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

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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

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.

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!

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