Blessing Okagbare has made a life-saving special request on her 35th birthday.
Nigeria's former track queen Blessing Okagbare is in the news for a good cause after soliciting support for a young athlete looking to save his dad's life.
Okagbare shared on her X page (formerly Twitter) a special birthday request asking everyone to join hands in raising funds to save a life.
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"Special Birthday Request. If you're close to me, you already know i do these things privately. Please join me as we raise funds to Save a life...," wrote Okagbare.
The athlete in question is a budding young sprinter and quarter-miler, Ese Oguma - a student-athlete at Iowa Western College and an award-winning athletics journalist.
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In 2020, his dad was diagnosed with stage four kidney failure and was immediately placed on dialysis. Ever since, his family spent all they had to keep him alive with the dialysis and expensive medications, but his health has taken a turn for the worse.
His dad currently needs an urgent transplant that'll cost $25,000, which they can't afford, so his family has resulted in crowdfunding using GoFundMe.
![Blessing Okagbare makes special birthday request soliciting for help](https://sportal365images.com/process/smp-images-production/ringier.africa/10102023/a840b534-3d30-43ec-9b62-4554f41def2e.jpg?operations=fit(480:))
As of writing this, $911 of the money needed has been raised - a meagre of the total needed for the transplant.