The good guys thread

[kuhio98]

Soldier saves German Shepherd after it was hit on Interstate 40
Bella Foundation, Animal Medical Center of Midwest City team up to care for dog

MIDWEST CITY, Okla. —A German Shepherd was left for dead after a car hit it on Interstate 40 Wednesday evening. The driver behind the wheel of the vehicle that hit the dog never stopped.

A soldier from the Moore area drove by the dog and saw it suffering. She stopped and took the injured animal to the Bella Foundation.

The Bella Foundation and the Animal Medical Center of Midwest City have teamed up to care for the dog, who they are calling “Trooper.”

The Bella Foundation isn’t sure if “Trooper” belongs to someone or if he is a stray. They say he will be up for adoption if an owner does not come forward.

For more information on how to help the dog, visit Trooper’s donation page. http://www.gofundme.com/Trooper You can follow her progress at the gofundme link. Trooper is recovering from surgery and they are looking for his family.


2/21/14 Update on Trooper:

Trooper's owners have been located. However...

Trooper's owners have been located. However, because of his extensive recovery they feel they are not equipped to give him the care he needs over the next several weeks and have elected to release ownership of Trooper to The Bella Foundation SPCA.

We are currently searching for a Foster Family that can help Trooper during his recovery and can ensure he gets the tender loving care he needs.

This will not be an easy task. Trooper had MAJORY surgery on his back hips and will need lots of love, support, and care during this time. While he is recovering he would do best in a quiet home with possibly one other dog. Playing in the yard is still a long way off but IS on the horizon.

The Bella Foundation will be entirely responsible for his veterinary expense and will ensure his new foster family has all the tools needed to see Trooper through this.

If you would like to foster Trooper and help him start a new life please visit http://www.thebellafoundation.org/foster

[kuhio98]

Students surprise teacher with donation after house burns down

SOUTHAVEN, MS - (WMC-TV) - There is nothing left of Emily Nelson's house.

Two weeks ago, Nelson's home burned to the ground. She lost everything. But now, with money from her students at DeSoto Central Middle School in Southaven, Miss., she can start to rebuild.

"I can't imagine just going out of my house with my pajamas on knowing that there was nothing left of my house," said Gracie Miles, one of the students in Nelson's class.

Miles and other students are part of Biz World. They are learning business by making and selling products at school. But before they could start, the group needed $100 to cover costs. It came from Nelson's pocket.

"They may discover something about themselves and become a little entrepreneur," said Nelson.

For the past several weeks, students have been selling all sorts of items they made at school.

"We had more girls in our group than boys. There was only two boys in our group so we decided to go with jewelry," noted one student.

When it came time for the students to donate all of their profit money to a worthy cause, they decided to give it to a familiar face, going through a difficult time.

"She gave so much to us, so we decided to give something to her," said a student.

It is a heart warming reminder that what goes around comes around. Now the students are combining their profits, totaling $600, to give Nelson an unexpected return on her investment while also helping her family start over.

"For them to decide that my family is the worthy cause to help out at this moment in time that's just, it was very sweet," added Nelson.

[kuhio98]

'Full circle': Man finds stranger who saved him from suicide 6 years ago

It was a Good Samaritan encounter that changed a young man’s life forever.

Six years ago, on a bitterly cold January morning, Jonny Benjamin was coaxed away from a ledge on London’s Waterloo Bridge by a total stranger walking to work.

Benjamin was 20 years old and had just been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder — a debilitating combination of schizophrenia and depression. He had dropped out of university, held little hope of being able to hold down a job or one day have a family, and decided life was not worth living.

Then a stranger’s voice pulled him out of the darkness.

“You can get through this. You can overcome anything,” Benjamin recalls the man saying, as he calmly spoke to him for 25 minutes, inviting him to join him for a chat over coffee instead.

The chance interaction altered everything for Benjamin who was ultimately pulled to safety and spent years battling his way back to health.

But there was one thing preventing him from achieving full closure on the bleakest moment in his life — lingering questions about the identity of the man who rescued him.

So, on Jan. 14, exactly six years after that near-fateful day, Benjamin launched an online campaign to try to find the man who'd helped him, taking to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter with his story in the hopes that it would jog some memories. "He was the first person to give me hope, and his words actually prompted my recovery," he says in the YouTube plea. "Now I need your help to find him. I've called him Mike, although I'm not too sure if that's his real name."

The search, which used the hashtag #findmike, was soon trending in the U.K., Canada and South Africa, and was retweeted thousands of times, including by singer Boy George, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and actor Stephen Fry.

Benjamin, now a mental health campaigner and ambassador for charity Rethink Mental Illness, said he has only recently felt confident enough to speak openly about his suicide attempt, and hoped to raise awareness through his story — but held out little hope of actually finding the mystery man.

But his search ended on Jan. 28, when Benjamin finally came face-to-face with his savior: Neil Laybourn, a mild-mannered personal fitness trainer from Surrey (just outside London), who had also spent years wondering what came of the man he coaxed from the edge.

Though he initiated the search, Benjamin says he was initially "petrified" to meet Laybourn: “I wasn’t sure what memories were going to be triggered from that, or if I was going to recognize him,” he told TODAY.com. But the fear quickly faded.

“Do you remember me?” Laybourn, 31, asks in a video of the pair's reunion, posted to YouTube, in which the pair is seen greeting each other with a long bear hug.

"It's all coming back," Benjamin says, moved to tears.

Laybourn was first alerted to the #findmike mission by his fiancé who saw a post on Facebook.


“Neil said the big shock first of all was to find out I was still alive, and that I was looking for him,” Benjamin said. “And it’s been a massive shock how big the campaign has got.”

Benjamin says it was Laybourn’s calm, collected demeanor that first lured him out of his state of distress on that day in 2008. He also noticed that Laybourn was a young man, much like himself, on his way to work — which filled him with hope.

“I was in my own world and he managed to burst the bubble that I was in and get through to me,” he added.

During their reunion in a south London pub, the pair went over the chain of events and Laybourn recounted details Benjamin had not been able to recall. He said at one point Benjamin had agreed to get coffee and started to climb back over the railing. Then he noticed the police pulling up and, fearful of being sent back to hospital, had a change of heart.

Laybourn had to reach out and grab Benjamin as he attempted to jump. “Up to that point, I remembered him stopping me with his words but actually, he physically stopped me,” Benjamin said. “It’s even more reason to thank him.”

When the police did finally arrive and get ahold of Benjamin, Laybourn was not been allowed near him and had no way of following up.

“He said it was amazing for him to see me smiling and back on my feet again, and how far I’d come,” Benjamin said. "He’s so humble about it. He says: 'I’m not a hero, I’m just an ordinary guy'. He’s taking it all in his stride and said: ‘I’m just proud of you Jonny.”

The pair plans to spend time getting to know each other in the coming weeks and months. Laybourn, who is getting married in August, also offered to help Benjamin get into shape.

“Everyone needs a friend like Neil,” said Benjamin. "He’s just the nicest guy. Very sensitive but very lovely and caring and kind, and just a great laugh.

"I always thought of that time as being very negative, I thought of that place as being the worst in my life,” Benjamin added. “I feel that I can look at it a very different way now. I’ve overcome that. I’ve come full circle and am able to close that chapter.”

[Taz_Zoee]

Here is a photo of Jonny and Neil. Jonny is on the left and Neil is on the right in the plaid shirt.
Two good looking young men!

[kuhio98]

Thanks Cindy. I couldn't get the photo to attach for some reason.

[Catty1]

http://www.viralnova.com/terminally-...ampaign=aweber

It Looks Like The Most Picture Perfect Wedding Imaginable. Except One Devastating Truth.

February 20, 2014 Stories

When 26 year old Chris Price found out he had terminal cancer and just six months to live, he decided that he would spend the rest of his days making the love of his life’s dreams come true.
He started out by proposing to 29 year old Ceri, and marrying her in a plush church with her four children as the guests of honor. It was truly a magical wedding.
Chris was sadly diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus in April 2012.



Shortly after he was given the all clear, but tragically the cancer returned in April 2013 and he was told it was terminal.



With six months to live Chris promised himself he’d spend it making his girlfriend Ceri’s dreams come true, starting by proposing and then marrying her.



After the wedding, Chris took his new wife and her four children Halle, nine, and triplets Evan, Morgan and Georgia, six, to Disneyland Paris.



Few weeks after returning from Paris he whisked Ceri off to New York for a weekend of sightseeing and shopping. He splashed out on an expensive pair of Louboutin shoes and a $1,500 Mulberry handbag that she had always wanted.



The loving husband then booked a trip to Las Vegas for her birthday, but sadly he ran out of time… Chris died in Ceri’s arms last month and his funeral was held in the very same church where the pair had married just six months earlier.





After Chris passed away in January 2014 Ceri had this to say about her late husband:

If my love could have saved him, he would have lived forever. We packed so much into the short time we had together. His illness made him live completely in the moment and he taught me to do the same.

He died in my arms and I felt his last breath. My heart is broken losing him and I still spray his Aramis aftershave and wear his clothes to feel close to him. He loved me and took me on with four children as if they were his own. They loved him so much too.
I have no regrets – we accepted what was going to happen and we savoured every single second we had together. At his funeral we played his favourite song Robin S – Show Me Love. That’s all he ever did was show everyone he met love. I miss him every moment of every day.

They packed more love in the short time they had than most people have all their lives.

Source: dailymail

[kuhio98]

J.B. Schramm's Non-Profit Helps Kids Realize College Dreams

J.B. Schramm remembers the beat-up couches and broken TV in the teen center he started in 1990 in the basement of Washington, D.C.'s low-income Jubilee Housing project.

And he remembers LaToya, a high school senior in 1992 – a bright student who he thought had college potential. So the Yale and Harvard Divinity School grad, who had expected to be a teacher or minister, spent Saturdays helping LaToya complete an application and write a personal essay.

"When I saw her a few weeks later, I brightened up and asked, ‘So, did you get a bid?' " Schramm tells PEOPLE. "She said no. I said, 'Why not?' She said, 'I didn't have a stamp.' I thought she was joking."

From that one girl missing one stamp – what Schramm, now 50, kiddingly dubs "The Stamp Act" – a life-changing idea was born.

Today, Schramm's College Summit boot camps annually train 2,000 students who, in turn, work with 50,000 classmates in 175 high schools across 15 states. Those schools involved with College Summit see an average 20-percent increase in kids attending college, says Schramm.

"I realized that, for a lot of kids with talent but not a lot of resources, there was a systemic crater on the pathway to finding and getting enrolled in a college," he says.

He cites studies that find 95 percent of low-income eighth-graders say they want to go to college, but only nine percent will get a college degree.

"It's an outrageous loss of potential," he says.

Putting 'Cool Kids' to Work
Within three years of "The Stamp Act," Schramm had put together a four-day boot camp where 32 "cool kids" from six different states worked with writing coaches and college counselors on skills they would not only pour into their own college applications, but impart to their peers.

"It dawned on me one day when I put a tutoring sign-up sheet on the door of the teen center," he says. "After the coolest kid we had put his name on the list, we had 30 kids sign up, too. And I thought, 'What if we got the coolest kid to go to college?' If we could get young people taking charge and helping themselves, helping their friends, we could change the culture and make a lot of progress fast."

And College Summit is there for the rest of the kids, too, through its free apps – at CollegeAppMap.org – which, starting in 9th grade, take students through the 30 steps they need to take to get into college.

"For the first time, a lot of my low-income students are saying to themselves, college could be a possibility for me," says Doris Dabney, 49, a 16-year teaching veteran at D.C.'s Dunbar High. "College Summit empowers them to make choices."

From Little Haiti to Stanford
One of those empowered students was Emmanuel Fortune, who credits Schramm and College Summit with helping him carve a path out of Miami's Little Haiti.

"My mom was a single parent with a 3rd-grade education who worked 12-hour days and had 11 of us to care for," says Fortune, now 28. "So I didn't have someone looking over my shoulder and saying, 'How's that college application going?' "

That changed at College Summit.

"These guys would be like, 'Dad says I should apply to Brown.' And I was like, 'What is this color you're talking about?' " recalls Fortune.

Nudged along by College Summit, he enrolled at the University of Florida, earned a degree in English and later continued on to Stanford University and a Master's in education policy.

Today, he is a married father of one and a consultant at Deloitte in McLean, Va.

And LaToya, the girl without the stamp, eventually made it too – to the University of the District of Columbia and a career in early childhood education, says Schramm.

"For me back then, it was, 'How do I get out of this and do more for myself?' College Summit connected me to this wider world," says Fortune. "J.B. built that bridge. He's truly a rock star."