Faletau on mission for cousin’s life-saving treatment

WALES and Lions No.8 Taulupe Faletau has begun a £50,000 fundraising mission so his cousin can have life-saving kidney treatment.

His relative Amanaki suffered kidney failure in 2015 and is undergoing dialysis in New Zealand. However because the 21-year-old was born in Tonga – like his rugby-playing cousin – he’s not a resident of New Zealand and his treatment is costing £3,100 per month.

Amanaki is in debt to the health board and has been advised to pay off some of that debt to help his application to become a permanent New Zealand resident.

As a permanent resident the essential treatment would be free and he could be on the waiting list for a kidney transplant.

Faletau, who has contributed £5,000 to the cause, wants to raise the sum as he fears his cousin could be deported and would die without dialysis.

England prop Mako Vunipola, who is also a cousin of Faletau, has donated to the GoFundMe page set up by Taulupe as have Welsh internationals Hallam Amos and Cory Hill, who played with the back-rower when he was with the Dragons.

Faletau’s Bath team-mates – England internationals Anthony Watson and Charlie Ewels – have helped swell the fund to close on £13,500 while Dragons chairman David Buttress and Leigh Halfpenny’s girlfriend Jess Tumelty are also among the contributors.

Faletau said Tonga does not have a dialysis centre because the cost of maintaining it would be 20% of the South Pacific nation’s health budget, with 1% of its 108,000 residents benefitting from it. “While this is understandable it is heartbreaking for the 1% who desperately need treatment,” he said on a GoFundMe page.

“Without dialysis a kidney failure patient would likely die within a few weeks. Being in NZ and receiving dialysis is his only hope of survival and without it, [he] wouldn’t be here today,” Faletau added.

“As a family and a community we have raised some funds to help with this over the past three years but most of his treatment has been at the mercy of the health board and he has now become in debt with them. To say the least it has been a very hard, sometimes helpless three years for Amanaki and his mother Lia, who have been separated from the rest of their family who are still in Tonga, trying to deal with mounting debt and worrying about the application. If their application is denied and Amanaki is deported to Tonga it would be less than a matter of weeks before his illness took his life.”