Pakistan Philanthropist Cares For

Karachi's Forgotten
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111102319
Abdul Sattar Edhi has personally washed tens of thousands of corpses that
he has rescued from gutters, beneath bridges and from the sea. The 82-
year-old Pakistani has devoted his life to the destitute of Karachi, burying the
city's forgotten and giving fresh life to its abandoned newborns. His
pioneering social work has drawn comparisons to Mother Teresa's.
His mission is synonymous with this sprawling port city, where rickshaws
bearing veiled women, scooters spewing smoke and drivers pressing palms
to horns all squeeze in the narrow streets through spaces as thin as a ray of
hope.
Among the chaos, in an aging building, is the room Edhi bought nearly 60
years ago to use as a dispensary. He arrived with the mass migration of
Muslims from India six days after Pakistan's independence. Edhi was barely
20 when he began the work that would make him arguably the most
respected figure in Pakistan.
"I saw people lying on the pavement," he recalls. "The flu had spread in
Karachi, and there was no one to treat them. So I set up benches and got
medical students to volunteer. I was penniless and begged for donations on
the street. And people gave. I bought this 8-by-8 room to start my work."
The single room has grown to a three-story headquarters. Donations, mostly
from ordinary Pakistanis, have already topped $36 million this year. The vast
philanthropic network offers Karachi's poorest what could be called cradle-
to-grave service.
Women's Suffering Starts At Birth
The Edhi Foundation runs two maternity wards in Karachi. Since 1948, 1
million children have been delivered in Edhi facilities virtually for free,
according to Edhi.
His wife, Bilquis, runs one of the maternity wards in Karachi. She has a
sunny disposition that contrasts with the suffering there. Just 40 minutes
after delivery, one mother, grimacing in pain, gets up to leave.
"In the past, they would stay for three days," Bilquis Edhi says. "But now,
even if they have stitches, the women don't linger."
The mother says this was her third child; Bilquis Edhi suspects it is her sixth.
"Islam is driving this," she says. Conservative clerics call family
planning haram, or forbidden. As a result, she says, "Women keep producing
babies, and these women are dying in the process."
A bright pink veil is placed carelessly across Bilquis Edhi's head. At 62, her
skin still glows. Despite bypass surgery, she continues a marathon schedule
devoted to helping impoverished women.
In this conservative society, women's problems start from birth, she says.
"When a baby girl is born here, the man storms out cursing his wife. But
whenever there is a male born, the men celebrate and offer us tea," she
says.
"Most of the babies who are left in the cradle at our doorstep are girls," she
adds. "Sometimes the babies are tossed in garbage heaps, gagged and
wrapped in plastic bags. In one week, we can get as many as 11 dead
babies."
Death With Dignity
The babies are brought to the Edhi morgue, where the acrid smell of
embalming fills the air. Employees who are paid a small stipend load a
corpse into an ambulance to be taken to the cemetery. It is a long slender
body prepared for burial. It bears a number, but it bears no name. The Edhi
Foundation buries bodies that cannot be identified.
The makeshift hearse snakes its way to the Edhi Foundation's cemetery on
the outskirts of the city. Mohammad Saleem has been a driver for the Edhi
ambulance service for 24 years. The service now operates throughout the
country. Saleem recalls his first assignment.
"Mr. Edhi sent us to collect a dead body, and the stink was so unbearable I
couldn't stand it. We all ran," Saleem says. "We came back with Mr. Edhi,
who showed us how to pick up a dead body and transport it."
"We work long hours," Saleem adds, "but we're at ease. We have a kind of
spiritual peace because somehow we're serving humanity."
The two young men being laid to rest this day will be interred in a place as
bleak as their lives likely were. The van bearing their bodies bumps along
the potholed unpaved streets. Little boys rush to sneak a peak through the
window, while babies sit like Buddhas in the endless debris.
Gravediggers cover the corpses that have been slipped into the earth of this
forlorn field with nothing but a white sheet. In Karachi, death comes without
pity.
Finding Homes For Unwanted Children
There is not an area of social need that the Edhi Foundation has not
touched, even raising money for the families displaced by the fighting in
Swat Valley and pleading with judges to reform the prisons.
The group also has placed more than 19,000 abandoned babies with
adoptive parents.
Karachi lawyer Tahera Hassan wanted a baby girl and approached the Edhi
Foundation. Not long after, Bilquis Edhi took her utterly by surprise when
she called to say that her baby was ready. But her husband wasn't. He was
away.
"So I called him up," Hassan says, "and I was like, 'The baby's come!' He
said, 'How will we know? How will you know it's the right one?' I said, 'Well,
the baby's there. It's the right one! It's there.' So I went and got her."
That baby, Maya, is now 3 and looking forward to having a baby sister
from the Edhi Foundation. Mother and daughter visit Bilquis Edhi regularly
so Maya will have a connection to the people Hassan calls "phenomenal."
She says they are able to look at the positive side of things, despite the
misery they deal with on a day-to-day basis.
'I Feel Happy God Made Me Different'
Adbul Edhi, bearded and slight, calls himself a "pragmatic humanist." He
also has been called a communist for his belief that the rich enslave the
poor. In fact, Edhi says, poverty is spreading terrorism.
"Almost all of our leaders are involved in looting and plundering, and the
Taliban are a reaction to that," he says.
Bilquis Edhi says of her husband, "Everyone said I was crazy to marry him.
Friends joked that while they'd go on picnics, he'd take me to graveyards."
But the man who built Pakistan's biggest social service network with no
formal education says he does feel a bit crazy, and he revels in it.
"I feel happy. There's so much craftiness and cunning and lying in the world.
I feel happy that God made me different from the others. I helped the most
oppressed," he says.
Bilquis Edhi says three or four more people like her husband could change
the destiny of Pakistan.

Aging philanthropist is Pakistan's Mother
Teresa
http://defence.pk/threads/abdul-sattar-edhi-washington-post-report.70947/
PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- The aging man in mud-splattered, frayed clothes has barely
lowered his body onto the sidewalk when the money starts piling up. Heeding his call for
donations for flood victims, Pakistanis of all classes rush to hand over cash to Abdul
Sattar Edhi, whose years of dedication to the poor have made him a national icon.

He thanks each donor, some of whom ask to have their photo taken next to him. Four
hours later, the crowd remains - and the equivalent of $15,000 is overflowing from a
pink basket in front of him.

Edhi has been helping the destitute and sick for more than 60 years, filling the hole left
by a state that has largely neglected the welfare of its citizens. Part Mother Teresa, part
Gandhi, with a touch of Marx, he is the face of humanitarianism in Pakistan.

Funded by donations from fellow citizens, his 250 centers across the country take in
orphans, the mentally ill, unwanted newborns, drug addicts, the homeless, the sick and
the aged. His fleet of ambulances picks up victims of terrorist bombings, gang
shootings, car accidents and natural disasters.

Pakistan's corruption-riddled government acknowledges Edhi and other charities do the
work that in other nations the state performs. The country has no national health
service, insurance program or welfare system, and few state-run orphanages or old
people's homes.

The foundation offers an alternative to charitable work performed by hardline Islamist
groups in Pakistan, some with alleged links to terrorism. The spread of these
organizations has triggered concerns in the West, including their work in the aftermath
of this summer's floods.

Edhi is a devout Muslim, but critical of Islamic clerics in general, not just extremists. He
says they focus on ritual, preaching hellfire and defending the faith against imagined
enemies, rather than helping the poor - which he says should be the cornerstone of all
faiths.
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The 80-something Edhi - he and his children disagree on his exact age - lives with his
wife, herself a charity worker, in a tiny room in one of his welfare centers in Karachi, a
bustling port city. His bed is a one-inch thick mattress on a piece of wood.

"I am a beggar for the poor," he says, stained teeth showing in a wide smile, eyes
sparkling after a week touring flood-hit areas. "Serving humanity is the biggest jihad. It is
the real thing."

Edhi deals with birth and death, and almost everything in between.

Just above his bedroom, a maternity ward and an orphanage are home to 18 children,
many of them abandoned by their mothers in cradles left outside his centers. They wear
hand-me-downs from the city's rich. Edhi's wife, Bilquis, tries to get the children
adopted, but few Pakistanis want to take girls or older children, she says.

On a recent afternoon, the kids shouted out English nursery rhymes and danced. They
then sat cross-legged on the floor, drinking tea from plastic mugs and eating spicy
pastries and sticky sweets that an anonymous benefactor had dropped off.

The home was clean and bright, with plenty of toys and loving staff. But there was no
place to play outside, and the roar of motorbikes from the lanes below was a constant
backdrop.

Across town, workers at the Edhi morgue were dealing with latest influx of bodies. They
receive around 25 a day, half of which are never claimed - the city's unloved and
unknown.

Working quickly but carefully, they cut the clothes from the bodies, lather them with a
bar of soap from head to toe, rinse them with water from a jug, then wrap them in a
white sheet. The bodies are bussed across town, prayed over and buried in unmarked
graves.

The body of American journalist Daniel Pearl, killed by al-Qaida terrorists in Karachi in
2002, was picked up by an Edhi ambulance and taken to the morgue, the largest in the
city of 14 million people.

The morgue is attached to a hospital for the homeless, a dispensary, a shelter for boys
and women and children, even a wedding hall for the marriages arranged for children
who have been looked after by the foundation. The smell of baking bread from an oven
that churns out 9,000 loaves a day fills the air.

"The poor can come here and get a solution to all their problems," says Ejal Hassan
Zaidi, who had accompanied a neighbor to the morgue to collect the body of his 3-year-
old daughter, killed in a hit-and-run incident hours earlier. "From the cradle to the
grave."

Born in what is now India, Edhi and his parents moved to Pakistan in 1947 when that
country was created as a Muslim state at the end of British colonial rule. The family was
quite well off - his father was a traveling salesman - and socially progressive.
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In his biography, Edhi credits his mother for setting him on a humanitarian path. She
urged him to give half his pocket money to someone poor every day and rebuked him if
he didn't.

"'You have a selfish heart, one that has nothing to give,'" he remembers her saying.
"'What kind of human being are you? Look at the greed in your eyes. Already you have
started robbing the poor. How much more will you rob from them in your lifetime?"

When she was dying, he looked after her, bathing her emaciated body and washing and
braiding her hair - experiences that would also shape his life.

The first night she spent in the grave, I dedicated my life to the service of mankind," he
says.

Edhi started small. In 1951, he bought an eight-foot-square shop in a slum neighborhood in Karachi that
he converted into a dispensary. Seven years later he bought a van that he used as an ambulance, writing
"Poor Man's Van" on both sides.

He became intimately involved in the business of caring for the sick and dying. He would drive the
ambulance to the scene of an accident to pick up the bodies, administer injections during a flu outbreak
and travel across the country to help after earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Edhi's record of round-the-clock service and frugal lifestyle attracted donations, and he soon had a fleet of
14 ambulances. In the 1980s and 90s, he opened centers and ambulance services throughout the
country. He donated $200,000 to relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina, and his workers have also helped
out in disasters in Asia and the Middle East.

Pakistanis are a generous people, required by their Muslim faith to give away 2.5 percent of their wealth
each year. The last nationwide survey done in 1998 showed that Pakistanis gave the then equivalent of
$820 million to charity, around the same as the government's health and education budget at the time.
There are no numbers on how rising terrorism and a poor economy have affected this philanthropy.

Edhi does not accept donations from international organizations or governments, including Pakistan's,
saying he doesn't need outside help and it is important for Pakistanis to help each other. He and his wife
live simply of the interest from some savings.

The foundation does not produce detailed financial statements or annual reports. Edhi points to a wall of
files in one office in which he says everything is accounted for. Donors do not seem to mind, such is their
trust in him.
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"You ask any Pakistani on the streets, Edhi is total credible with them," says Anjum Haque, the executive
director of the Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy. "The success of the trust is down to Edhi himself."

Last year, donations to Edhi-run charities totaled around $5 million, according to Faisal Edhi, the
founder's son and trust member. A significant chunk of the funds comes from overseas Pakistanis, who
want to donate to their homeland.

The lack of transparency has caused some concern among others in the charity sector in Pakistan. Faisal
Edhi acknowledges that some of their 13,000 employees - who receive very modest salaries - might skim
money off donations. There have also been questions raised about the lack of professionalism and
efficiency, specially as the foundation has grown.

Edhi Village, a 65-acre complex in the undulating hills beyond the northern slums of Karachi, is home to
300 children, many picked up off the streets, and 900 adults, many elderly or suffering from mental
disabilities.

Most wear clean, ironed clothes, and the food is fresh. Yet there are also signs of neglect. One naked
youth dragged himself through a puddle. Some had no shoes and begged visitors to buy them a pair.

The adults live in rooms around the size of three tennis courts, bare except for raised sections for
sleeping. They are locked inside for part of the day. There are two doctors, four nurses and two ward
boys looking after them.

"We do the most we can do with our resources," says Billal Mohammad, a regional Edhi manager. "They
would be living on the pavement under the sky. We give them shelter, food and treatment. You must not
see this place throughout Western eyes."

Edhi has made no secret of his dislike of Pakistan's ruling class. So it was a surprise to see a gaggle of
politicians using one of his orphanages in Karachi as a venue to mark the recent birthday of President
Asif Ali Zardari.

The visitors spooned cake into the mouths of the children, shouted political slogans for television cameras
and asked Edhi to be photographed next to them. He said he only let the politicians in so the children
would have a party to enjoy.

"So what if the politicians are using me? They even use God," said Edhi, who sat by himself for most of
the event. "Landowners, clerics, politicians. They are all looters. There is no fear in telling the truth."

Hardline Islamist groups have criticized Edhi for his progressive views on women and the secular nature
of his work. Some have said that by accepting newly born babies from unmarried mothers, he is
promoting premarital ***.

"We meet them and we read their newspapers. They say we are non-Muslims, unbelievers and
communists," says Faisal Edhi. "The jihadi groups don't like us. They don't believe in humanity."
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There are questions about what will happen to the foundation when Edhi dies. He says his two sons and
three daughters will take over, though without him at the helm, people may not give as generously.

For now, his children appear more concerned about their father's health. Apart from an afternoon nap, he
works just as hard as he did when he was in his 30s, they say.

"We tell him to take it easy, but he doesn't listen," says daughter Almas Edhi. "He wants to keep busy."


In this photo taken on July 24, 2010, humanitarian leader Abdul Sattar Edhi, left, has a meal with children
living in one of his charity houses in Karachi, Pakistan. Edhi is a devout Muslim, but critical of Islamic
clerics in general, not just extremists. He says they focus on ritual, preaching hellfire and defending the
faith against imagined enemies, rather than helping the poor _ which he says should be the cornerstone
of all faiths. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil)


This Aug. 2, 2010 picture shows humanitarian leader Abdul Sattar Edhi as he sits on the side of a road in
Peshawar, Pakistan to collect money for flooding victims. Edhi is a devout Muslim, but critical of Islamic
clerics in general, not just extremists. He says they focus on ritual, preaching hellfire and defending the
faith against imagined enemies, rather than helping the poor _ which he says should be the cornerstone
of all faiths. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)


In this photo taken on July 24, 2010 humanitarian leader Abdul Sattar Edhi, kisses an orphan child living
in one of his charity centers in Karachi, Pakistan. Edhi is a devout Muslim, but critical of Islamic clerics in
general, not just extremists. He says they focus on ritual, preaching hellfire and defending the faith
against imagined enemies, rather than helping the poor _ which he says should be the cornerstone of all
faiths. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil) (Shakil Adil - AP)


In this photo taken on Aug. 2, 2101 humanitarian leader Abdul Sattar Edhi sits on the side of a road in
Peshawar, Pakistan to collect money for flooding victims. Edhi is a devout Muslim, but critical of Islamic
clerics in general, not just extremists. He says they focus on ritual, preaching hellfire and defending the
faith against imagined enemies, rather than helping the poor _ which he says should be the cornerstone
of all faiths. Edhi has been helping the destitute and sick for more than 60 years. (AP Photo/Anjum
Naveed) (Anjum Naveed - AP)



In this photo taken on July 24, 2010, Belquees Begum, wife of humanitarian leader Abdul Sattar Edhi,
takes care of children living in an Edhi charity home in Karachi, Pakistan. Edhi is a devout Muslim, but
critical of Islamic clerics in general, not just extremists. He says they focus on ritual, preaching hellfire and
defending the faith against imagined enemies, rather than helping the poor _ which he says should be the
cornerstone of all faiths. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil)


In this photo taken on July 24, 2010, Belquees Begum, wife of humanitarian leader Abdul Sattar Edhi,
takes care of children living in an Edhi charity home in Karachi, Pakistan. Edhi is a devout Muslim, but
critical of Islamic clerics in general, not just extremists. He says they focus on ritual, preaching hellfire and
defending the faith against imagined enemies, rather than helping the poor _ which he says should be the
cornerstone of all faiths. (AP Photo/Shakil Adil) (Shakil Adil - AP)

Aging philanthropist is Pakistan's Mother Teresa

Source: http://defence.pk/threads/abdul-sattar-edhi-washington-post-report.70947/#ixzz3AjcE9axl