Words by Abi Scaife
“My father said his aim was to reach about 10 million people in his lifetime,” says Dr Matee Rajput. As well as being a hair transplant surgeon based in the UK, Dr Matee, along with his family, set up the Samr Trust - a charity dedicated to improving the quality of life for people around the world.
Dr Matee’s family, in particular his father, have always been keen on giving back and did so informally until his father sadly passed away from COVID-19. Along with his late father and brother, Dr Matee has always been dedicated to performing charity work on an ad-hoc basis, until eventually they decided to make it bigger.
“We decided to formalise it, and set something up so that other members of the public other people can contribute.” Thus, the Samr Trust was born.
“Samr means ‘fruit’ in Arabic - it's the fruit of whatever you put in, and the whole society benefits and reaps all the hard work that you do,” explains Dr Matee. “It's also an abbreviation of family members who have passed away that helped us to get where we are now. That's how my father came up with the name.”
The Samr Trust’s flagship work is around providing people with access to clean drinking water, including building wells in rural, desert areas where water is a limited resource. Dr Matee estimates that, so far, they have likely impacted around three and a half million people, just from their clean drinking water initiatives.
“We started with, water wells. For the last 13 years now, we've really reached people with our water wells,” explains Dr Matee. “This is mainly through contribution from friends and family members, and our close network of professionals and people who just want to do some charity work.”
Alongside their wells, which can provide 5-10 houses with clean water, the Samr Trust has begun building water filtration plants, which can provide clean water for up to 20,000 people.
“[My father] also noticed that a lot of the widows or women who've lost their husbands or families where there's no male, in male-dominated societies, didn't have any breadwinners in the family,” adds Dr Matee. “So we did was set up sewing classes, and women education and empowerment classes where they can start earning money themselves.”
The Samr Trust works in multiple different countries, cultures, with people of all different races and walks of life, meeting them where they are at every time. Their ultimate goal is to improve the quality of life for everyone that they can, whether that is through improved access to water, to education, or even to food.
Their current, long-term project involves creating a hospital in Pakistan that would enable better access to treatment, medication and regular medical care for people in the surrounding area. Something like this would be incredible for the area, and was a dream of the late Maulana Sana Ullah Sialkoti (RA) who bought the land for the hospital by selling his home.
“We do food distribution programs in the winter periods, when it's really cold in the mountains in Kashmir or in very rural parts where people find it really hard to get access to food for months,” says Dr Matee. “Our current distribution packs have enough supplies to last a family of three or four for about three months.”
“We do the same thing in the desert in the summer months, taking the financial burden off the family.”
Dr Matee is also incredibly passionate about helping children into education - and over the last decade, he has seen some incredible stories.
“We put orphans into private school education so that they get educated and can bring that change in their local community,” says Dr Matee. “One of the girls now she's a professor at a university because she was put in the right environment.
You give that start to any children, they can achieve their way all the way to the top. And now she's clearly not just transformed her family. She's transformed the whole village where she comes from because they see her as an example.”
The Samr Trust is an example of an incredible charity that is dedicated to wholistically helping our world to improve by impacting the lives of others.
“We empower people and we educate them, so they can help others”
You can learn more about the Samr Trust and how to support them by visiting their website here. For more information on their hospital project, visit the Samr Trust Hospital website here.
At Smiley Movement, we like to elevate the work of charities across the world. Here are three charities whose causes align with the themes in this article.
The British Red Cross. This charity helps people in crisis, whoever and wherever they are. They are part of a global voluntary network, responding to conflicts. Support them here.
CARE International UK. CARE is there to help people when they need it most. They are one of the world's leading humanitarian agencies, delivering life-saving assistance when disaster strikes. Find out more here.
Goods for Good. This is an organisation which offers global humanitarian aid by transporting donations such as industry overstock from generous partners to help communities in need. Learn more here.
