Santa Fe woman to answer another's prayer with kidney donation

Santa Fe New Mexican | Julie Ann Grimm
Photo: Julie Chambers, 43, plays with her children, 19-month-old Teo Chambers Arevalo and 11-year-old Caitlin Skibyak, at home Wednesday. Chambers says she wants to be a role model for her children and to teach them the value of life. - Jane Phillips/The New Mexican

People do it all the time for their siblings, their spouses and their best friends. To donate your kidney to a complete stranger is a much rarer story.

For Julie Chambers, the decision to give up a vital organ for a woman she’d never met was a choice that came naturally, she said.

This past April, Chambers scanned the page of a church newsletter that a friend had left in her office at the state Environment Department. She was thinking of visiting The United Church of Santa Fe and wanted to learn a little more about it.

“Prayers of hope and healing” was the title of a long list of people in need. A father had died, a knee surgery had taken place and someone had suffered a stroke.
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