And so basically for every church that we can take this information to, it makes for
a better opportunity to spread the word about kidney disease how people can detect, prevent
and manage kidney disease. In 78 years of the history of our family reunion, never before
had we focused on health. That was the first time. I was elected president in 2008, we
have many, many people in our family that have obesity, that have high blood pressure—some
people have diabetes. However, I didn’t find anyone in the family during the time
that we hosted the American Kidney Fund—I didn’t find anyone that had kidney disease
but we did find several people that had high blood pressure, that were really at high risk
for this. So basically those people said to me “I’m really happy that you’re letting
us know and providing this material because we could have had a stroke or we could’ve
had diabetes or we could have had kidney disease.” People really were very responsive they were
very happy that they received this information. I had told Dean originally it was 83—it
was really 81 people when I went back and looked at the numbers but that was a success
story according to the American Kidney Fund because like I said there were many young
people there that were unable to be tested there were several older people there that
were unable to be tested. So if you look at the numbers it actually was a success story
for us to be able to have 81 people there to get tested. The one thing I’m glad about
is that we didn’t just provide this information to the family and just say okay we’ll do
this for one year and it’s over. What we did was we said that every year we will focus
on health. Not just kidney disease, we’ll focus on heart disease we’ll focus on something
that will make our family want to live longer.