian pupil born in Abu Dhabi but who lived in the United States during much of her treatment.
"It has to mean something," said Nour, who has had family members who died of cancer.
The pupils want to help the patients pursue their passions "so cancer isn't something that stops them from living their lives", said Fadila.
Fadila told her friends about her idea some time after telling them that she used to have cancer.
Her condition was first diagnosed as acute lymphoblastic leukaemia at the age of three. At six, three weeks after being deemed free of cancer, she relapsed, with leukaemia in her nervous system.
The family moved to the US, where she lived for eight years – five years of treatment and three years of check-ups. There, she participated in programmes to improve facilities in her hospital.
"I just wanted to start something like that here, because there's not anything like that here," she said.
She was home-schooled during her treatment and on returning to school, at times she found it hard to discuss her experiences with her peers.
"Part of the club is that it was hard for these patients to talk to their friends at school about it and after they could go back to school, they would be bullied, they would be different – they would sometimes miss school because of the successive treatments," she said. "It's helping them to get back in that zone."
It also helps to increase schools' understanding about how to deal with these patients and what they're going through, Fadila added.
It helps to increase schools' understanding about what pupils with cancer are going through.
The girls asked their classmates and 50 said they would participate in Protect Our Fighters. Then they devised a four-year plan and created a logo with footprints coloured to represent different types of cancer. Their slogan reads, "Making a difference one footstep at a time".
Doctors at SKMC felt touched and impressed by the students' initiative and appreciated the interaction between the community and medical staff, said Dr Azzam Alzoebie, head of paediatric oncology at SKMC.
"These types of diseases are chronic and depressing, and by simply having a child in the atmosphere in the hospital, it will definitely help those children, and hopefully it will contribute to better outcomes for them," he said.
Fadila said her drive comes from making friends during her treatment with children who "had less of a chance of making it" than she did, because of the severity of their treatment and the stage of their disease.
"I was stage one. Many of them were stage four or even five and a lot of the people that I met before my treatment died before I was cured.
"They were hard times. And I would always be grieving for them because I was that close to them and them not being able to make it while I was still there meant something. So that's where it comes from."
lcarroll@thenational.ae
