A Leeds mum and dad who saved their son’s life by each donating a kidney discuss how they became involved with and now run Homeless Hampers, an organisation providing essentials to those less fortunate in the city.
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00:00 Leeds parents Tina and Aki Suryavansi voluntarily manage Homeless Hampers and together with
00:06 a team of volunteers they support Yorkshire's homeless by providing essential supplies,
00:11 direction and advice. As well as being heroes to the homeless, they're also heroes at
00:16 home as they have both donated a kidney to their son Akash, saving his life twice. We
00:21 can now meet them with Homeless Hampers trustee Chris Benson.
00:25 The Stemper started up in 2015. We actually joined as volunteers ourselves and we just
00:32 saw a need. We'd seen individual people just sitting on street corners and people would
00:39 just walk by, pass them and all the rest of it. We put some meals together, a flask of
00:46 coffee and one bag of clothes and we just walked around the city centre. There were
00:52 about four or five of us. From feeding 15 people a night, we are now seeing up to 130,
00:59 137 people in our food queues at the moment. Every Sunday we put a shout out through the
01:07 week of volunteers and then obviously they respond and then they meet us here. And the
01:13 food that's been delivered or donated, Max's Spencer's, Waitrose, Tesco's, Sainsbury's,
01:19 Gregg's, local restaurants like Singh's and Punjabi Heaven, they actually provide
01:24 regular food to us. They come to us, they're mostly very, very polite, very thankful. We
01:30 have a bit of a laugh with them. It's not a miserable thing, it's an uplifting experience
01:37 really. Yeah, and the reaction's great and I absolutely love doing it. We've got twins
01:43 and our son was born with renal failure, kidney failure. We were going to lose him but fortunately
01:51 in 2003 I was able to donate my kidney to him. But back in 2015 we found ourselves in
01:58 a bit of a dark place again because that kidney failed. A week before I was supposed to give
02:03 my kidney to Akash, he actually had a double brain haemorrhage. Ended up in a coma for
02:07 about 10 days. We do actually think that it was his twin sister that brought him back
02:11 out. She was there with him every day talking to him and he woke up with her in front of
02:15 him. On the 27th of November 2015 I was able to give my kidney to Akash and save his life
02:21 again. And now he's 25, enjoying life. We were in a bit of a, I don't know, a place
02:28 we didn't want to feel sorry for ourselves but the way we look at life is there's always
02:33 somebody worse off than you. So we got involved in Homeless Hampers and it actually helped
02:40 us deal with whatever we were dealing with. Our thing is we just want to give back. We're
02:47 grateful for life, we're grateful for our son's life and that's why we do Homeless
02:52 Hampers. And the fact that we were both able to give Akash a kidney each, that was a big
02:57 step that we wanted to give something back from the heart. And that's why we do this
03:02 with so much passion.