‘Loving my neighbour as myself’
Hamilton man donates his kidney to his friend: a newcomer to Canada
HAMILTON— Their story began with a knock at the door and a gift of bottled water.
It has become about so much more — a 65-year-old Afghan man and a 29-year-old Canadian man sharing meals, religion, culture, respect and now, almost unbelievably, a kidney.
On an August day in 2012, Ghulam Akbar Momand and 18 of his family members moved into a downtown highrise, only to find their three units without water or electricity due to a building emergency.
It was not an ideal welcome to Canada for the Afghan family, who recently arrived in Hamilton via Pakistan.
That same day, neighbour Andy Clutton made his way through the 16-storey building along with a group of other residents, distributing water bottles to help those who couldn’t make it out of their units.
Going door-to-door, Clutton met Momand — who he calls “Dr. Akbar” — along with the rest of his family living in the building, which included nine children.
It was the start of a beautiful friendship between the two men born more than three decades apart in different countries with different skin colours.
“From that day, we make our friendship,” Momand said about Clutton. “A friend who gives ... half of life to you — I find this friend.”
The story of how the two men went from “friends to donors” grew out of their shared medical experience, explains Clutton, who is recovering well after donating one of his kidneys to Momand three weeks ago. Momand, who was chief and served as doctor in his village of Mangwal, Afghanistan, would routinely perform procedures like circumcisions and pull teeth.
Clutton, a father of three, works as a palliative-care nurse in Grimsby. “Even though (Momand’s) English was very poor then, there were many terms in Latin through medical terminology that we could tell stories about, laugh about and learn from each other on,” Clutton said.
Clutton’s shift work also meant the two could have tea often. Through these meetings, Clutton learned of Momand’s medical conditions, including slowly deteriorating kidneys that led to him being on dialysis for more than three years.
In 2015, the father of 10 had a heart operation. The stress of the surgery caused his kidney function to rapidly decrease.
As Momand’s health contin- ued to decline, the family looked into whether one of his children could be a living kidney donor, but none were eligible because both Momand and his wife have diabetes, Clutton said.
So, the family approached Clutton and another friend in the building, Varun Rana, for help explaining their situation to other Canadians.
Not knowing what being a kidney donor involved, Rana and Clutton began exploring basic questions, such as eligibility and the length of the process.
“Initially, just to find out the facts, but kind of setting our hearts to walking through this door until the door was closed,” Clutton said.
Several years ago, Clutton, his wife, Shannon, and a group of their friends — including Rana and his wife Amelia — moved into a nearby neighbourhood purposefully to serve immigrants and refugees.
“Varun and I were part of a team that would try to use our spare time to help the neighbourhood,” he said.
They are part of a small movement called MoveIn, in which Christians move into lowincome, high-density communities with large newcomer populations to follow Jesus’ example.
“We’ve always explained ourselves in this neighbourhood as trying to imitate the life of Jesus in service to others,” said Clutton, who grew up in the Philippines and went to high school in Toronto.
After looking into living donation, Rana and Clutton both decided to start the process themselves. Both men were eventually approved, but because Rana did not have the right blood type, he waited on an exchange program and was never matched despite getting the green light first, Clutton said.
It took until January 2018, but Clutton was cleared and given a surgery date of May 30.
But five days before the scheduled surgery, Momand came down with pneumonia. He was too sick for the operation.
The wait continued — this time, for another six months while Momand got healthy and was cleared for surgery again. Finally, on Nov. 7, it happened. Four days later, Clutton was discharged, and Momand spent five days in the hospital.
“We’re slowly improving each day,” Clutton said, noting last Friday was the first day he could wear jeans. Momand can’t say enough about the care he received while he was sick, including when he would undergo dialysis every other day.
“I’m really happy from every doctor, every nurse,” he said. “They work with me kindly, friendly.”
For Clutton, his decision to donate stems from a “spiritual conviction” to live life like Jesus.
“It was more than just a physical need that I felt like, ‘that would be cool, I could do that,’ ” he said. “It’s not that simple.”
There was something deeper — otherwise, with young children and such a drawn out donation process, he would have given up a long time ago.
Clutton said he felt like God was “opening these doors into developing this friendship right from the get-go.”
“Not just did we visit for tea every day or every third day, but we, as a group of Christians, were constantly praying for Dr. Akbar and his family,” and vice versa, he added.
Some who hear their story are intrigued by how two neighbours ever got to this point, while others struggle to imagine themselves in that position.
When Asghar tells the story of how his friend gave his dad a kidney, customers at his supermarket asked to see a photo, and he would show them one of the two men side-by-side wearing hospital gowns.
“When I show the picture, a lot of people say, ‘Unbelievable.’ They close their eyes,” Asghar said.
Some are struck by the age, the colours of their skin, their religion.
“I say, ‘Friendship is friendship,’ ” Asghar said.