Roses to the Chapel Hill Wine Company, which once again has raised a lot of money to help sick kids being treated at the North Carolina Children's Hospital.

Chapel Hill Wine teamed up with Vine Street Imports and Bordeaux teamed up for this year's Corks for Kids fundraiser, which raised more than $80,000 for the children's hospital.

Owner Todd Wielar founded the event four years ago as a way to try to repay a debt he says can never be fully repaid; the doctors, nurses and other staff at the hospital saved his wife Amy and his daughter Lily Mae -- well-known to recipients of the wine shop's e-mail listserv as his "beautiful redheaded daughter" -- when life-threatening complications arose during delivery.

Corks for Kids is an annual two-day dinner and wine tasting that raises money through ticket sales, sponsors, donations and an auction. This year's event featured dinner with some of Australia and New Zealand's finest winemakers at ACME restaurant in Carrboro and Bin 54 in Chapel Hill, and a big wine-tasting and auction the Friday Center.

"I personally want to say a serious Thank You!! to everyone who helped make this possible," Wielar wrote. "This brings our total to just about a quarter of a million dollars raised for the North Carolina Children's Hospital over the last four years. Corks for Kids is truly a community effort -- with the continued support of our local sponsors, donors, and customers, we proved that even in hard times we can still support a service that is so important to our community and North Carolina families."

There is no more worthy cause than children facing serious illness, injury or other medical conditions. We're grateful to all who participated in this year's Corks for Kids, and especially to Wielar, who believes that a business has a responsibility not only to succeed in terms of its own bottom line but also to contribute its expertise and resources to benefit the wider community.

Roses to Chapel Hill Fire Chief Dan Jones, who took part in a recent workshop to help train fire officers in the nation of Botswawna.

The program was the first civil-to-civil exchange of the State Partnership for Peace Program between Botswana and North Carolina. Jones and North Carolina National Guard master sergeant Robert Borgesi (a former Chapel Hill Fire Department captain) conducted the workshop for 37 fire officers from around Botswana and the Botswana Defense Force Fire Brigades.

The attendees at the workshop took the first steps in forming a Botswana Fire Protection Authority to enable all fire officers in the country to work together in improving the delivery of emergency services to the citizens of Botswana.

Why should local fire officials bother working together with their counterparts in such a faraway land? Because in the world of the 21st century no land is truly very far away. All nations are neighbors. Building partnerships, lending a helping hand and forming positive relationships across borders are the stuff of good will, cooperation and understanding.

Roses to Chapel Hill's Tim O'Brien, who reminds us that so much depends on how you look at things.

O'Brien is a photographer, and a very good one. He is also legally blind.

Most of us wouldn't think to put those two things together. Photography is a quintessentially visual medium, after all; a photograph doesn't even have the tactile quality that, say, an oil painting does.

O'Brien, though, has never considered his condition -- a form of macular degeneration -- a handicap. His mother, he says, always told him it was a challenge, not a disability, and he has taken her words to heart.

Being visually impaired means he goes about shooting photos somewhat differently than a normally sighted photographer; before she takes any shots, he makes his way around the environment in which he is shooting, familiarizing himself with the layout, the light sources and so on. After he's taken his photos, he uses computer software to illuminate and blow up the images to a size that allows him to work on them.

O'Brien was surprised to find that he wasn't "the only visually impaired person crazy enough to delve into photography." Turns out there are quite a few; a number of them now contribute to the Web site he launched, www.blindphotographers.org.