While many young people regularly visit fancy places to spend their weekend, Ario Erlangga, 21, a broadcasting student, spends his weekend lining up to donate blood.
Ario, a regular donor over the past year, was waiting in the queue on Saturday to donate blood for the fifth time.
“At first I thought that donating blood would hurt. I didn’t dare to imagine how it would feel when a needle was injected into my skin. In fact, it didn’t hurt,” he told The Jakarta Post.
Instead of feeling weary, he now always tries to allocate time to donate, saying that helping makes him very happy. Donating blood, he said, would also make him healthier.
Ario was one of dozens of youths who participated in a two-day blood donation event held by the US Embassy, in cooperation with the Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) and Blood for Life, a social campaigner that uses social media to promote blood donations among youths.
The event marked the beginning of the “Blood4Nation” campaign to celebrate both the US National Blood Donor Month, which falls in January every year and on the first anniversary of @america, a hi-tech American cultural center at Pacific Place Mall in South Jakarta.
According to the PMI, Indonesia needs to collect more than 4.5 million blood donations every year from about 2 percent of the total population. However, only 4 million blood donations can be collected by the PMI because few people are aware of the importance of giving blood.
Even if more people are eager to donate blood, it is sometimes not easy, or takes too much time to find a place where they can make their donation.
Jusuf Kalla, the PMI’s chairman, said that despite an increasing number of blood donation facilities, additional efforts were still needed to make blood donations easier. It took at least a month for companies, for example, to arrange a mass blood drive, he said.
“They have to first contact and arrange with the PMI to collect blood at least one month before they hold the blood donation event,” he said.
The PMI has operated 100 mobile blood donor units and established donation centers at 10 shopping malls nationwide, as well as running blood donation services at universities. Yet, more facilities for blood donations are needed.
“Because the collected donations still fall short of the target, we want to make blood donation a lifestyle,
especially among young people. Therefore, we will develop more blood donation centers at shopping malls, campuses, or any other places that are popular among young people, as well as using social media,” said Kalla, adding that the PMI aimed to decrease the average age of blood donors in Indonesia to 25 years from the current average of 30 years.
Valencia Mieke Randa, founder of Blood for Life Indonesia, said mobilizing blood donors and raising awareness of the importance of blood donation could be more effective by using social media or “online tools”.
“Online social media is a powerful media. With social media, the world is not segregated by time and place. Each time we have demand for blood donors, we can deliver in seconds through applications specially designed for Blackberry and Android users, for example. In less than one hour, as the result, we can mobilize blood donors,” she told the Post.
As of January, Blood for Life has 11,000 members throughout the nation and it is projected to continue to increase. About 1,000 young blood donors have also joined Young Blood for Life (YBL).
“We hope that more young people, even those who are still in their teens, are eager to donate their blood, as long as they are healthy. If blood donations can become a lifestyle, Indonesia will not lack blood donors anymore,” said Valencia.
To attract more young donors, the Blood for Life designs various youth-friendly programs, including programs in which they can mark their seventeen birthday by donating blood.
Since 1970, the American people celebrate January as the National Blood Donor Month because it is traditionally the time when the country has the smallest number of blood donations.
US Ambassador for Indonesia, Scot Marciel, said the newly launched “Blood4 Nation” campaign was a great way of coordinating partnership on how to work and bring people of the two countries together to solve problems in Indonesia, though initiatives run by PMI had also been working very hard to promote blood donations.
“Under the leadership of Pak Jusuf Kalla, the PMI has made it easier for people to donate blood, including establishing centers in universities and shopping malls. At the same time, this is the month [January] where we emphasize giving blood in America, thus making it the perfect time,” Marciel said. ***
