The Government Lit Up Green for Organ Donation: The Light Is the Easy Part, the Family Conversation Is the Hard One

For two evenings in a row, the Government building and landmarks in Skopje, Prilep, Struga, Veles, Tetovo, Kavadarci and other towns glowed green. The occasion was European Day for Organ, Tissue and Cell Donation, and according to the Ministry of Health almost every municipality joined the initiative.

Health Minister Sašo Klekovski thanked the donors and their families, the living donors and the transplant teams. "Behind every transplant there are people who, in the hardest moment, chose to think of someone else," he said. The most important sentence in his message, though, was not about the lights: "Organ donation starts with a conversation. Talk to your family, tell them your decision, so they don't have to decide for you."

That is the heart of it. The decision to donate often falls on a family that is learning, in that very hour, that it has lost someone. If it has never been talked about, the answer in a hospital corridor can easily be "no" - not out of malice, but out of shock and uncertainty.

Green light on the facades is a nice, easy gesture. The harder part is finding out how many people are waiting for an organ, how many transplants from deceased donors have been done this year, and what the system is doing to make that number grow. Those numbers, not the facades, will show whether the message actually reached families.