Category Archives: Causes I support

65_RedRoses Premiere in the USA

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This is one for any of my readers in the US of A. Most of my regular readers have heard me talk about Eva Markvoort, a girl who was born the same week as me, but in Canada with a genetic disease – Cystic Fibrosis. While on the wait for a double lung transplant, a friend asked if she  would be willing to be the subject of a documentary about living with CF and being on the wait list for an organ transplant.

65_RedRoses came out in 2009 and has since won numerous awards at film festivals across North America. The documentary originally ended with Eva walking down  a street healthier than she’d really ever been with a future ahead of her. Of course, we know now that 2 years later she was diagnosed with chronic rejection and while on the wait for a second transplant she died a few days before her 26th birthday.

The documentary has since been updated to reflect that, and will premiere on the Oprah Winfrey Network as part of the OWN Documentary Club tonight (Thursday) in the USA at 9/8c.

If you are able to watch, please do so. Hopefully when you watch you’ll understand why I’m so passionate about raising awareness of Organ Donation and the need for people to sign up on organ donor registers and talk about their wishes with their families.

Scotland kicks organ donor butt!

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I saw a WONDERFUL piece of news yesterday that had been posted by Abby & Hope’s ‘Sign Up, Speak Up, Save Lives‘ campaign facebook page.

Scotland has now broken a record for the organ donor register, with 40% of our population having signed up to become organ donors.

Of course, there is still work to be done raising awareness of the need to register, dispelling the myths about organ donation and transplant and the need to speak to your families NOW about your wishes. Sadly there are a lot of people whose dying wish to having their organs donated is denied because their families refuse doctors to harvest their organs for transplant.

The last statistics I found was that in the UK, only 29% of our population are on the register despite the fact that 90% of our population say that they support organ donation. There is a massive gap there that needs to be narrowed between theory and action.

I don’t know if this is definitely true, but I also read that only 26 states in the USA offer the organ donation option when they are applying for their driving licenses. 8O

I know that a lot of my readers are now registered to be organ donors – and guys – THANK YOU! You totally rock for being willing to give life in your death.

 

 

Lent Sunday Causes – Sport Relief 2012

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185 mile cycle from 9.30 a.m. to 4 a.m.
Rowing the English Channel after getting 1 hour of sleep (and after cycling for 185 miles)
Running marathons (actually longer than marathon distances) for 3 days

Yeah.

It’s mental.

No.

I wouldn’t be doing it.

I’ve liked John Bishop’s stand-up comedy for a few years now, and listen to Radio 1 most days. I have to confess that I felt kinda weirdly proud and a little emotional each time I heard him when they called him daily while doing this crazy week of hell.

What I also loved though, was the people that cheered him on.

3 years ago, I sat in a hotel room with my friend Jud watching Comic Relief. I’d driven us from Edinburgh to Watford and was kinda tired. The reason we were in Watford was for an orientation/training day in preparation for us going to South Africa that summer.

I’d grown up watching those appeal videos but that year it became more real – knowing that we would like be seeing some of that poverty in person. It would no longer be just something we saw on TV.

I watched one appeal video with David Walliams, and it reminded me of the kids in Durban who were living on the streets. A month after we went there, police came, took them off the streets, drove them 100 km out of the city and dumped them out there – so tourists wouldn’t see ‘street kids’ during the world cup in 2010. What was lovely was seeing the young boy in a second video, now living in a better place, thanking David for some stuff he had sent him.

It made me think of Henok and Kinen.

I will say that the one thing that bothers me about Sport Relief is they don’t show what they have that we don’t. Joy. Resilience. It’s not all bad out there. I was really pleased to hear John talking to Dermot O’Leary during one of his marathons talking about how people don’t want hand outs – they just need a hand up. Because these are capable people.

They are people with potential.

They are people who probably know how to start solving some of the problems.

This year I donated to Sport Relief because I was inspired by John’s determination and endurance, and the reason why he did it.

I hope that the money does make a difference to save lives.

I hope that one day the western world will stop taking advantage of the vulnerable so that the structure that causes all these problems in the first place, will one day come tumbling down.

 

Lent Sunday Causes – Amelia’s Campaign

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Friday saw a stealthy postman come a-visiting. Somehow our postman ‘couldn’t’ deliver a parcel from Girlguiding UK online shop because no one was in. Funny when there was me, my stepfather and at least 3 builders in our house all day and the doorbell didn’t ring!

But today, after I came back from the post office with the package contaning some new resources for next term something awful happened. A football player collapsed on the the pitch in the middle of the game. He had to be resusciated with a defibrilator. As he was stretchered off the pitch to be taken to hospital by paramedics he wasn’t breathing. Amazingly, medics have been able to get him in a stable condition though as I write this he is in a Cardiac Intensive Care Unit criticially ill. Fighting for his life.

He is 23 years old.

An athlete.

With a wife (or fiancée?) and child.

His name is Fabrice Muamba.

When I heard about it, my automatic reaction was ‘crap, it sounds like this guy has undiagnosed HCM’. Just for the record, I don’t know that for sure, and I’m not a doctor. But I know that HCM is common amongst young athletes and is often the cause of sudden death in young people. In 2003, a footballer collapsed and died on the pitch, and he had HCM. And it is something that has been at the forefront of my mind because…

It was the cause of death for Amelia Scholey’s brother.

This year, Amelia (who is a Guider in North Yorkshire) is trying to promote the importance of organ donation and raise money for two charities – Live Life Then Give Life (a charity I’ve spoken about before) and the British Heart Foundation (a charity my family raised money for after my Uncle died from myocardial infarction a few years ago). After Amelia’s brother died, they found out he had Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) which is a genetic disease. They thought perhaps that it may have been the cause of their father’s death too. Amelia got tested, and doctors discovered she had a heart disease too, and ended up having to have two heart transplants.

Next term, at Guides we’ll be combining some Olympics fun and awareness raising to do Amelia’s Campaign Challenge Badge. Some of the resources we’ve got to do this, I received in our parcel this afternoon.

The Amelia Campaign Challenge Badge can be done by Rainbows, Brownies, Guides or Senior Section, and to get the pack you can e-mail the LLTGL office info@lltgl.org.uk

You can also find out more about Amelia’s Campaign to raise £10,000 by August 2012 for Live Life Then Give Life and the British Heart Foundation by going to the Amelia’s Campaign website.

I commend Amelia for all her hard work into putting the challenge badge together, plus all the campaigning which I know is going well.

My thoughts and prayers are also with the Muamba family, Fabrice, the medical team taking care of him and his friends and teammates at Bolton.

Lent Sunday Causes – British Red Cross

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This weekend, my chosen charity is the Red Cross. Today is the anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami, and Red Cross was one of the first organisations on the scene helping those affected. Red Cross & Red Crescent societies exist all over the world.

Last year I wrote a post showing videos about the work that the Red Cross does all over the world. You can see it here.

At the moment the main appeal British Red Cross is doing is for Syria, where the International Red Cross & Red Crescent have been trying to provide aid and even helping take people to safety.

They are also still in the ground in Fukishima trying to help rebuild community in the areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

They’re also doing things every day probably in your hometown. Educating about the work of the Red Cross from humanitarian aid, to war crimes trials, to tracing missing families, to helping bring supplies in snowy weather. Teaching First Aid which could save lives of many.

In fact my friend Nicola wrote a fab post recently about her experience of taking part in training from Red Cross. And I love that my friend Flinderella now is part of a Red Cross education team.

Are there ways which you can get involved? Why don’t you go to your local Red Cross organisation’s website and find out?

Lent Sunday Causes – Compassion International

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Last weekend my lent sunday chosen charity was Compassion International. Apologies for the lateness of this post – but I’ve been without the internet for the last 5 days!

The story of how I began supporting Compassion is here. But let me tell you the little story of how I came to sponsor this wee guy:

This is Kinen. He lives in Indonesia, and is one of 6 children (the same as Henok). Apparently he loves cycling and singing. Maybe he can teach me to ‘love’ cycling (because I already love singing, and have a love/hate relationship with my bike). Kinen will be 9 in a few months, and I suspect this photo is not totally recent. I could be wrong.

On a table full of photos of children clearly being told to stand up straight, look serious this little guy jumped out at me. My first reaction on seeing his cheeky grin was one of giggles. He reminds me a LOT of Elastatoddler. He also reminds me of my friend who died at Christmas time.

We flicked through all the photos the had on the stall, and there was another little boy with a cheeky grin too – I noted that the two of them would probably be trouble if they were friends, and then noted that the other little boy was also from Indonesia – so maybe they are. Hee hee.

Anyway. I walked to and from the stall, eventually took the photo back to my stall for several hours. Eventually I realised that if nothing else, the fact that when the people from Compassion asked for the photo back I couldn’t do it, I needed to sponsor this wee guy! So I proclaimed to my colleague

“Right! that’s it! Decision made – I’m sponsoring him”

I filled out the form, and went over to the Compassion stall to had the photo & form back. They thought I was saying ‘no’.

“Turn it over, I’ve filled it in”

Elastatoddler’s Mum (my lovely friend Carrie!) was also at the conference. She’d actually taken ill that afternoon, and her Mum had left their stuff at our stall while she went on a search for Carrie. When Carrie came back (feeling better!) she said

“Look!” – pulling out a picture of a Compassion child she’d decided to sponsor that day.

“Look!” – I said, reaching for the picture of Kinen.

We laughed, and what was so funny was Carrie said to me

“I saw him, he’s got such a cheeky grin, and I almost sponsored him.”

She though had wanted to pick a younger child close to Elastatoddler’s age to sponsor, and so had asked to see children not on display, and found a little boy who is exactly a year older than Elastatoddler (they share the same birthday). I love though that although she hadn’t sponsored Kinen, I had come along after and ended up sponsoring him!

My Mum did sigh one of those heavy motherly sighs when I told her about sponsoring Kinen (‘Don’t you already sponsor a child?’). But I know it was the right thing to do. Plus, Henok, the child I’ve sponsored for the last 10 years will soon be 18 so I will no longer be sponsoring him after that. I hope that the education he has received over the last 10 years will have set him up well for adulthood, finding a job and all that stuff.

To find out more about sponsoring a child through Compassion, you can go to your country’s Compassion website. People in the following countries can sponsor a child through Compassion International:

Australia

Canada

Germany

France

Italy

Netherlands

New Zealand

South Korea

Spain

Switzerland

UK

USA

It just might be that you give a child more opportunities, and possibly save their life today...

 

Lent Sunday Causes – Girlguiding

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Every Sunday of Lent, I choose to highlight one of the charities that I support. This weekend, I choosing Girlguiding because earlier this week it was World Thinking Day. (This is the birthday of the founders of Guiding & Scouting, and the day when Girl Guides & Girl Scouts all around the world think about their sisters globally each year).

I’ve been involved in Girlguiding for half my life. I was a Rainbow; a Brownie – where I first got a taste of leadership becoming seconder, then sixer of the Pixies; I moved up to Guides where I first got thrown into having to work things out as a team, went to camp and met several of my high school friends. As a Guide I learned Scottish country dance, how to do a reef knot (actually kinda handy), how to pack to go on holiday super efficiently, First Aid, sign language, leadership skills and team work. Doing my Baden-Powell Award I had to do all sorts of things including becoming a leader at a local Brownie Pack for a year. I still have the toy Mushu (a character from Mulan) that one of the Brownies gave me for my 16th birthday. I was a Young Leader - I stayed on with the Brownie Pack and then later helped at a challenging Guide unit in Leith. While working on a service team at a big Scottish camp me & my friend Kate met our friends Lizzie and Karen and they introduced us to Rangers. We got to go on Venture Scout camps doing activities we’d never have got to do usually, did community projects and ended up becoming finalists in a competition where we got taken to London to give a presentation about it.

All of these things gave me skills I’ve been able to use in the workplace and at university. And I’m super grateful.

I am super happy after a 9 year separation from Guiding, to be back as a leader!

Girlguiding has 500,000 members in the UK alone. The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) has about 10 million members across the world, making it probably one of the largest international youth organisations.

I loved guiding. For a while as a teenager I thought it was a bit ‘uncool’ but now I’m so happy I stuck with it, because I learned a lot and made some amazing friends. I love guiding still because I’ve realised how inclusive it is compared to most youth organisations. I also love that it has stayed ‘girls-only’, because I think it’s important to have a place were girls can be girls with no pressure to look good because of the distraction of boys!!

If you are female, and would like to be involved in your region’s Girlguiding/Girl Scouts you can find out how to contact them here on the map of WAGGGS member organisations. There are so many ways to be involved – by volunteering your time, by donating to your local organisation or some of the Global funds…

Causes I support: Live Life Then Give Life

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Today is Easter Sunday. The weekend Christians celebrate how Jesus died so that all that believed He was the son of God may have a second chance at life. So it was a very simple choice to make my final ‘Lent Sunday’ cause a charity very close to my heart who encourage people to be organ donors – so that in our death, we might give someone (or many people) a second chance at life.

lltgl

The mission statement of Live Life then Give Life is

“To save and improve the lives of all those in need or receipt of organ and tissue transplants. The charity exists to improve education and awareness of organ donation and to fund projects that increase the numbers of successful transplants in the UK.”

LLTGF Website

Last year, after hearing of Eva’s death and on the lead up to Easter weekend I wrote this post in regards to my thoughts on organ donation.

More than 10,000 people in the UK alone are currently waiting for an organ transplant. It’s funny – we always think ‘it’ll never happen to us’ but if you read some of the stories on the LLTGL website, you’ll find that’s not the case. You just don’t know when yourself or maybe a close friend or relative may end up on that list. In fact the way things are at the moment, you are more likely to need a transplant than to become an organ donor.

So if you haven’t already, I’d really encourage you to get educated, and if you feel it is something you want to do…join the organ donor register in your country. And make your wishes known to your family.

Links connected to this charity:

Live Life then Give Life Website

NHS Organ Donor Register (UK only)

Donate to Live Life then Give Life via JustGiving

Causes I support: Love Oliver

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Palm Sunday.

I have too many  causes to support I’ve discovered. But being that I got a great reminder via a lovely article on the Scottish Television news website on Saturday, the cause I chose this week was Love Oliver.

There aren’t many babies that have had the amazing number of friends on facebook that Oliver did. And now his parents, Andy & Jennifer – with the support of lots of family & friends, along with many people who probably got to know them purely through seeing pictures of Oliver’s gorgeous smile and hearing his story as he spent his 5.5 months on earth battling a rare form of cancer.

Love Oliver is supporting families who have relatives facing a similar battle in Edinburgh Sick Kids Hospital, as well as going to be supporting research into rare forms of cancer found in children.

You can donate here.

Causes I support: Pregnancy Crisis & Loss support

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It’s something that everyone has known directly or indirectly in their lifetime. You might have had an abortion, or gotten pregnant when you hadn’t planned on it – at the ‘worst possible time’. You might have had a miscarriage. Maybe your mother had a miscarriage. Your friend did. Your friend in high school got a girl pregnant…

Everyone who reads this blog pretty much knows my own story. A number of my friends have had a abortions during the last decade. A few of my friends got pregnant while we were at university. Two of my friends had miscarriages this year. My friends had their second child while one of them was a stay-at-home-parent, and the other a full-time student, neither of them really earning.

It is not easy. We don’t really talk about it. Pregnancy loss is a taboo subject (not only abortion, but miscarriage & still birth too). And people don’t understand it.

But across the country, and in many others people train staff & volunteers in counselling skills and gain knowledge of these things so they can provide a safe space for women & men who are in crisis or grieving to come to. To be listened to. To be supported through.

This week, 10 years ago I conceived new life with my at the time boyfriend – my best friend & partner in everything. It was a horrible time, and I’m so thankful that I had someone who cared about me enough to go through it all with me as much as he could.

A lot of people going through something like that aren’t so lucky as I was.

Two friends of mine (Douglas & Annaliese)are running the Edinburgh Marathon to support our local pregnancy crisis centre. Others are at the moment collecting change in baby bottles.

So this ‘Sunday’ this is the cause I’ve chosen. :) You’ll be able to see that I’ve given a donation to both of my friends! I’d love if you could do the same – or failing that, get an empty jar or baby bottle and collect your spare change & then hand it in to YOUR local centre on Father’s Day.