Imtiaz Sooliman – Chairman of Gift of the Givers Part 2

A lotto or, you know, or anybody else in Haiti, I don't get

emotionally attached to that person the moment you do that,

finish its curtains for you, because you'll break down, you

won't be able to function. You'll just keep crying all the time. And

that happened to some of my teams. They actually broke down after

four or five days. They got too emotionally attached. And you

should not allow that to happen. And what do you do for your team?

So when that happens, and they do fall, when they do break down, and

they do, you know, cry or see this. I mean, I would imagine, if

I were there, I would probably be one of those people that would be

completely distraught and not, probably not be able to work,

because I would just be so broken by what was happening. How do you

how do you deal with that in the field? We talk, we discuss it in

groups. But of course, we don't do the counseling there. When they

come back, they have opportunity for trauma counseling, which we

provide, but before we take them, people think I'm crazy. I tell

medical personnel, I tell doctors, I tell paramedics. I said, I talk

to those who are involved in accidents, and they see all the

type of injuries coming back. I tell them, when you go there, make

sure you don't become squeamish, and they must be thinking, this is

manmade. We medicals all the time. We do this all the time. I said,

the difference is you see that in a controlled environment, you see

one car, two bodies, three injured people. When you go to an

earthquake, you see 10s of 1000s of injured people, total

destruction, women and women, children running the street were

normally 12, for example, in the church, when they went to do clean

up and to assist when the child came, they had to amputate the

child of the hand of the child of the hand of the child who was

already amputated before, and suddenly, before, they messed it

up. Now they had to cut more. When they finished, they told the

child, go home now. And the child looked at them and asked, What

home? There is no home. So they said, All right, go to your

parents or your grandparents. And the child said, what parents and

what grandparents? There is nobody. I am alone. And they just

broke down. And when that happened, how do you I'm sitting

here, I'm thinking, I don't even know what question to ask you

next, because my brain's just gotten into a freeze. How do you

deal with that? How do you then at that moment? Because there's no

time for them to come back and then counsel them at that moment,

what do you do? There is no counseling at acute stage. It's

just too traumatic. You know what? You take the guys and tell me,

have a breather, set aside, and in the evening, the teams talk among

themselves. I'm talking about my teams. I'm not talking about the

other people in that acute phase. You can't do counseling. People

are worried, where's my father when I'm going to eat? Can I get

medical service? What am I going to do about my house? They are

worried about all those things. Counseling won't work there. They

won't be interested in what you're saying. That's a phase in stage.

Later, exactly right now, I went to Congo on the fifth on Ninth of

March. I went back last week this weekend. Now the next phase is

counseling. They've asked us for counseling, for trauma counselors,

and we putting together a team that will leave on the 29th of

April. But when did this thing happen? On the fifth of March? Can

you see the time span? Because there's total flux between camps.

One day in this camp, then you're in the next camp, then you moving

around, then you're looking for your house, then you're looking

for your son or your child. 75 children are missing. You know,

they found 28 in different camps. So if you are focusing on that

kind of stuff, you can't focus on counseling, and you don't have to

have continuity. So counseling has to be done at a later stage. Like

in Pakistan, we send in spinal rehab teams after the initial

phase for orthopedic injuries and spinal injuries. So there are

phases in what you do and how you do it. I want to talk a little bit

about education. That's something that you're very passionate about.

And it seems as though I was reading something where your

organization had donated about 1.3 million to the University of

KwaZulu, if I'm correct, just talk to us a little bit about about

what you would like to see give to the givers involved in when it

comes to education. Because I know with this particular donation that

you gave you gave it was primarily for the agriculture schools in

that in that university Africa needs to develop it needs to

develop skills. It needs education and needs agriculture. 70% of the

economy of this continent is dependent on agriculture. We don't

need high tech stuff because we import high tech machines. Nobody

knows how to fix it. Nobody knows how to repair it. We need simple

involvement in agriculture, and we wanted to reactivate the Faculty

of Agriculture, get students interested. Because the last few

years, agriculture is not fashionable. It's something done

by the past, by people now they say Africana farmers, apartheid

people need agriculture. They have that kind of mentality, but we

need agriculture in Africa, so we gave them a grant to stimulate and

bring kids back. But besides that, we do bursaries. We started in 97

to 20,000 Rand bursaries. We now do 6 million Rand a year on

bursaries, because if kids are not educated, they cannot make

progress. Education is a means of empowerment. People become

entrepreneurs. They develop we have skills, and each skill person

creates jobs for other people. And we even started something else, a

special problem we may not have time to talk about this now, a

computer program called jumpstart, where we give three kids in

school, in standard grade news, all system like grade 10, grade 11

and grade 12, where we teach them, you know, how to give them a logo,

the value of branding, the value of marketing, how they can promote

themselves. We give them a web page, Blender heads, business

cards, and we just started this pilot program last year in

December alone, one of those kids we selected made 15,000 and profit

from one of the projects itself. And we've doubled as invested 5

million in project already. But it's all education, and it

related, in that case, agriculture and education. In the other case,

education in general, with bursaries and education for the

schools where we support their.

Stationary, with books, with libraries, with computers, what

sports equipment, what food and a whole range of things that we do.

One of the things you've been accredited has been developing the

civil society. So ready food supplement, which, which is, you

know, when I was just reading some of the articles and just how much

it's how much is in it, and how it's changing, some communities

that it has been distributed in where do you find the time? I want

to talk a little bit about it, but where do you find the time to even

take away from this and be able to develop a product like this? I

didn't develop it, you know what? I again, the formula was put into

my brain on a Friday morning on the 16th of April, 2004 I did some

nutrition lectures in medical school. I didn't go to all of

them. I haven't been in practice since 94 and that was in practice

only for eight and a half years as a GP. So really, to design a

nutrition formula has to be some kind of a spiritual gift. You

know, when my teacher told me, in 1999 you'll be involved in food,

he passed on then, and he told me involved in food, I didn't know

what he was talking about. In 2004 I understood then what he was

talking about. And this formula came ahead that Africa's problems

is globe weight, lack of iodine, lack of iron, lack of protium,

lack of calcium, and issues generally in terms of nutrition.

And although we rolled out food parcels, you know, of the highly

blended products in the country, people still, they were not

hungry, but they made no progress in terms of the health. And this

product came the world's first, again, developed in Africa, Ground

Nut soya combination, water premix, preservative free, doesn't

require water to mix, doesn't require heating, doesn't require

cooking, doesn't require refrigeration. In the case of

disaster or hardship, difficulty, you just throw the bottle from the

helicopter. People open it, and it's energy dense and nutrient

dense, meaning that one spoon is very potent in terms of the energy

it supplies and the nutrients it supplies. But I don't want to take

credit for that. There's so much as like you were saying, half an

hour just flies fast. Thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely

inspiration, listening to you speak, and wish you well and the

organization very well. Thank you so much for coming in. It's a

pleasure. Thank you very much. Well, that was Dr Imtiaz Suleiman,

founder and chairman of gifts of the givers Africa's largest relief

aid organization. Have a good evening. Good night.