Imtiaz Sooliman – MOVERS & SHAKERS ll Episode 5

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.