Abdul Sattar Edhi

It was 1957, in Karachi, Pakistan.

An Asian flu epidemic was sweeping the city. A young man bought an ambulance with money people had given him.

It was the first. One day, there would be more than eighteen hundred.

The man's name was Abdul Sattar Edhi.

He was born on February 28, 1928, in Bantva, in Gujarat, India. His family was Muslim, from the Memon community.

His mother had taught him to love people and to care for them.

When he was about eleven, she fell gravely ill. She was paralysed. The boy became the one who looked after her, every day.

She died when he was nineteen. He thought then of all the sick people who had no one to care for them.

At the time of the Partition of India, his family left for Karachi. For a while, the young man sold cloth in the street.

Then he stopped. He began to beg, not for himself, but to open a free dispensary.

He founded a welfare centre, with a maternity home and an ambulance service. It was the Edhi Trust.

In 1965, he married Bilquis, a nurse. She ran the maternity home. She organized the adoption of abandoned babies.

Outside Edhi centres across the country, there were cradles. A baby could be left there.

More than 20,000 children have been registered in Pakistan with Edhi's name as their father.

His ambulances also carried the dead.

One day, someone asked him why he also carried the bodies of Hindus and Christians. His answer, as reported: because his ambulance was more Muslim than the person asking.

Words are also attributed to him:

He said that empty words and long phrases do not impress God.

He himself lived in a single room, with a small kitchen, at the foundation's headquarters in Karachi. He owned only two sets of clothes. He never took a salary.

The foundation lived on private donations from Pakistani citizens.

In 1997, it had the largest private fleet of ambulances in the world. Over time, it grew to more than 1,800 ambulances and 335 centres.

For ten years, the foundation sheltered Geeta, a young deaf and mute Indian girl. In October 2015, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, offered ten million rupees. Edhi refused.

In early 2016, he refused to be treated abroad. He chose to be treated in Pakistan.

Abdul Sattar Edhi died in Karachi on July 8, 2016, of kidney failure. He was eighty-eight.

Pakistan gave him a state funeral, the first in thirty years. The prayer was held at the National Stadium in Karachi. He was buried at Edhi Village, on the edge of the city.

Even after death, he gave. His corneas went to two blind people.

His ambulances did not ask the religion of the dead. That way of living echoes Ubuntu without being the same thing: we are only fully human by caring for others.

He left cradles outside the Edhi centres.

And a fleet of ambulances, born from a single one.