Imtiaz Sooliman – MOVERS & SHAKERS ll Episode 5
AI: Summary ©
Dr. Imtiaz campaigns on helping people of all cultures to address the crisis in South Africa. He describes his mission to form an organization to help people of all races, political affiliations, and geographical locations. He also talks about his responsibility to save lives and prevent war, as well as his experience with a seven-year-old walking with a bowl of olives. He emphasizes the importance of protecting people's privacy and the need for people to trust leaders.
AI: Summary ©
I know him as a very passionate and compassionate human being.
He's driven by vision and by purpose, and this you see,
translated into everything that the gift of the givers does.
Africa has a reputation for being on the receiving end of aid, but
one man's mission is helping to change this perception. Today,
we're taking you to the very heart of humanitarianism and bringing
you the story of Dr Imtiaz Suleiman, the founder of the
largest response agency of African origin, the gift of the givers in
1990 following a civil war in Mozambique, a young Dr Suleman,
who had only been practicing medicine for four years, led a
team of volunteers to deliver aid and Benoit to him. This would be
the beginning of a lifelong mission and a calling of sorts.
But the thing that finally changed was in 1990 when I went to
Mozambique. But what struck me more than anything else, without
the fighting, I saw these two little black kids. They were
digging a hole, and I thought they were building a sand castle, and
when the hole was about half a meter deep, they actually put
their hand in the bottom to drop some water. And I asked my guide.
I said, today people must have been doing water this way. Why is
are these kids doing this? Is it some kind of a game they play?
Said, my friend, there's a drought in Mozambique. There's no water.
We've got big rivers, we've got the big sea, but there's no
drinking water. And I froze. It hit me the reality of having no
water. I came back and I launched a project to help people of
Mozambique. We put in 30 wells, we supported the hospital, we paid
salaries of doctors. And that was the first project. I thought,
okay, it's over. And just a few weeks later, when the Gulf War
broke out, people said, You know what, you've marketed Mozambique,
why don't you do something for the Gulf War? And then I did that. And
then a few months later, there was a cyclone in Bangladesh. And the
real change came in the same year 91 when I met a spiritual teacher
in Istanbul. It was as a result of that cyclone that I was forced to
go to Turkey. Dr Suleiman is on a spiritual mission. He was given an
instruction from a Sufi teacher to actually put this organization in
place to help any nation, any religion, any nationality, and he
lives by that credo. So for him, it's a higher level purpose that
drives absolutely everything that he does. Two years after getting
the instruction from his Sufi, he quit his private practice and
traded his white coat for a life of alleviating the suffering of
others on a much bigger scale. It was a Thursday night, the sixth of
August, 1992 they had a spiritual program. After the play, he just
turned and he looked at me, and he said, You will form an
organization. The name will be gift of the givers. You will not
I'm not asking you. I'm instructing you. You will serve
all people of all religion of all races, of all classes, of all
colors, of all political affiliations and of any
geographical location, and you will serve them unconditionally.
He had that spiritual link and inclination that he will he is
being chosen to some degree that he will provide assistance to
those in need in various forms and fashions as a vehicle, and it's
God helping others through him. What starts to happen to you as
you confront the magnitude of seeing people in triage, and the
most important thing is you cannot be emotionally attached. So when I
go to a war zone, people ask me, how are you? I said, I have
compassion, and I'm ice cold at the same time. They can't
understand that I have compassion generally, people I need but I'm
ice cold when it comes to an individual. I don't get attached
to an individual in the area that I work in. The moment I get
attached, my mission is over because I will not be able to
function. I'll start crying. I'll get weak, you know? I won't be
able to concentrate. So I said, Okay, when a child is dying in
front of me, I'm unmoved, sorry to say that, but I'm unmoved. But if
I don't do that, I'm trying to worry about one child, I lose the
1000s that I'm supposed to help. It affects me. Yes, in terms of
the competition is getting greater. Does it get heavy? Yes,
it gets very people call you a number of things, you know, not
just doctor, but Dr, Savior. Do you consider yourself a savior?
No, I just consider myself fortunate to be, maybe
presumptuous to be but to be selected to do what I do, because
they said that's only a grace and a favor from God Almighty. Most
recently, Dr Suleiman and his team defied the South African
government and went into Syria, risking their lives and the wrath
of the country's army, all in a bid to bring much needed relief to
the afflicted. The world was not responding to Syria, and the world
really is still not responding to Syria. We are into trouble for
that as well. Yes, and I mean, I mean the question with the SA
government, like, how could you do that? Who authorized you to go
there? No, no, it wasn't so it wasn't so brave. And they told.
I had a discussion, pre discussion with them, and they told me, You
know what, we will be unhappy if you go into Serbia, probably
security concerns, you know, diplomacy, diplomacy issues. You
don't seem to be deterred by that. No, you I told him, I'll go in
illegally. I said it bluntly, I will go in illegally. You know, we
will stop me. I said, the world spends a lot of money planning how
to bomb other people, how to destroy lives, but they spend very
little time in planning how to save lives. And I don't follow
international law. I follow God's law. So if somebody wants to stop
it, they're welcome to shoot me. You know, have you been stopped?
No.
Nobody didn't stop me. It will be a bullet. Nothing else, nothing,
nothing. I crossed the borders illegally. We have to do that. And
I did it, and we were not silent about it. We filmed it, and
immediately I showed it to the world, and we did it okay, but
that makes your rogue, that makes your target, that makes you
someone. People want to stop, yes, well, they're welcome to do that,
but it doesn't deter me. It's simply for that reason. People
have been 120,000
people have died in Syria, because everybody is saying, You know
what, you can't do this. You can't do that. Who determines that by
what law? Sure, so sorry. So it's about the end for you, not the
means. No, it's the end. The end is saving lives. And if people
fight, saving lives offensive, so be it. What are the highlights of
this job for you? What's a good day for you? The Good day to be to
see a smile on his face, just unpracticed for me, the smile I'm
talking about is not an orderly smile. It's a smile masking
something very intense. Take Syria, for example. A seven year
old walks with a bowl of olives towards you, and we ask, what is
this? They say, You got to eat. I said, Why do we have to eat? It's
a war situation. They say, You're the guest. They the host. The
teaching is that the guest takes priority over everything else. I
said, if I eat the food, there'll be nothing left. They said, That's
not your concern. You have to eat, otherwise you insult them. To
finish the bowl of olives with other people around you quietly in
discussion, you hear the next meal they will get is in 10 days. You
finish olives, the child gives you a smile, a big smile, because She
fulfilled her duty to you as a host and you were the guest, but
that same smile covers the fact that for the next 10 days she's
not going to eat food. She may have to drink boiled grass water.
That's not an orderly smile. So when I tell you, I put a smile on
the faces of people, not me. It's the God's grace. You see, when
people get the aid, when they get their supplies, when they get the
food, I know the background where the smile is coming from. Since
its establishment 21 years ago, the organization has given more
than a billion random aid in 37 countries, including South Africa.
But what keeps volunteers going back to danger zones and disaster
areas where no safety is guaranteed? There's two parts to
this. First of all, it's the quality of South Africans, the
Ubuntu driven nature of our people. They couldn't have got
that after talking to me for five minutes on the phone. It has to be
something that's innate within them. The second thing is, many of
those people have been on missions with me before, and it may not be
necessarily a war, it earthquake or something else, and they've
seen that, and they like the system that we take a lot of
precautions. I go myself alone first to check and because of
that, they trust me, and I never allow anybody to go without me,
especially in a disaster at a dangerous zone. But you can get
shot. I'm the leader. So something happens. I get shot first. His
passion for humanity is much more fervent than it was 21 years ago
when his mission began. He's not only elevated the country's image
and its spirit of Ubuntu, but he has brought hope in the face of
carnage and human suffering, restoring faith that there are a
lot of good men and women out in the world. His big heart and
selflessness will forever be the gift that keeps on giving
you.