Imtiaz Sooliman – House Call part 24 Gift of the Givers
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss their involvement in various disaster management projects, including a primary healthcare program, hospital clinic, and special nutrition supplement. They also mention their involvement in a wheelchair distribution project and a food parcel program for children in physical conditions. The speakers discuss a nutrition supplement program for energy and iron for energy and iron for energy and iron for energy and iron for energy and iron for energy and iron for energy, as well as a traditional dish called "soya." They also mention a doctor's name and a peanut butter supplement, which is a meal that works well in many conditions and is a good source of energy for many people. The speakers discuss a new supplement called Charity that works well in many conditions and is a good source of energy for many people.
AI: Summary ©
Because
one gift of the
givers foundation now we are still talking to us about the
relationship with government as part of international disaster
response. It's very good to have relationship with government. It
breaks diplomatic red tape. So my relationship with our government,
what all the chairs again, Before the ANC time? What ANC time? What
changes in the President's made no difference to me. My aims to get
the job done. So it was the government of the day. I work with
them, and my relationship was with foreign affairs, which is now
international relations, because in most cases, disasters outside
the intervention from foreign affairs. The advantage of that
relationship is that it clears huge ambassadors use embassies or
other parts of the world, and when you walk into a country, in most
cases, the door just opens up and he walks straight through, because
you have the government on your side. So diplomatic passport, but
government representatives sometimes travel with me as part
of the mission, so you know, and the embassy meets you, the
ambassador meets you. And really, there are difficulties, as in any
disaster response, but by far and large, we have been well received
everywhere in the world, because our government has done everything
possible to facilitate, as we sort of represent South Africa when we
go across anyway in the world. So your general motto is to relieve
physical distress, emotional distress, and to improve the lives
of mankind. Now disaster management, or disaster seems to
be central to this process. But what are some of the other things
that the organization does outside disaster management or disasters
we have 22 projects all together. We started off as a disaster
response agency. After that, we designed container clinics. We
said, if we can build a hospital in containers and take it 1000s of
kilometers away, we can do container clinics, because that
time, kwasama, the now Home Minister, affairs minister, came
up with this idea of, remember, of primary healthcare. Primary
Healthcare 94 became a big buzzword in the medical circles.
So we said together, and it's going to become a big buzzword
again. Now, yeah, going forward, in preparation for the NHI In
fact, it's central to the National Health Insurance also is going to
be primary healthcare, because there have been complaints and
concerns that the South African medical system is more curative
and you can start to become primary healthcare and
preventative base will do a lot to alleviate the problem that we have
exactly. So we designed a container clinic, and we started
putting it in rural areas in South Africa. We have 20 such clinics in
the country. That was the second project, and there we partnered
government again, because we said, in terms of running, it's better
to run, be run by government, because as the protocols change,
they can implement the protocols in the system. So it's easier for
them just to manage the whole program, which we gave them. But
in between, as an one of our other projects, we supply medical
facilities, we supply ultrasound machines, we give medicines, you
know, that kind of stuff to hospitals. So a medical project is
the third thing is another project after clinics. There's a hospital
called Sara Fox in Cape Town where there's abandoned children
recuperating children that come from Red Cross and other
hospitals. And we fund it every month in terms of the food
supplies, we renovated parts of the hospital, put in new painted
the whole hospital, put in beds, linen supply was required on a
monthly basis. And we want to expand that project. It's only one
and a half year old. So that's something else that we do. Then
closer to home here Soweto, the Adelaide Tambo School for the
physically challenged, the physically challenged children in
Soweto, we've become a partner in that school again, helping
refurbishing. We made arrangements for lotto to put a major swimming
pool in the in the in the school itself. Then special kind of
equipment for those kind of kids to play with. We put that in. We
look at putting extra classrooms and extra structures. We've
already given the plans in. Takes a long time for the plans to come
out. Special type of playgrounds for the last two years, the
special Paralympic sports where these kids are involved in they
went to PE we funded the whole event. Those are the kind of
things that we do. Then another thing related to physically
challenged people is a wheelchair distribution. We do that in a big
way also. So like this, there's many other projects. We design a
special nutrition supplement, you know, which we use also for people
in different types of conditions. We designed that.
We got samples here. So is this the busses of product? There's a
history
behind this product
in 2003
2002
we were at NASDAQ, you know, the world's Summit on Sustainable
Development. I see, whilst we were there in September, there was a
write up in the front page of The Sunday Times to say that 167
children died out of starvation in the Eastern Cape. We were the only
agency that responded and took in lots of food parcels. We then met
the then Minister Zola skivia of social development. He said, I
love what you do. I love what you are doing and what you've done
here. He came to me afterwards. He said.
Can you work with government and help us design a program? How to
spend 400 million Rand? I said, Fine. I put nine points together
game the program. Few months later, he came back to me. He
said, I love the food parcel program. He said, Can you run,
design a food parcel program and run it? I said, not a problem. He
said, but there's only one problem you have to tender. Government.
Rules are, everybody has to tender. So I said, Minister,
advice is free. I don't tender. I'm not a business. I'm an NGO. I
will not tender. Time went on. It went on tenders. They called me
five times. I refused all five times.
Seven provinces were
given tenders, big companies. Seven provinces got it February,
2003 they came back to me. They said, please? I said, no, they
called me a week later. They said, You have been appointed for KZN
and Eastern Cape. We went to Treasury, we went to cabinet, we
went to Parliament. We waived all tender roles. We appointed you,
and we give you the two most complicated provinces in this
country, Eastern Cape and KZN. You design a program. We give you 60
million Rand to do the food parcel and to roll it out. I said, Mr.
Minister, money up front, I'm not the business. I'm an NGO. And they
agreed, given up front. This is how this product was born. I see
because while giving out branded products, Victor, we found that
people were they were not hungry anymore, but there was no
difference in the medical condition. If they had no loss of
weight, they still had loss of weight. That bad skin, that's
still bad skin, to any medical condition, nothing happened. So
they were not hungry anymore, but they were still showing the
repercussions of malnutrition one form or another. And I said, No, I
was feeling bad, because I'm the one who designed this program, and
I'm thinking, I put all this stuff in the mind. Nothing happened. Any
case, I put it at the back of my head, 2004 I February, write up by
the UN and different write ups to say the biggest problem in Africa
is lack of iron, iodine, folic acid, protein, you know, and
certain micronutrients still back of bed. I visited Malawi, we have
an office in 2004
April. I went there for fertilizer and garden projects in agriculture
development, because I met somebody from Malawi in 2002 at my
stand. So I went to the company, thinking, I'm going to learn about
fertilizer and seed roll out, which they do in Malawi. The last
day of second, last day of my visit. He takes me to his factory,
and I get the smell of food. I said, oh, where's the fertilizer
smell? You said, We don't only do fertilizer. We do food also. We
were the first company that extruded soya for the World Food
Program when Mozambique and refugees came into Malawi for
seven years, we ran the program for 24 hours a day. I said, You
never told me that about food. You said, yes,
my spiritual teacher told me, my son, remember in life that
whatever you do is done not it's not done by you. It's done through
you. You will be shown you will be given direction, but everything
will be done through you. You do nothing. So don't sit on your
faith ego and said, I did it because you do nothing. So that is
God who is in charge, God. And this is a classical example,
Victor. I got up on Friday morning the 16th of ninth of April, you
know, sorry, 16th of April. That morning before I left Malawi, and
it came to me, my food parcel made no impact on the people I'm here
in this company that does food program. I need a formula, and in
my head, a formula came in the morning. I'm not a dietitian. I
didn't go for nutrition lectures to medical school. Most of the
time I wasn't even there. My professor said, you passed by
correspondence, I remember, and this formula
came Malawi's got the best ground nuts, one of the best ground nuts
in the world, the best aflatoxin. Let's take it. What's got soya?
What's got protein and essential amino acids, is soya, but soya
don't have a good taste. Combine the ground nuts and soya together
and put in a vanilla flavoring, and put in the a pre mix that has
all these other micronutrients, copper, magnesium, selenium, you
know, antioxidants, put it together, and we started fidgeting
with it, and eventually we came up with a product that works for
twofold. It has no preservatives. And we said, we'll make it ready
to eat. You open the bottle and you eat. No cooking, no heating,
no refrigeration, you just eat. It. Perfect for disasters. When
you come into a prom where there's water all over, like in Pakistan.
Now we're using it in Pakistan also where you can't get you can't
throw a primer stove, you can't throw rice, you can't throw other
kind of stuff. You have to put a whole lot of ingredients together.
This thing is energy dense and nutrient dense, meaning that one
spoon has more potency than whole plate of food, and you don't do it
for profit. No, this is for a given out for free. For when you
return, we continue our very, very interesting and untold story of
Doctor imjea Suleman, Chairperson of the gift of the givers, you
stay with us.
You.
Welcome back. You're watching politics house call here on SABC
two, and today we're having a one on one discussion with the doctor,
mts sudeman, Chairperson of the gift of the givers. Now you're
still telling us about this brilliant product. What is it? I
said it looks like peanut butter to me. What is it? Basically, it's
a paste. Yeah, it's a paste. It's a paste. So you put it on red, you
put it on bread. You can, I said it's ready to eat. The best way to
eat it the catcher is you got to stir it well, because there's no
preservatives. The oil set of settles at the top from which your
energy comes. So you need to stir it well. But you can eat it. It
tastes like an Indian sweet meat. Okay? Patients in hospital love
it. You know, normal people love it. Sick people love it. Okay?
It's got a very pleasant taste, it has a good smell, a lovely taste,
and, you know, it's very palatable, and it's very high in
energy, as I said, energy dense and nutrient dense. You've got the
patent on it. Well, we haven't put a patent on it because we don't
mind if other people do something similar, because we want people to
benefit from the product. Absolutely. In any case, we
started using it for disasters. In the process, we found it has
magnificent results in cases where people are debilitated, so in TB,
in HIV, in AIDS, in cancers. In other conditions, it's not a cure.
People must understand this is not a cure. This is a supplement. It's
a food item that works exceptionally well in many
conditions. Many hospitals in South Africa are using it. You
know, we've used it in Haiti, in Gaza, in Niger, where there was a
severe famine, in Somalia, in Sudan, in Pakistan, in South
Africa, Malawi, risotto and Botswana, not huge quantities, but
people are seeing the value of which maybe Charity begins at
home, do you spend most of your resources, most of your time, on
South African projects, than you do on continental and
international projects? Or you just respond on demand? It's not
necessarily that you are first a South African entity that might
have to look at other countries if you've done justice to the South
African needs.
Internationally, our projects are disaster response, mainly, okay,
21 other projects take place in South Africa. I see the span is
more than 70% 70 to 75% in South Africa, and other 25% depending if
there is a disaster, there may be three disasters in one year, like
what happened to the Pakistan earthquake. The tsunami finished.
Then came Nigeria famine, and then came to Pakistan, earthquake, that
can happen, but sometimes they may be no disaster. When I say no
disaster, nothing major that needs to be responded to, because then
again, we can talk about it as if there's times, in this case, you
do some of your cold projects, you know, but those projects in South
Africa continue all the time. We've got a counseling service,
marital problems, abuse, you know, HIV, AIDS counseling and face to
face that runs 24/7 the whole year. Then we have life skills
programs in school. Our bursary and scholarship program started
off in 97 20,000 Rand a year. For the first year, it's now reached 3
million. And we partnered method University, simply because of
this, for development in Africa, where we said, let's support
science and agriculture. Lots of young people say today, science
and agriculture is for the farmers. It's for the Boro people,
the South Africans. It's not for all of South Africa. Africa is
dependent on agriculture. The Ministry of Economy in Africa is
agriculture. We need to take the students and put them back there.
So I went to the University. I said, I'll give you a grant for
1.3 million. Use the money to do marketing to the schools and tell
us kids to come. They said, in the first year, we may not get good
students. I said, I understand that a business doesn't make money
in the first year. It takes five to six years before it makes
money. So I said, get me any students. Just bring the students
and bring them inside. You have the criteria. You choose them.
They said, We got kids with 50% 55% and not so many. I said, it
doesn't matter. I'll find those kids all the way to qualification.
I said, in the second year, we'll do a little better. In second
year, kids put better symbols came. In the third year, they got
kids with a grades aggregates, and they said, now we're getting
oversubscribed. And people started getting, you know, all
distinctions in the course, and they're getting shot by different
parts of industry. We need to support science and agriculture.
Agriculture is very important for Africa. And what I like about that
university in marysburg, it got like a mini NEPAD there. In those
classes, there are students from all over Africa. In some
departments, there are 39 PhD students. They're coming with the
knowledge of what's happening in Rwanda, in DRC, in Kenya and
Uganda. Now, can you imagine if you take all the resource
properly, when you say, okay, in Uganda, this works that doesn't
work. In Kenya, this works that doesn't work, and you take all
that knowledge together and don't leave it in the library, take it
and implement it. Can you imagine what a powerhouse Africa will
become? And that's something that very rural development and poverty
relief are some of those things that you concentrate on in South
Africa. Does it help, or is it an advantage that you're a medical
doctor running this organization? It helps a * of a lot. It helps
a * of a lot. Because, for example, the hospital that we
designed, we were instrumental in designing a hospital without
medical knowledge. You couldn't do that this supplement. It was
inspired.