Bilquis Edhi
| Bilquis Edhi | |
|---|---|
| Born |
14 August 1947 Karachi, Pakistan |
| Citizenship | Pakistani |
| Education | Vocational |
| Occupation | Nurse & Philanthropist |
| Spouse(s) | Abdul Sattar Edhi |
| Children | Two sons and two daughters |
Bilquis Bano Edhi (Hilal-e-Imtiaz) (Urdu: بلقیس ایدھی, born August 14, 1947), widow of Abdul Sattar Edhi, is a professional nurse and one of the most active philanthropists in Pakistan. She has been named The Mother of Pakistan. She was born in 1947 in Karachi. She heads the Edhi Foundation, and with her husband received the 1986 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service. In 2015, she received the Mother Teresa Memorial International Award for Social Justice. Her charity runs many services in Pakistan including a hospital and emergency service in Karachi. Together with her husband their charity has saved over 16,000 unwanted babies. Her husband, Abdul Sattar Edhi, died on 8 July 2016.
Bilques Edhi was born in the city of Bantva which is now in the State of Gujarat in western India. When she was a teenager she was not enjoying school and managed to join a small expanding dispensary as a nurse in 1965. At the time the Edhi home was in the old city area of Karachi known as Mithadar where it had been founded in 1951. The small number of Christian and Hindu nurses who worked there had just reduced in number. The founder, Abdul Sattar Edhi, recruited a number of nurses including Bilquis who, unusually, was from a Muslim background.
Her future husband proposed to her after recognizing her talents and allowing her to lead the small nursing department. He had recognized her enthusiasm and interest during her six-month training program where she had learnt basic midwifery and healthcare. They were married when she was seventeen and her husband was nearly twenty years older. Their honeymoon was unusual in that the newlyweds discovered a young girl with head injuries at their dispensary just after their wedding ceremony. Edhi said in 1989 that she did not regret the time lost in consoling the twelve year old's concerned relatives or supervising blood transfusions as now "... that girl is married with children; that's what is really important." The Edhi Foundation's unofficial website uses the line "Making a difference and changing lives forever".
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