Experiences

Sailing as a means to forget illness

31 May May 2017 1523 31 May 2017

The initiative Les Voiles de l’Espoir comes to its ninth edition. It is a charity week on a sailing boat in Côte d'Azur dedicated to children with tumours and leukemia.

  • ...
Jasper Ven 47651
  • ...

The initiative Les Voiles de l’Espoir comes to its ninth edition. It is a charity week on a sailing boat in Côte d'Azur dedicated to children with tumours and leukemia.

It’s called Les Voiles de l’Espoir (Hope Sails) and it’s the largest sailing exhibition in the world dedicated to children with tumors or leukemia. It is held every two years and now it has come to its ninth edition, that will take place on the Côte d'Azur from the 10th to the 17th of June.

100 children aged between 8 and 14 coming from metropolitan France, the Overseas Countries and Territories, Morocco, Luxembourg and Belgium, a great part of whom has just finished an intensive chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant will embark on 70 sailing boats, accompanied by 600 volunteers and a medical team. The volunteers will be by the children to allow them to have fun, to forget their illness as far as possible and to discover with total security the sailing boat and sea worlds.

The young sailors will start from Port Grimaud, to then head to Cogolin, Fréjus, Saint-Raphaël, Cannes and Monaco. The adventure of the kids will be marked by sailing courses, theme evenings and other entertainments, during which the children will experiment the joy of living in a community, of sharing moments and emotions together with other kids and they will also experiment the happiness of being far from the hospital. For the greatest part of the children it’s their first experience outside the family and medical contests.

The Voiles de l’Espoir is organised by the association Table Ronde Française and is made possible thanks to an endowment fund, the Fonds de Dotation Les Voiles de l’Espoir, that supervises and guarantees the good functioning of the organisation of the event.

Related news