Doing our work

Audre Lorde wrote: "...I am myself -- a Black woman warrior poet doing my work -- come to ask you, are you doing yours?" Alas I fall short of that. I am not doing my work. I haven't quite figured out what my work is. So I am drawn to stories of people who most certainly have found their work and are doing it.

On NPR today there was a profile on a couple in Karuchi, Pakistan (interesting: the way the article is titled and framed, it is about the husband; the way I read the story, it is about both of them). They run the largest social service network in Pakistan--so far this year, they have raised $36 million to serve the city's poor. Their efforts include running two maternity wards, burying the city's unidentified dead, placing children with adoptive families, assisting families displaced by fighting in the Swat valley, and advocating for prison reform. The NPR story is embedded below.

Abdul Sattar Edhi and Bilquis Edhi

"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.