Imtiaz Sooliman – Chairman of Gift of the Givers Part 1

Africa prime brought to you by Jamison's select reserve.

He has traversed war zone, survived prejudice, and proves

that Africa can make a positive contribution to mankind's

condition. In that time, he has gone on to save yet more lives

across 33 countries. He's generously given relief aid to.

He's Dr mt siliman, founder and chairman of Africa's largest

relief aid organization, gift of the giveth. And he joins us now in

studio. Thank you so much for joining us. And you have just come

back from the DRC. Do you tell us what you were doing there? I came

back from the Republic of Congo. Yes, people confuse the two. But

the Republic of Congo is across the river from DRC. We were

responding to a crisis. An explosion took place in a

residential area. There was an ammunition depot within the

residential area. And on Sunday, the fourth of March, an explosion

took they said it was a short fuse once some of the weapons caught on

fire, and slowly, explosion after explosion followed when we were

there on the ninth of March, for the first time, you would swear

that this an earthquake the scale of nine on the scale, hit this

area because there was just nothing standing. Everything was

destroyed. It just showed how violent, how powerful, and how

strong these weapons were, or dissemination was. 5000 homes

destroyed, a school, a church, the police station, everything inside

completely flattened. The official count is 252. People dead to be

probably more than 500 have died now, operating in 33 countries,

how do you prioritize where you're needed the most? Well, most of

these are one off responses, except in Somalia, we're there for

quite some time now. In Malawi, we have a permanent office. And of

course, in South Africa, we have four permanent offices. We

respond. We work in South Africa all the time. But on the

international disasters, it's given the magnitude of the

disaster makes us decide where to go. For example, the tsunami in

2004 was huge. It affected 13 countries. There was no need to

wait to see what's to see what's to be done. Obviously, the whole

world could not respond, and were never enough. The scale of the

destruction, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 was huge. The famine

in Somalia, in Rome in last year 2010 the famine in Asia in 2005

the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 so those are the type of crisis

where the huge, and you know, you require response. You need to do

that all on the flip side, the same time that Haiti got hit, a

few weeks later, Chile got hit by an earthquake, and the chile

government said, We don't want any international assistance, and they

managed on their own. A few years earlier, Mozambique got hit by a

cyclone, and they said, We're quite fine. We can manage on our

own. We don't need assistance. One of the things that I found

actually quite interesting is that you say to be the largest

organization of your kind, operating on the African continent

of African origin. But then you're not just operating on the African

continent. You've mentioned so many other countries that you work

on outside of the continent. And one of the things that I found was

really interesting when we're doing, when I was reading up on

you, was that, you know, when you go into some of these countries,

people are saying, you know, have you come for aid? What do you want

from us? You know, when they hear that you're from Africa, and then

you go in and you say, no, actually, we coming to give you

assistance. Just how has that been? You know, changing the

stereotypes and, you know, the perceptions that people have of

our continent, there's, there's two stories, or basically three

stories, you know, to talk about. One was very sad. You know, when

it was I met an Alawi ambassador to the United Nations. He was an

ambassador many years ago, and he told me, one day, he said, You

know what? I need to tell you a story. He said, I was in Europe

many years ago, and there was a big conference discussing issues

in the world, and there were very few African diplomats in that

conference, and we felt very shy because we were outnumbered. And

he said, After three days, it struck him, and it struck the

other diplomats, that the word Africa or the name of any African

country, was not mentioned once in those three days, they spoke about

all the other countries and the other continents and the other

parts of the world. So the third day, said, I felt a bit shy, I

felt a bit scared, but I got brave enough to ask the convener of the

conference, my friend, why was Africa or one of the countries not

mentioned once. So he said, You know what answer he gave me? He

said, Africa is not relevant. And when I heard that, I said, You

know what? One day we want to make this continent relevant. In 2005

we walked into Pakistan. We came again for earthquake response. And

there were Western organizations there who saw us. They were they

were confused. Because, I mean, our teams, it's a rainbow nation,

you know, it's black, white, Indian colored, Hindu, Muslim mix.

So they don't really know which country you come from. And when I

said, we're from Africa, you're from Africa, what did you come

here to fetch? I said, What do you mean? What did you come here to

fetch? He said, You guys are always asking with the begging

bowl, always wanting things. So I said, No, we came here to help.

And let me tell you something, my friend, we've got the most highly

skilled medical team in the world, and not any organization yet today

will match us. And that's what the Pakistan government said. And we

were the only team given a whole hospital that was shutting down,

and we converted it in 24 hours to a 400 bed emergency hospital. And

to me, the real you know.

The headline came in 2010

when we send the team to Haiti, and when they got there, the

search and rescue team, any medical team. And it is the first

time in the history of the African continent, in the history of the

world, that a team from Africa, a search and rescue team from

Africa, found a person alive in the rubble in any earthquake in

any part of the world, we made history and let us focus the

film's life on many networks all over the world. But to me, the

highlight was when, again, Western teams came to the area to 80 and

they looked at the area and they said, We cannot work here.

Everything is destroyed. So the South African team stepped forward

and they said, We can work under any circumstances. And to the

credit of those Western teams, they told the people in Port au

Prince that if you want help, go to the Dream Team. And the deemed

Dream Team is from South Africa. Wow. What an amazing story. What I

would like to ask you, you've pointed so many things I would I

would really like for us to delve into. You've pointed on quite a

few issues there, but one of the things in there, you were talking

about how highly skilled your team is, how do you attract these

skills to be able to work? I would imagine that when they're working

with you, they're not getting paid the kind of monies they would get

paid if they were working in the private sector. For instance, you

know, it is a general statement that Africa has got a heart. It's

got a soul. It's got the wounded spirit. Across the continent.

These are medical doctors who come from expensive clinics, some of

them, maybe even 30 to 40,000 Rand a day. You know, not only do they

give up their time, they may have to stay in an open air in tent,

but no sanitation facilities, no ablution, you know, no bathrooms.

And they have to come from that five styles to a situation like

that. And they come not once. They come over and over again, because

they have this passion to work. We have a core team, a core team of

different specialties. Most of the specialties are related to trauma,

earthquake, volcano, war, the disaster, destruction is the same.

You need orthopedic surgeons, general surgeons, emergencies,

medicine specialists, anesthetists, ICU nurses, theater.

Nurses, those what you need. We have a core team in a case like

Somalia, where there's famine, you need pediatricians, dieticians,

people specializing in primary health care. So we have different

categories of people, and we've got this core group, but we make

an announcement. We even have a database. People say, You know

what, I've seen you on TV. Can I come next time this kind of story?

We want to go and so we build a list, but whilst we have the list,

we still open it out to the public. And it just so happens

that people will call in and every time we have a new three or four

new ones over the old ones. And that's how you develop a network

of people. Another thing that I found really interesting was that

your team seems to be really on the edge of innovation. I mean,

when people say, but who are you? Where are you coming from? And

you're coming from the African continent and not really giving

you the accolades that you deserve at the time when you go into a

place. I mean, when it comes to Bosnia, for instance, you say, to

be, to have been the first organization to build a mobile

hospital in that particular area, have you been able to replicate

that model into other places that need it? It wasn't necessary at

that time. You know, first of all, that hospital is the world first.

And again, it was designed with South African technology in

Africa, in the south of Africa in 1993 it's a world first. And after

today, nobody has replicated that hospital, that model, to replicate

it. Today, the cost factor is horrendous, because that time it

was 280 to the dollar. Now it's $800

and that's only the currency exchange. But in terms of labor

costs, shipping fuel, you know, transport manpower, it's far too

expensive to do that. We have another concept. Initially. We

started off as a response teams, taking 10s blanket and food. Then

we started taking primary health care teams, and we started taking

medicine simple things. Now we take fully fetch theater teams.

Then we've been taking automatic and surgical instruments. We are

now looking at field hospitals in terms of lightweight tents. In

Somalia, we put up a theater in one hour. We took our own theater

tables, own esthetic machine on oxygen. We were the only team in

the whole country that had oxygen, no hospital, no facility, no

organization, even medical organizations had no oxygen in

Somalia only, we added and we look at systems, how to be efficient,

but what lightweight, practical, portable items, and we have

regular meetings building up these kind of things to take, what to

respond. So the hospital was not replicated. There was no need to

replicate it, because now it becomes very cumbersome to move in

in that kind of course, I needed it, but now it is faster to take

lightweight things to respond when you're talking about all of this.

I mean, this is a lot of money that goes into this. I mean, under

I would imagine that you have people donors that come in. How do

you fund all these operations? It's very strange. We don't look

for money, right? We don't make proposals, we don't call people,

we don't phone, we announce. We don't advertise. When I say we

don't advertise, it's not paid. We have free coverage from the media,

and because we have such a track record, because the media has

traveled with us, people can see we're very transparent. They can

see how the money is being spent. They can see how people are

benefiting. They can hear from the people on the other side what

they're saying about what we're doing on the other side, and they

can see all that, and even in the country, everywhere we go, people

speak about what we do. So because of that, you.

Five regular donors saying, You know what, here's money. Do what

you like. And you have a specific project where people would say,

look, and these are not big companies. These are very ordinary

people. For Somalia, for instance, people very school, the small

people who are poor. I mean, in an informal settlement, people

collected 42,000 Rand in an informal settlement when the kids

in the school don't have food to eat themselves in another area at

all age home, where people have dinners, you know, once a year a

function, they said, this year, no dinner. We don't want the dinner.

People in Somalia needed more than us. That's the Ubud sport that I'm

talking about, not only among doctors, but amongst all the

people of Africa and people in the country poor people said, Look, we

are refugees ourselves, but we can identify being with what a refugee

is like, moving out from the south, coming to the north,

looking for food and looking for ours. We haven't got much, but

whatever we have, we will give you. And the volume increased like

that. We spent 70 million Rand on Somalia. It has been our biggest

project to date, in our history, and it happened in just in just

over two months, because South Africans responded in such a

manner because of the compassion I want to talk a little bit about

Somalia because one of the things about Somalia is, if you're

talking about transitional government in that it's been that

way for a really long time. You've got people that are living in

Somalia leaving that country because they feel it's not safe

and looking for opportunities elsewhere. People who are not in

Somalia afraid to go to that country, and yet you're operating

there. You say it's your biggest project and gift of the givers,

when it comes to building those relationships, how do you operate

in a place like Somalia, in any in any kind of project? It is about

attitude. You have to go in to say, You know what? I'm not going

as a politician. I'm going as a humanitarian. As a humanitarian,

you transcend all politics. You don't take sides. You don't say

who's right, who is wrong, because all you want to do is get to the

recipient of aid, because the person on the other side doesn't

want to know which government sent you, which political party you

belong to, how you came, which side are you taking? All you want

to know is, can you save the life of my child, and what are you

going to do about that? My husband is hungry? Can you give him some

food? My child hasn't had milk for five weeks. Have you got something

for that? That's all they're interested in. So when you go in,

it's important for the government or the warring parties, if they

are warring parties like in Somalia, no, you know what? These

guys have got no agenda. They're not taking sides with us. They

just want to go to our people. And that's exactly what we did. Some

of your some of the aid that you take to Somalia goes via the sea.

We do know that one of the issues that has has been, you know, and

not just stuff that's going to Somalia, but you know, just when

it comes to trade, for instance, that Somali waters that are

anywhere near, near that place have been, you know, really,

really dogged by Somali pirates. How have you been able to sidestep

that's the catch. Somali pirates are taking things not going to

Somalia. They're not attracting things going into Somalia. And

that's what we figured out once we were there. We've sent in my ship,

132 containers of aid already, and it has been warmly received by all

parties, meaning not all parties are benefiting, but the Al

Shabaab, the transitional government, the the United Nations

agencies, the Amazon forces, the different tribes, the different

warlords, the people on the ground. All know this is gifts of

the given stuff, and it is given across the board. We don't say,

I'll excuse me, Which kind do you belong to before we give you aid?

Who do you which side you take? We go to a camp. Actually, that was a

story on its own. After 48 hours in Somalia, the different members

of the committee, the Committee on Social relief, came to the

governor of the bronze and asked, Who are these people? They just

walked through the airport, got into the car, went to a camp, set

up a hospital and set up a clinic and started treating people.

Nobody came to us, and they just started distributing things

themselves without any going through government. So the

government asked them, What is wrong with that? He said, I wish

every agency in our history were like them. There's no politics,

there's no side taking, and everybody benefits

unconditionally. Thank you so much. Well, we are going to take a

short break, Dr Sullivan, because we do want to talk a little bit

about the man and behind this fantastic organization or the work

you're doing, we're going to go to a short break and we'll come back

and dive into that.