EDMONTON - When Abdullah Saleh was a child in Paris, he walked past a sign that announced, “Dogs welcome. Arabs not allowed.”
He asked his mother about the message.
“She told me, ‘People’s intolerance is because of their ignorance.’ ”
Saleh, 28, has spent his life fighting ignorance and promoting tolerance wherever he goes in the world. And he goes far.
A University of Alberta medical school graduate, he’s a third-year surgical resident. Hospital training keeps him busy, as much as 100 hours a week. In his “spare” time, he has a second life — as a global social activist.
He’s co-founder and chief executive director of a nimble, iconoclastic Edmonton-based development agency, Innovative Canadians for Change. It’s a small group of volunteers who share expertise on quietly radical development projects that tackle poverty, not with big-budget infrastructure but with creative thinking and entrepreneurial drive.
Saleh comes by his global outlook honestly. He was born in Iraq, but moved to France when he was two, where his father completed a PhD in petroleum engineering. When he was nine, the family returned to Baghdad.
“My parents didn’t want us to lose touch with our Arab roots. But Saddam Hussein was in power and it was a pretty difficult and dangerous time. In Paris, we’d faced racism and discrimination. In Iraq, it was dictatorship and tyrannical rule.”
The family relocated to Kuala Lumpur, where Saleh learned English. But Malaysia didn’t offer permanent citizenship. So in 2000, his family emigrated to Calgary, where Saleh completed high school, and a science degree at the University of Calgary. He spent months in Ecuador, volunteering at a pediatric hospital, and fighting human trafficking. He also realized how much death and disease was caused by the lack of safe drinking water.
In medical school, he made a best friend, Abraam Isaac. They became so inseparable that classmates joked they were really the same person. Together, they started work on a water purification project. Enlisting the help of Edmonton potter Lorris Williams and U of A microbiology professor Mike Belosevic, they engineered a cheap but surprisingly effective ceramic filter — fired clay pots lined with colloidal silver.
They chose rural Kenya to pioneer their idea. Using their own money — and stretching their Visa credit limits — they built a small factory, and trained local Kenyans to make the pots. The pots are sold cheaply, on a not-for-profit basis, through local stores. ICChange also sells the pots on a wholesale basis to local women to sell as micro-entrepreneurs.
The pot project was just the beginning. Working with Williams and with Frank Weichman, a U of A professor emeritus of physics, they developed a small, extremely fuel-efficient ceramic stove. They introduced the stove to the Kenyan factory, then brought the technique to Burmese refugees in camps on the Thai border. Now, says Saleh, the Burmese buy clay from the Thai villagers, make the ceramic stoves, and sell them back to the Thais — creating a mutually beneficial relationship, which has helped to smooth community tensions.
Saleh didn’t stop there. In Kenya, he saw far too many rival aid agencies building medical clinics ——clinics that often competed for patients and duplicated efforts.
“They didn’t need more infrastructure. Building them another clinic wouldn’t do anything for them.”
He and his friends decided the country really needed an online medical records system. With the help of a $100,000 grant from the Harper government’s Grand Challenges program, ICChange created an electronic medical records system for the Kibera slum outside Nairobi, the third-largest slum in the world. They now have two clinics as part of the network, with a third about to join.
Saleh just returned this week from another trip to Kenya, this time to meet with the Kenyan Red Cross to pitch his next big idea: an advanced trauma life-support training program for nurses and doctors outside of the country’s big hospitals, to teach them how to stabilize trauma patients, for safer transport to hospital.
Saleh and his teammates have been recognized for their work by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and hobnobbed with Bill Clinton as part of the Clinton Global Initiative. And just this month, Saleh was honoured with a Queen’s Jubilee Medal.
On Wednesday, he’ll be speaking about the Kibera project as part of the U of A’s International Week. But mostly, he says, the pleasure of solving problems, meeting people and having adventures is its own reward.
“Why do I do this, instead of getting rich? Isn’t the point of getting rich to be content? I don’t think we get richer by having more money. I think you calculate your level of richness by contentment.”
Juggling his workload is stressful — but not as stressful, he insists, as being bored or unfulfilled. With so many many ideas buzzing in his brain to improve health care delivery, it’s sometimes hard for him to keep his “suggestions” to himself.
“I get in trouble all the time, like crazy,” he laughs.
“There are lots of lessons that stepping outside of our reality can teach us. The lessons I’m learning by overcoming challenges in some of the world’s poorest places have given me a lot of ideas about how to reform our own health care system.”
Abdullah Saleh and his Innoative Canadians for Change team will be speaking about their work in the Kibera slum at part of International Week at the University of Alberta. Their free lecture takes place Wednesday, Jan. 30, at 1 p.m., in Room 217 of the U of A Telus Centre. To read more about U of A International Week, go to edmontonjournal.com/Paulatics
To read more about International Week, go to Paula’s blog at edmontonjournal.com/Paulatics