THE POWER OF CONSTRUCTIVE WORK
In May 1990, gunfire erupted on a street in Karachi. Shots were being fired from both sides. People were being wounded, and bodies lay on the ground. Muhajirs and Sindhis were exchanging fire with Kalashnikov rifles. Even the police, terrified, had withdrawn.
Suddenly, the sound of a siren broke through the chaos. An ambulance sped onto the street. As soon as it appeared, both sides stopped shooting. The ambulance pulled up, and its staff lifted the dead and injured into the vehicle. During this entire process, the fighting paused. But once the ambulance drove away, the same people resumed firing as though they were sworn enemies.
This was the work of Abdul Sattar Edhi (1928-2016) of Karachi. Through 30 years of selfless service, he had earned such respect that wherever he went, even rioters and terrorists bowed before him.
Edhi’s formal education ended after the sixth grade. In 1947, he migrated from Junagadh to Pakistan, where he took up small jobs to make a living. Soon, he noticed how weak the ambulance system was in Pakistan. His spirit of service grew stronger. With loans and donations, he bought an old truck, covered it with cloth, and began using it as an ambulance.
He dedicated himself to taking the injured and sick to hospitals and carrying unclaimed bodies to cemeteries. Seeing his sincerity and hard work, people began to support him. He bought more ambulances. Today, his fleet includes 350 vehicles, all equipped with sirens, radios, and oxygen cylinders. He also purchased two helicopters to reach those in distant areas.
Along with this, he set up hospitals, maternity homes, orphanages, and other welfare centers. Recently, he acquired 11 acres of land to bring all his services together in one place. The site will also have a field for landing and housing helicopters.
Thirty years earlier, Edhi had been so poor that when his mother fell ill, he had neither the money for medicine nor the means to take her to a hospital. She died in great pain. But her death gave him new purpose. The shock made him realize how many poor people must suffer in the same way, with no one to help them.
He resolved to create a welfare organization to serve those in need. Thirty years ago, he began this institution in the simplest of circumstances. Today, it has grown so much that its annual budget is 120 million rupees. The man who once could not afford medicine for his dying mother now provides food and clothing for 7,500 people at his center.
Abdul Sattar Edhi received the international Magsaysay Award. In June 1989, the widely read American magazine Reader’s Digest published a feature praising him, summarized in the February 1990 issue of Al-Risala. On 30 June 1990, New Delhi’s India Today published a seven-page illustrated report with the headline:
Pakistan’s Father Teresa.
Constructive work has an irresistible appeal. If you truly set an example of constructive action, people will be compelled to acknowledge it—even your fiercest opponents.
For Edhi, one possible path was the example set by shallow leaders in both India and Pakistan: politics of slogans and banners against the “system.” He could have started a third-rate newspaper, publishing sensational headlines about people’s suffering. He could have launched campaigns demanding action from government institutions. He could have gathered angry young crowds who, in the name of protest, burned buses and set hospitals on fire.
Another path was the one followed by so-called Islamic activists. They marched in the streets shouting slogans like “Establish the Islamic system,” creating the same atmosphere of hatred and conflict between the people and the government that today’s Islamists have irresponsibly spread everywhere.
Had Edhi chosen such methods, he would only have increased his country’s problems in the name of solving them. Instead, he decided to take direct responsibility. No matter how small his work seemed, he chose to begin action himself.
The result of this decision was that, forty years later, he built a constructive legacy in Pakistan—recognized from India to America. In the same period, other leaders of his country created nothing but destruction.
