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.”

He’s been on dialysis ever since.

When he got home from the hospital, Dave and his wife, Betty, talked with Tracey and her husband, Nick.

Dave told them what the doctors had said — the next step was to find a kidney for transplant.

“I said, ‘I’ll give you one of mine,’” Tracey says. “And he laughed at me.

“But I thought it was day surgery. In April, when we started the paperwork, I started reading it all and I was talking to them [medical staff] and I said, ‘I’ve got to call you back’.

“And I went over to Dave’s and said ‘Dave, this isn’t day surgery’.”

In fact, if Tracey’s kidney turns out to be one with which Dave can live — phase three of the tests will be completed today (Aug. 25) — Tracey is looking at several days in St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, and then up to six weeks recovering at home.

So far, having gone through a battery of tests, all she knows for sure is that she is in good health.

The process started with reams and reams of paperwork.

The next step was to review Tracey’s medical history and discuss the steps she needed to take before she would even be considered, which included ensuring her body-mass index was at a specific level.

It is.

The third phase addresses compatibility and, although they have different blood types, Dave says there are so many ways doctors can address this to ensure her kidney would work in his body.

At one point, when the two families were talking about this unique neighbourly exchange, Tracey’s son, James, said he’d donate his kidney if his mom couldn’t.

“He can’t. He’s too young,” Tracey says of her 19-year-old son.

“But that’s just how we all feel about Dave.”

Tracey’s been on the organ-donor list since 2006, when Kamloops residents were urged sign up as Nina Johnson waited for a heart transplant.

The Kamloops teen died in July of that year, but Tracey’s commitment to step up if her name was called didn’t waver.

Should she not be compatible, the surgery could still proceed.

Dave says in cases like that, doctors opt for a process called pairing, which sees two incompatible kidneys exchanged — helping out a pair of patients.

Dave says his doctors have told them they’ve done up to six pairings at one time.

While Tracey’s been going through a battery of tests, so has Dave, most of them focused on ensuring his mental health is strong enough to cope with the transplant.

Now retired, Dave once worked at the Weyerhaeuser mill as an assistant manager, responsible for hiring, firing and other work.

“So I cope with stress well,” he says. “And I’ve been a little lucky with my genes. I act and feel a little younger than I am.”

That luck stepped up when his kidneys were removed. After the surgery, Dave says, he didn’t recover as well or as quickly as doctors expected, resulting in a quick air-ambulance trip to Vancouver for more tests, which revealed he had a heart attack during the kidney-removal surgery.

“Part of my heart was just flopping around in there,” he says.

But doctors quickly treated it — to the point Dave and his wife were able to spend about 10 weeks in their motorhome driving to Newfoundland and back, with the dialysis machine on board.

“He doesn’t like to be kept down,” Tracey says of her neighbour.

While Dave’s been lucky, having a potential donor next door, others wait for months — and sometimes forever — for a transplant.

“Oh, God, there’s lots of waiting,” Dave says.

“They say for every 93 people who sign up [on the donor list], by the time they’ve all filtered out, there are only two or three left.”

Potential donors change their minds. Their health changes. There are many reasons why so many drop out, Dave says.

Tracey says people have questioned her decision.

“Some of them have said I’m jeopardizing my own family.

“Well, how?

“This is the right thing to do.” (Story by Kamloops this Week)

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

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
The community must raise the $120,000 needed to fund the scholarship for the first two years. After that, it will be able to collect a portion of the state education property tax revenue that residents and businesses pay. It also plans to look for outside funding.

“Baldwin doesn’t have a multimillionaire who can do this with writing just one check, or at least they haven’t found that person,” said Chuck Wilbur, special education adviser to Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Instead, the people and businesses in Baldwin have pumped in nearly $100,000 toward the project so far, including $17,000 pledged at school employees’ meetings just this week.

“We’ve had an outpouring of support from businesses and private individuals and graduates,” Howes said.

Few communities need the boost for students as much as Baldwin, where the town’s largest employer, a privately owned prison, shut down in 2005 after the state ended its contract there. Lake County’s unemployment rate is 18.7 percent, higher even than the overall state rate of 15 percent.

The area, about 30 miles east of Lake Michigan, was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1800s and is home to Idlewild, a former haven for black entertainment during the segregation era.

“We’re filled with lakes and rivers and streams and state forests and national forests,” Howes said, noting the county fills up on weekends with 35,000 summer residents but doesn’t have a single stoplight. “And yet the community of Baldwin, from a profile perspective, looks like a lot of inner cities.”

Generations of poverty
Fifty percent of the Baldwin school district’s students are white, 42 black and 8 percent Hispanic. Ninety-two percent its 560 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and generations of poverty stretch across ethnic lines.

About half of Baldwin High School graduates each year go on to attend community college or a university, Howes said, a percentage he thinks will shoot up with the scholarship. Graduates can qualify for up to $5,000 a year for four years to help pay tuition as long as they maintain a 2.0 grade point average in college and carry a full course load. Part-time students can get smaller grants.

Residency is a requirement to get the grant. Students who have attended school in the district for four years can get the full amount. Those who have attended school for three years can get 75 percent of the grant, while those there two years can get 50 percent and those there just one year, a quarter.

Scholarships such as the Michigan Promise Scholarship — currently in limbo as state budget talks drag on — and federal Pell grants would be counted toward tuition first, with the Baldwin Promise scholarship filling in what’s needed up to $5,000 a year.

The prison owners, GEO Group Inc. of Florida, are finishing up a $60 million expansion and hope to reopen the North Lake Correctional Facility soon, offering jobs paying at least $40,000 annually and giving those who might be lured by the Baldwin Promise a place to work, Howes said.

“It’s like the stars are aligning for Baldwin,” he added. “There’s a lot of really good news in a kind of glum economic climate in this tiny little rural place out in the middle of nowhere.”

This is the coolest story and one that warrants 5 stars. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

All the meanness in the world, from abuse, to bullying, to gang violence, can be attributed to people who “have lost touch with their heart.”

That’s the message of Brock Tully, a Vancouver writer and speaker whose has pedalled his message around North America not once, but three times.

“I really believe that the solution to all our challenges, gang violence, crystal meth, abuse and bullying of kids… is creating a culture of kindness.”

Tully, 62, is cycled through Surrey and Langley last Monday, on the last leg of his “Kindness, Cycle it Forward” tour, begun in Vancouver in September.

Along an 18,000-kilometre route that included Salt Lake City and Phoenix, Arizona, through the southern U.S. states and back up the west coast, he has arranged presentations to school children about bullying and kindness.

“It is kind of an anti-bullying presentation, that is inspiring, but it focuses on a solution, which is kindness.”

He makes his talks interesting and instructive, through multi-media presentations and juggling acts, and he aims at making children understand why bullying happens, and how to stop it, he said.

He also hands out bracelets to the children, with “kindness” written in nine different languages. The children start each day with the bracelet on their left, wrist, and move it to their right, upon an act of kindness.

Bullies, he says, have lost touch with their heart, and pick on people with qualities they have lost touch with in themselves, he says.

Because their victims don’t understand this, they take it personally, he said, but the bully is actually jealous.

“If kids see that they are being bullied because of something lacking in the bully, not because something is wrong with them (the victim), it is really empowering.”

As a UBC student, Tully says, he was “a jock,” by all appearances outgoing and popular, yet with many problems. He was drinking too much and was suicidal when he decided in 1970 to cycle around North America.

He describes that 1970 tour not as a 10,000-mile trip, but a 12-inch journey, “from my head to my heart, which included Washington D.C., the southern states, and Mexico.

“I reconnected with my heart and I am living a life of purpose.”

Tully is the first to admit he is not perfect.

“I am not always kind. We all falter, but it is important to get back up and keep trying.”

He writes inspirational books, the Reflections series, and appears as a keynote inspirational speaker while living in Vancouver.

He is the co-founder of the Kindness Foundation of Canada, and in 2000 he again set off by bike to take his message to across Canada and the U.S. hitting New Brunswick, New York, Miami, the southern States and the West Coast.

On this trip, Tully is pulling a 70-pound trailer behind his bicycle, and had just travelled up the West Coast, through “freezing snowstorms and unbelievable winds,” taking a ferry to Victoria from Washington, before travelling through Vancouver to Langley on his way to Kamloops.

He will return to Vancouver on May 3.

“It has been amazing. I come in and offer (a presentation) and a lot of schools have invited me in.”

At cycleitforward.org, people can follow Tully’s daily journey.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Here is an excerpt from World Vision that Gina at ScarfAid wanted to share with our team:

Dear Gina,

Thank you for your life-changing gift of 2 Hens and a Rooster from World Vision’s Gift Catalogue! Your gift will be a blessing to a child and family in need, and a truly meaningful way to celebrate the promise of hope and new life.

Thank you for giving the gift of hope to children and families in need around the world.

Sincerely,

Dave Toycen
President, World Vision Canada

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

We also found this passage the kindness in motion team wanted to share with our readers:

“In response to all he has done for us, let us outdo each other in being helpful and kind to each other and in doing good” (Hebrews 10:24 TLB).

We might be different but we can still reach out and help each other in  a time of need.

Here is an act of kindness worth mentioning, Kamloops Alliance Church parishioners donated over 5000 lbs of Food at a ThanksGiving weekend service for the Kamloops Food Bank.

The following week Kamloops Rotary group collected another 20,000 lbs of Food for the Food Bank. With the food bank shelves looking pretty bare this latest infusion will help get them past the toughest part of the year.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Associated Press
PLAINVILLE, Conn. – They don’t climb tall buildings in a single bound, but the mysterious “Gas Men” are super heroes to some fed-up motorists.

The unknown duo were dressed in sunglasses, baseball caps, khakis and matching green golf shirts when they gave Gayle Kilburn a $100 bill on Thursday as she filled up her car at a Citgo in Plainville.

They also handed her a card that read “Re-Fueling Our Community” and was signed “The Gas Men.”

With fuel prices where they are today what a great sentiment or random act of kindness these Men performed.

The Kindness in Motion Team have awarded this story the prestigous 5 star rating.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Credit: Associated Press
LUDINGTON, Mich. – A woman who lost her class ring in Lake Michigan in 1954 has it back, thanks to a metal-detector hobbyist.

Robert Savage told the Ludington Daily News for a story Saturday that he found the ring about 12 years ago but only recently began looking for its owner.

He did a bit of detective work by looking at the initials and the year on the ring. He found a Ludington High yearbook for 1955 and found that Jan Pedersen was the only person in the class with the right initials.

Now Jan Zacharda, she says she had forgotten about the ring she lost at Ludington State Park. And she’s even more puzzled that Savage found it in a lake about a dozen miles away.

Zacharda now wears the ring on her index finger, where it fits better.

This is what Kindness in Motion is all about, going out of your way make someone else’s day. Kindness – Pass it On!
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars