Artist: Yaruk Mehmood
Portrait of Dr. Ruth Pfau at GI Karachi
Yaruk Mehmood is a young Karachi based artist, he is studying IT and received his fine arts education from Sikander Jogi. His main research is on human portraits and anatomy study.
Actively participating in different group art shows to his credit, recently he has worked in PWF, Munaqash, Kurray say Art banao events. He uses charcoal and graphite medium in his portraits.
By Zoya Ahmed
Dr Ruth Katherina Martha Pfau (9 September 1929 – 10 August 2017) was a German-born Pakistani physician and nun of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She moved from Germany to Pakistan and devoted more than 50 years of her life fighting leprosy in Pakistan. Known as "Pakistan's Mother Teresa", Pfau contributed in establishing 157 leprosy clinics across Pakistan, which treated over 56,780 people.
Dr. Ruth Katharina Martha Pfau was born in Leipzig, Germany. She grew up seeing the horrors of the Second World War (1939-1945) during which her city was bombed and her home destroyed. When the war ended, millions of people had been killed or went missing. Her country, in a state of ruins was finally divided into East Germany and West Germany. In 1948 she had to cross the demarcation line illegally from East Germany (then under Russian occupation) to West Germany to pursue her education as a medical student. In the 1950s she studied medicine at the universities of Mainz and Marburg in West Germany. After her graduation she joined the catholic order of the 'Daughters of the Heart of Mary'.
She left her native country Germany and stopped in Karachi on her way to India on 8th March 1960. She was being sent to a Mission Station in India by her Congregation but due to some visa problems she broke journey in Karachi and here she was introduced to the leprosy work. On her first visit to the Leprosy patient’s colony at McLeod Road (now I. I. Chundrigar Road) she got so depressed with the situation that she resolved on the spot to join the group and help the affected Leprosy patients.
In 1961 she went to Vellore, South India to acquire training in the management of Leprosy. She then returned to Karachi to organize and expand the Leprosy Control Programme. In 1965, she and Dr. Zarina Fazelbhoy, a Pakistani dermatologist initiated the training programme for paramedical workers. 1971, she had, in cooperation with the Provincial Governments, completed the network of treatment and control units in the Leprosy affected Provinces (Balochistan, Sindh, NWFP), Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir, traveling to every nook and corner of the country. 1979, she was appointed Federal Advisor on Leprosy to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Government of Pakistan. In 1996, she managed to control Leprosy in the country.
In 2006, she gave over to her successor, the Chief Executive Officer of MALC.
She has authored four books in German about her work in Pakistan and neighbouring Afghanistan, where she first went in 1984. One of these books, 'To Light a Candle' was translated into English in 1987.
Dr Ruth Pfau is well respected by the Muslims in Pakistan, as the Muslims are the majority of patients in the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre. She never talked about religions, yet "her faith, service, and love" showed actual representations of the spirit to animate interreligious relation. In 2018 her private residence in Karachi is being converted into a museum to showcase some of her personal possessions.
Dr. Pfau is recognised in Pakistan and abroad as a distinguished human being and had been awarded many awards and medals. On 23 March 1989, Pfau received the Hilal-i-Pakistan award presented by the then-President of Pakistan Ghulam Ishaq Khan at the President House for her work with leprosy patients. Speaking at a function in Islamabad on 30 January 2000, to mark the 47th World Leprosy Day, the then-President Rafiq Tarar praised Pfau, who built up the National Leprosy Control Program in Pakistan, for working not only for those afflicted with leprosy, but also for those with tuberculosis.
On 14 August 2010, on the occasion of Pakistan's Independence Day, the then-President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari awarded Pfau the Nishan-i-Quaid-i-Azam for public service. She was hailed as Pakistan's "Mother Teresa" after her work towards helping people displaced by the 2010 Pakistan floods In 2015, Pfau was awarded the Staufer Medal, the highest award of the German state of Baden-Württemberg.
On 19 August 2017, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah announced renaming of the Civil Hospital Karachi to Dr. Ruth Pfau Hospital as an acknowledgment of "selfless services of the late social servant