Imtiaz Sooliman – House Call part 34 Gift of the Givers
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Yes, but I had understanding of medical knowledge do that to
contain the clinic. When you go on disaster missions, you need to
understand, Okay, well, I can't take a trauma team for primary
health care. It's a disaster. It's not going to work. And you can't
take a primary health team for earthworks. You need orthopedics
trauma specialist and the status. So you need to understand. Now
tell us, I've always wanted to ask you about this question. I mean,
your organization was lauded for the response, the speed and the
level of activity and the and I think the variety of healthcare
professionals that you brought together within a very short space
of time during the Haiti earthquake. Now, how did this
happen? How did you hear about it? How did you get there? How did you
get all the people involved? And how did you land in what was a
very, very tricky geographical environment? My advantage is I
have 18 years of experience in disaster response in 18 years
already. It's eight, well, it's 20 years, 18 years of gift of the
givers, and two years before that, I see and you know. And the
difference is, I myself go for every mission. I don't send other
people. When I said, don't send other people, I'm in charge.
Except Haiti was the difference. And I'll come to that. When I was
in Egypt, I just got back to South Africa, it was the 13th of January
in the morning, you know, Wednesday morning. I got a call
from a friend of mine who even gave me a call during the time of
tsunami, 10 past six in the morning. He said, My Friend,
foreign face is looking for you. They didn't know if you're in the
country or out of the country. I said, I just got back. He said,
Did you see there's a massive earthquake in Haiti? The Victor
with me. I can look at pictures in 30 seconds, and I can tell you if
it's big or small or small, or how massive it is because of so much
of earthquakes that I've seen. I said, Okay, wait for me a couple
of seconds. I'll put the TV on. It didn't take me five seconds. I
said, Man, this thing is huge. You know, it probably 30 or 40,000
people are dead already. You know, I phoned, I made the announcement.
I said that was at 10 past six, at half past six, I made the
announcement that we're going in at half past just like that. Yes,
Yes, uh huh. At half past seven, the search and rescue team was
ready. At half past eight, the medical teams already. But this is
permanent with the organization. Oh, these are all volunteers.
These are all volunteers, and you'll be surprised the amount of
people. That's why the people ask them, Do you have a list? I said,
Yes, I do have a list. But it's not limited to the list only
because, for example, Victor tells me, in January, I'm ready to go
with you. But in the disaster hit in March, but 28 February, Victor
just took his holiday from Moscow. He can't go anymore. So Victor
says, Okay, John, can now go. So like that. We have a list, but we
open it to the public, and within seconds, the names coming, okay?
And then, so what happened on this particular day? Then we had from
our own list, people were ready to go, and also people calling. They
said, we're ready to go. I said, the biggest complication is, how
do we get to Haiti? There's two options, either through Europe or
through America. But hang on. Have you got aircraft, your own
aircraft? At that stage, we decided the best thing was to take
commercial airliners and the direct flights via America, you
know, into Haiti, or we can take but when the first two days, when
earthquake happened, I spoke to Air France. I said, You know what,
we need to get there. I said, but there's one condition that airport
may close. I know the earthquake, if everything is unstable, the
airport will close. They said, No, the airport is open. It's fine.
We'll get in. I said, Give it to me in writing. I guarantee that
you will get them in. If that airport is closed. They got into
the flight. They got to Paris, and Air France says airport is closed.
They said, We have to turn you back. I took out the email. I
said, Remember what you wrote here? Yeah, you can't turn them
back. So they said, What do we do? I said, I'm not unreasonable. You
reroute them to Dominican Republic. I see I had already
prepared ground arrangements in Dominican Republic. That's the
reason I didn't go on this mission. So there was no
communication from Haiti, and now all my teams would have got stuck.
So by SMS, I control all the teams that went and instead of selling
them that, in fact, I was happy that airport closed in Haiti. But
the first thing would have gotten the second thing would have been
stuck. Also you decided to stay behind so that you could
coordinate the process. Yes, once inside the aircraft, you would not
have been able to do all the community and also in Haiti,
because all the networks are down. Normally, I can do that while I'm
the other country, but in this case, I knew I was not going to be
able to do it because Haiti is too small, and all the networks are
wiped out. So there's no way I could tell my people who to bring,
what to bring, what to do. Lessons learned from the Haiti process.
Lessons learned is the same in every other one you know, no
matter what you do to prevent an earthquake, if you can, you can
never adequately fast enough move people what you need to do, and
what we've always done is your speed of response time. Your
speeds of response is external, essential, and from Haiti and from
the other earthquakes, what I want to do is to have my own field
hospital. But when I say field hospital, I don't mean field
hospital. And I explained that when I got there, people said we
got class field hospitals. And when you go there, you realize how
impractical this thing is. It weighs so many tons, it requires
big equipment to move it. It's got all this expensive stuff that
requires massive electricity. I said, my friend, if you got no
cranes, no aircraft to learn, I need to move the stuff somewhere
else. How are you going to do this? I said, What we need is
lightweight theater tables, ordinary tents.
Where you can make the flaps join together. So one tent is theater.
Next tent is recovery room. That tent is postop, and they go out
and an esthetic section. And then bigger tents do that small table
and search and rescue equipment lightweight, you know, because
other countries come in the aircraft, because South African,
South Africa doesn't, cannot afford to send expensive planes,
but on all missions, it's very expensive. Hold it there. When you
come back from the break, you must now tell us that, have you got any
plans for succession, who's going to succeed? Because clearly, the
success of organization has been ready, mainly because you've been
at the helm. But I'm sure it is such that with the passage of
time, you'll also have to rest at some point and pass on the patron
to other people. Remember to continue our discussion on our
website, as we have a resident doctor who can attend to audio
queries and continue our discussion with Intel's suderman,
Chairperson of The gift of the givers foundation after the break.
You
welcome back, juanesatura, pelagas house, corner o SABC two, and
today we're having a one on one discussion with chairperson of the
gift of the givers of foundation, Dr Imtiaz sudemar. Now you have
Zola, your wife and five children based in murresburg. How are they
coping with your travels around the world? They've got used to it
over the time. You know they, they they've realized, because from the
religion, it tells you you need to get involved in serving mankind,
and they have understood that this is what life is, and religion is
all about, and very supportive, fully, completely, 100% talking
about succession. Now, what, what? How did the organization run? And
what are the plans when you decide to retire at some point? I've been
thinking of that all the time for many years, you know? And because
this is like a spiritual instruction, you need to find
people who are spiritually elevated to where I'm not saying
that I'm spiritually elevated, but to find people who can understand
this kind of inspiration initially, when I started off, I
started out doing this project myself. I did the faxing myself,
put up pictures of the wall myself, did everything myself, and
was very do it myself kind of stuff. Eventually, I realized you
have to trust people. You have to bring other people in. And then I
opened I only had one office in 1994 in marysburg. Only years
later, in 2006
several years later, I decided to open a second office in
Johannesburg, and I said, Okay, let me put a manager something I
can trust. And then office in Dublin in 2008 and an office in
Cape Town in 2009 an office in Malawi in 2006 I said, Okay, I'm
gonna put the protocols down. Serve people unconditionally.
Value of do things in modesty, in a very balanced, accountable way,
do everything. And I laid out all the protocols, and I said, Now you
guys got leeway. Your only job is to deliver to people in the best
way possible. And I leave you free. Victor, they drove me crazy.
They came up with projects. They came up with ideas. I left them
free because they knew I trusted them. They started designing their
own things, you know, and they came up with fantastic ideas. And
because of that, we expanded so rapidly in the last two to three
years. So in terms of management of most of the projects, all these
managers can run it. The problem is, with the International
disaster response, I've taken doctors with me. I've got other
doctors who work with me, and I've, you know, some of the on
repeat missions. They're now learning the ropes how to do
stuff, and that's why, on the Haiti mission, I could send people
without me going with I see I now need to show something how to
coordinate the disasters and all the other projects together and
the expanding portfolio. So you have a board of trustees that,
yes, helps manage and govern the organization. Well, there are
group, a board of trustees who just, you know, see what's going
on, but, but the bottom line is, because this thing comes by
inspiration, we are shown what to do, and you decide, okay, this is
going to be done. This would be done, you know? And because
everything is related to service orientation, you never have any.
There's nothing negative about what
we do now. Who's your main sponsor?
There is no main sponsor. It's companies have a choice. They have
a preference, you know? They would say, Okay, in this disaster, we
would like to respond the other problem that we had, you know,
let's talk about this openly. I've talked about it many times because
people say, this is a Muslim organization. Is it for Muslims
only? I see, and yet, 99% of our eight in this country is
predominant for people who are not Muslim and international
disasters. Unfortunately, most of them were Muslim countries. You
know, if you look at Pakistan, earthquake, first one, and now the
floods, the crisis in Iraq, the problem in Afghanistan. But of
course, there was Nigeria, which is not a Muslim country,
Rwanda, in rehab, in Lesotho, where there was.
There in Swaziland, we've helped. Then we've helped in other parts
of the world, the DRC, the volcanic eruption India, which is
a Hindu country. In Sri Lanka, the tsunami. So we've helped in
Malawi. We've got offices use not a Muslim country, but people still
didn't understand that. When the Haiti thing broke out, they
realized that this was a Catholic country, and there are people from
other denominations there. And the strange thing the media and the
public are now saying that the Muslim organization responded to a
Christian country faster and more efficiently than they've responded
to a Muslim country, and that broke all the barriers, companies,
ordinary people, churches, everybody came to us, and from
that day onwards, no matter what project we talk about, even at the
Pakistan, which is a Muslim country, people say, no, we want
to support you because we know you are purely humanitarian. And you
don't look at color, you don't look at religion, you only look at
need. And in that way, the support is come across sector. When I say,
we don't, we get support from government. Government gives me
the diplomatic support, but remember, in 2003 they gave me
that 60 million Rand to roll out the food parcel program. But at
times the government will say, Okay, we will now pay for one
flight, but you must fill the flight. And sometimes I would say,
Okay, I will pay for the flight and I will fill it, and I will
take you with me, so we have a partnership relationship. So
that's where government comes in. But there are a few corporate
companies, not many, but not big amounts. But it's slowly coming
and in kind as well, or in kind, man, they've made me put Wales
after Wales after Wales. I know I cannot talk about the companies in
terms of advertising here, but there are companies who have been
really supporting us in a big way. And there's one company that
stands out. In the last three months, they funded, like they
told me, when they saw one program on TV, they called me. They said,
You know what they call my effect, my manager from marysburg, they
said, we very happy with what we're doing. We want to give you
some stuff. Come collect 30 pallets, or 25 pallets, we
thought, for the year, this is our contribution. They call him a week
later. They say, take 30 pallets. They call him a week later, and
for the next three weeks, they gave him a bucket load of soup
food items. Then they called him a few weeks ago and said, eight tons
of supplies. And then they said, we heard you got an office in
Johannesburg. They said, yes, they call a job offers, two trucks
loads. They called us yesterday, come collect 200 pellets of items.
And then they said, we heard you got an office in Cape Town, and
they started in Cape Town. And these are expensive products in
kind. It's run into millions already. Then you have people
giving us new shoes, new clothes. Victor, it runs in the millions.
They say, If God be for us, who can be against us? But now, okay,
now
the World Cup, 2010, FIFA, World Cup. What? What impact did that
have in your organization, and what contribution did you make, if
any during an event that is clearly a historical event, both
for the continent and South Africa? I think the most poignant
part, part of this event was the relation, relationship building
between races. Although I specialize in disasters and the
other projects, I always say, That's my secondary work. They
say, What's your first work? My first work is what my teacher
taught me in Istanbul when I saw black, white, Hindu, Christian,
Muslim and Jew all get together because of so much ethnic strife
all over the world, I like to see relationship building between
people. And there's no better relationship building than sports
and culture that brings people together. There's no politics,
there's no barriers, there's no rules. And we said, okay, sports
is related to health. You know, kids across color play together.
So for the World Cup, we prepared months in advance. We made 500
soccer balls branded in our name, and we made 200 full soccer kids.
And we said, we will find poor schools. And they announced it
over the radios, write to us, but motivate to us why you should get
the soccer kit, and we went throughout the country. Besides
giving us the kids out, we went and we found we made matches. We
made people play against each other. And say, soccer is good for
development. We do volleyball also. We do other stuff, but
soccer has been the biggest thing for us. And we said, let's get
children excited. Soccer is a big sport, and we need to reintroduce
us into schools and to belabor in the future, from the from the very
small level, and to go up also the leagues. And in the process, one
night before the finals, the finals on Sunday, on a Thursday
night, I was at Charis fountain. They were having a meeting of all
the legends, you know. And they were bringing the All, all soccer
players from the old leagues together. And whilst I was there,
I met a German couple.
When I say couple, I mean they were about 2029, years old, and we
just read by chance, and we took a liking to each other. And they
said, Look, we involved very closely with a German national
team. We involved with Angela Merkel. Our group is called
Global, and we have another organization called children. Are
our number one. We do consulting through global which is our sports
arm, and children, our number one, which is our charity arm. I said,
What do you guys do? They say, We specialize in training
goalkeepers. And they said, if you look at Africa's from most of the
cases, the goalkeepers don't have the kind of coaching that the
European teams get. And our academy, their academy, is one of
the most.