Imtiaz Sooliman – Chairman of Gift of the Givers Part 1
AI: Summary ©
The devastating impact of recent measurements on the continent, including homes, schools, and public places, is highlighted. The success of Pakistan's efforts in finding missing people in a crash in Nigeria is also discussed. The speakers emphasize the importance of responding to these events and global aid, as well as the need for lightweight items to respond to operations. They also discuss the development of a network of people to develop hospital and care workers in countries such as Bosnia, Cambodia, and Nigeria, and the importance of collaboration and engagement in building relationships. The speakers briefly mention a project called a man and his work, and emphasize the importance of building relationships and not taking sides in government projects.
AI: Summary ©
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.