Donor dads are meeting in Toronto

Two fathers who live worlds apart — one in the West Bank, the other in California — are meeting in Toronto for the first time this weekend.

The lives of Ismael Khatib, 45, a mechanic, and Reg Green, 82, a journalist, couldn’t be more different. And yet they are bound by a life-altering experience. They both lost their young sons to a gunman’s bullets. And they both allowed their dying children’s organs and tissue to be harvested for transplants.

As a result of two violent deaths — and the generosity of two grieving families — 11 lives were saved. Another two people regained their sight.

Khatib and Green are coming here for a 10-day mission to encourage Canadians to sign donor cards. At a more personal level, they are making the long trek to Canada to honour Ahmed, who was 11 when he died in 2005, and Nicholas, who was 7 when his life ended in 1994.

Their schedule will include a visit to Toronto General Hospital, walks in memory of the boys and organ and tissue donation drives in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal from Oct. 29 to Nov. 7. The donor dads may take in a Maple Leaf game.

On Monday, with the support of MPPs from all parties, Conservative Frank Klees will introduce a bill to create an alert system, much like the Amber Alert, for children under 18 in urgent need of an organ or tissue transplant.

In a recent telephone interview with the Star, Green spoke enthusiastically about his meeting with Khatib. “There is a common thread of giving across a barrier in both his case and ours,” says Green.

The two men have conversed on Skype. Khatib, in a telephone interview from the West Bank, said the face-to-face meeting will bring a measure of good out of tragedy. “Meeting him will increase my conviction that what I did was right,” Khatib said through an interpreter.

Canada is the venue for Green and Kahtib’s first meeting because of the efforts of George Marcello, 56, who received liver transplants in 1995 and 2005. His health challenges have led him to devote himself full-time to fundraising and public-awareness campaigns.

It is Marcello who felt that bringing Green and Khatib to Canada would highlight the role that donors can play and go a long way to improving the dismal sign-up rate in Ontario. A former fitness trainer, he has organized walks through Ontario and across Canada through Step by Step, the charity he runs from his modest home in Little Italy that his parents left him and his siblings. His Torch of Life was blessed by Pope John Paul II in 2001 and has now been carried by children in rallies throughout Canada, the U.S. and Italy.

The visits of the two men are being made possible with help from the National Congress of Italian Canadians, the Canadian Peres Centre for Peace, Step by Step, Iman Ali Roukieh of the Muslim Girls School and several others, including Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Palestinian doctor whose three daughters and a niece were killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli shelling.

Here are the stories of Nicholas and Ahmed.

Nicholas Green died on Oct. 1, 1994. Seven-year-old Nicholas, his parents, Reg and Maggie, and his sister, Eleanor, 4, were on a European holiday that had started in Switzerland a week before.

Late one night, as they drove down the highway from Naples to Sicily, a car raced up beside them. The two occupants shouted and gestured for Green to pull over. Sensing danger, he accelerated.

“The two cars raced beside each other,” Green said in a recent conversation from his home in La Canada, California. “Then there was a tremendous explosion and the window behind the driver’s window, where the two kids were sleeping, was blown in. A moment later the driver’s window was blown in.”

The car dropped back and disappeared.

Reg and Maggie, in the front seat, were frantic. Maggie looked back; both children seemed to be asleep. Reg sped down the road hoping to get help. About 15 kilometres along they came upon police and ambulances at another accident scene. Reg pulled over, and the extent of Nicholas’s injury became evident.

“When I opened the car door, the interior light came on and Nicholas didn’t move.” He looked closer and saw that the boy’s tongue was sticking out unnaturally. “I had been a journalist long enough to know that was a very bad sign.”

He had been shot in the base of the brain.

Two days later, the doctors told Reg and Maggie that they couldn’t save Nicholas. He was brain dead.

It was Maggie who asked doctors whether organs and tissue from their “magical little child” could be used for transplant.

Reg recreates that terrible moment: “I remember thinking, ‘How are we going to get through the rest of our lives without him?’ But then suddenly there was this possibility that somebody could benefit from this. There was that sense that, although he didn’t need that body any more there were a lot of people out there who desperately needed what that body could give.”