There are different types of neighbours.

There are neighbours who smile and wave at each other, maybe get together for the occasional barbecue or shovel each other’s driveway.

There are neighbours who never speak and secretly wish the other people would just move away.

And then there’s Tracey Louvros and Dave Kozoris, neighbours in Brocklehurst for the past eight years.

Dave needs a kidney.

Tracey is jumping through all the medical hoops she needs to so she can give Dave one of hers.

Why?

“Because he needs one,” Tracey says matter-of-factly.

Right now, Dave’s living without his kidneys, which were removed in February as a result of the polycystic kidney disease he had — essentially, his kidneys were filling up with grape-shaped growths, distending his stomach and shoving all his other organs into places they weren’t meant to be.

After the surgeons removed the two organs, they were weighed. One hit 20 pounds, the other was seven pounds.

Kidneys usually weigh not much more than four ounces.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Dave says. “It was hard to walk.”
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Gift of Life

Kindness in Motion would like to highlight this program and its service. A little bit about Feed the Children and their Mission:

Feed The Children is a Christian, international, nonprofit relief organization with headquarters in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, that delivers food, medicine, clothing and other necessities to individuals, children and families who lack these essentials due to famine, war, poverty, or natural disaster.

Please check it out and do your best to support this organization. www.feedthechildren.org

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If you enjoy Christian humor this website is worth checking out www.reverendfun.com

This organization is worthy of the Kindness in Motion 5 star award. Kiva is a wonderful organization dedicated to helping the impoverished. Donors can help by providing a loan for as little as $25 to a needy individual in another part of the world. The power of micro-finance…it is an amazing story.

Check out the site, form a team and start making a difference! www.kiva.org

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For every pound you pledge to lose through June 30, 2010, the Pound For Pound Challenge will donate 14¢ to Feeding America® — enough to deliver one pound of groceries to a local food bank. $800,000 maximum donation.

Check it out here Wake Up To Hunger

Our hats are off to General Mills and NBC. This cause and effort is definitely worthy of our 5 Star Kindness Rating.

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As always, Rick publishes excellent articles and practical ways we can demonstrate love and kindness.

Love is an action
by Rick Warren

Dear children, let us stop just saying we love each other; let us really show it by our actions.

1 John 3:18 (NLT)

Love is something you do. You show love by what you do, not just by what you feel.

Love is more than attraction and more than arousal. It’s also more than sentimentality, like so many of today’s songs suggest. By this standard, is love dead when the emotion is gone? No, not at all. Because love is an action; love is a behavior.

The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige, and position. If you can demand service from others, you’ve arrived. In our self-serving culture with its me-first mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept.

Nothing can be more rewarding than helping others. There is something in the human spirit that lights up when we are able to do something kind for someone else.  Remember to smile while serving others!

We recently were made aware of an inexpensive but cool way to perform a random act of kindness. Visit small candy machines and fill the slots with quarters so when unsuspecting children visit the machine they will find them loaded and ready to go.

Talk about community, in Lansing, Michigan they have elevated this to a new level. A tiny rural school district where nine out of 10 students come from needy families is offering high school graduates $5,000 a year for four years to fulfill their college dreams.

Baldwin Superintendent Randy Howes will hold a ceremony on Tuesday to launch the program to 25 students set to graduate next spring. All students in Baldwin schools will be covered by the new scholarship offer of up to $20,000.

The community of just more than 1,000 people is the first in Michigan to follow the example of the highly popular Kalamazoo Promise, an anonymously funded scholarship that has attracted new residents to the city eager to get all or most of their children’s tuition paid at public universities or community colleges in Michigan.

Kalamazoo’s program has inspired at least 19 similar programs nationwide since its inception in November 2005, while more than 50 other communities are exploring the idea. Ten Michigan communities have gotten state approval this year to set up scholarship programs. But Baldwin’s is the only one ready to go as the new school year gets under way.

Community needs to raise $120,000
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Michigan town providing scholarships to all