By Khalida Sarwari
Harker School student Eesha Chona and her brother, Aneesh, are on a mission: They want to ATAC the world. No, that’s not a spelling mistake. Through ATAC, which stands for Association of Teens Against Cancer, the siblings from Saratoga are determined to take on the disease, first at home and then abroad.
Eesha, 17, and her 20-year-old brother founded ATAC following a turbulent time in their own lives. A year and a half ago, their mother was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. It was the kind of thing, Aneesh said, that he’d gotten used to hearing happen to other people but never expected could happen to his family. His initial response was shock and speechlessness, followed by anger and then sadness. His sister went through the same stages of grief.
Over the next several months, the Chonas pretended everything was fine at school, all the while dealing with their mother’s diagnosis, surgery and recovery at home. They felt like they were leading double lives, which for Eesha resulted in her feeling isolated and alone. They didn’t know who to turn to for support.
“Both my brother and I felt that we didn’t want to take attention away from my mother’s treatment by saying we were undergoing stress while we were going through this process,” Eesha said. “We really didn’t want to be victims during that circumstance.”
The saving grace was that they had each other to lean on, but that was also the problem. Eesha said she didn’t want to continually burden Aneesh, so sometimes she would turn to friends and acquaintances who also were familiar with the experience of having a parent with cancer.
At the same time, Eesha began volunteering for other nonprofits in the area that provide support for cancer patients and their caretakers. One such organization is Bay Area Cancer Connections, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit that helps cancer patients and their spouses.
She recently started working with Shanti, another nonprofit that provides financial and emotional support to San Francisco’s most vulnerable women living with life-threatening illnesses.
She discovered that such resources already exist for parents of children with cancer or the spouses of cancer patients, but she couldn’t easily find a community for people like her and her brother.
“We realized other teenagers across the nation and the world–and even children–go through the same circumstances. They feel the same things; they need the same support system,” said Eesha.
These experiences would help shape the concept of ATAC. When Eesha approached her brother with an idea for an online community for children and teens whose loved ones are battling cancer, he was more than willing to help her turn it into reality.
Today, the website (atacnow.com) helps other kids in their position understand the various cancers and their treatments. The site also contains a directory of hotlines that teenagers can use during a crisis.
ATAC is also sponsoring two villages in India to receive breast cancer screening, prostate exams and mammograms with the goal of eventually raising enough money for 11 villages in Chandigarh, the village where their parents were born. The Chonas are also figuring out how to send prosthetics, wigs, scarves and specialized clothing donated by BCC to an organization in India that will give them to individuals in those two villages who are found to have cancer and need ongoing invasive treatment.
The decision to support the villages was twofold for the Chonas. On the one hand, it was about going back to their roots, but also they realized they wanted to make an immediate impact before fundraising toward research.
“We thought, what about people right now who don’t have access to health care who need it so they can actually get treatment and get rid of the cancer?” Eesha said.
Eventually, they want to create a portfolio of charities they’d like to support through a crowdfunding process, Aneesh said.
“We’re really trying to expand our global footprint,” he said. “Right now we are targeting India. … The goal is to potentially expand to Africa.”
While Aneesh, who’s studying business and science at the University of Pennsylvania, handles the business and financial aspects of the organization, Eesha looks for ways to apply new features to ATAC. One feature she recently added to the website is a space that allows teenagers to blog about their experiences dealing with having a cancer patient in the family. When she had to write down her own experience it helped her come to terms with it, she said.
By the end of the year, she hopes to make available an app she’s been working on that lets children customize a ribbon, add a message of support and send it to any of their loved ones suffering from cancer.
Next spring, Eesha is planning to visit the two villages in India and meet not only cancer patients but their children. It will be an intense, hands-on experience where she’ll also get to work in the villages and assist with the patient exams and screenings, she said.
As for Eesha and Aneesh’s mother, she is well and recovering from a second surgery she had a year ago. And not surprisingly, she’s proud of what her son and daughter have accomplished with ATAC, and especially that it’s brought them even closer together.
Aneesh likened their respective contributions to the group to a body, where he is the bones, Eesha is the brains and their work together results in forming the heart of ATAC.
“We have the ultimate bond,” he said.
