Imtiaz Sooliman – Chairman of Gift of the Givers Part 2
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the emotional attached of certain people to certain situations and the importance of counseling for trauma and injuries. They emphasize the need for a later stage of counseling and mention a donation from the University of Africa to the University of edge. The speakers also emphasize the importance of education and empowerment for schools to promote their children, particularly in the agriculture sector. They develop a nutrition formula for children, which includes various ingredients and products, and discuss the challenges of developing it in Africa. They emphasize the importance of creating a foundation for aid and empowerment for children in Africa.
AI: Summary ©
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.