Larry White planned the initiative as a way of honoring the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is recognized as a national holiday on the third Monday of January each year. It was Dr. King, a champion of civil rights and desegregation, who said, "Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve," and Larry White believes that this is the sentiment driving the National Marrow Donor Program.

Congress recognized the spirit of Dr. King in 1994, when it passed the King Holiday and Service Act of 1994. Since then, the Corporation for National and Community Service has partnered with the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, to transform the King Holiday into a day of service to build local communities.

Anita Gonzales, a Recruitment Specialist for NMDP, says adding one volunteer to the NMDP database can potentially save another person's life, so Customs success in adding 20 people to the program's database - a group that includes minority volunteers - affords her a very special pleasure. The demand for life-saving marrow transplants is disproportionately high for minorities, because minority volunteers are more difficult to recruit. Ninety percent of transplant matches are between people of the same racial or ethnic group. That means that although white patients have a 70 percent chance of finding a suitable match, most minority groups have less than a 50 percent chance.

Ms. Gonzales says that if more people realized that the average person only has a 30 percent chance of finding a donor match in their family, they would probably be much more inclined to register as a potential donor with NMDP.

The process of registering with NMDP usually takes about 10 minutes; the volunteer completes a short questionnaire and a small amount of blood is drawn. What most people don't know is that only a small percentage of volunteers are ever asked to donate their marrow. In fact, you're as likely to be tapped as a donor as you are to win the lottery - the odds are roughly the same, 1 in 40 million.

NMDP facilitates about 130 marrow transplants each month, and about 40 percent of these transplants involve a patient or donor from outside the United States. Donors who do agree to contribute bone marrow undergo a 90-minute surgical procedure during which physicians use a syringe to remove donor marrow from a site behind the pelvic bone. Some donors may experience bone pain for several days to a few weeks after undergoing the procedure, but the knowledge that they may have given someone else the gift of life usually makes the discomfort easier to handle.

"At this time of heightened alert, I am pleased that our Customs folks have made this a 'day on' instead of a 'day off' and found the time to give back to the global community. Generosity like this is living testament to the spirit of one of our greatest Americans, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," says Linda Lynn Batts, Special Assistant to the Commissioner (EEO).