Bruce L. Braley: “I want to thank you. One of the things that we rarely talk about is the human faces that Congressman Kagen was good…”

“I want to thank you. One of the things that we rarely talk about is the human faces that Congressman Kagen was good enough to share with us from our district. And I want to share a personal experience from my own life, and I think it illustrates the importance of what we are talking about here today. About 15 years ago when my wife and I had our three children, who were all young and in school, my wife and I got involved through our church in a mentoring program at a city center school in Waterloo, Iowa where we lived. As a result of that, I started mentoring a young fourth grade student named DeUndre, and then I got involved in Big Brothers, Big Sisters as an outreach of that program and spent a lot of time with him and his family. When he was in sixth grade, DeUndre started complaining of pain in his abdominal area, and he ended up going to the hospital and they diagnosed him with acute large cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. They did surgery to remove the tumor, and then he spent about 6 weeks undergoing chemotherapy in the pediatric oncology unit at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. And I was faced with a choice, because he had nobody in his family who could go with him and be there when he was going through that ordeal. And I made a decision after speaking to my wife that it was going to be me who was there for him.”