A day standing still in North Delta, answering questions

Ten of the forty-five days on this route are Bone Marrow Awareness Days, and this is the first of two on this stretch. Jeana Moore describes them in her own words: "I stay where I am to educate about donors, transplants, how and why they should join." There is no march, no stage and no programme of speakers. She is in North Delta, in public, for the day. The invitation is to come and talk to her.

What she can walk you through is the actual process. In Canada, joining means registering with Canadian Blood Services' stem cell registry, which takes people aged 17 to 35. You answer eligibility questions online, fill in your details and sign a consent form. If you are accepted, a buccal — cheek — swab kit arrives in the mail within one to three weeks, and you return it in a prepaid envelope so your HLA type can be read and added to the searchable list. Readers in the United States register through NMDP instead. None of it happens on a sidewalk.

She will also be straight about the limits. The Jada Bascom Foundation is not a registry. It does not perform HLA typing, does not collect cells, does not mail kits and has no say in who is eligible. Nobody is signed up by meeting a walker. What a day like this can do is answer the questions that stop people partway through — and those questions are almost always the same few: does it hurt, does it cost anything, what happens if I am called years from now.

Jeana has a reason to know how much the answers matter. Her granddaughter Jada needed marrow from a stranger as an infant, and it came from Torsten Huber, a man in southern Germany who had joined the German registry at a donor drive more than a year before Jada was born, for reasons that had nothing to do with her. Every name on a registry starts the same way: a decision made before there is any patient attached to it.