Meet Doctor Joanne Liu
The amazingly courageous woman who leads Doctors Without Borders
A Canadian physician who risks her life to save the world.
"A rare visible minority in a city that was and is overwhelmingly white, Dr. Liu, 48, was bullied mercilessly in grade school, from minor teasing to racist taunts and pushes and punches. “It shapes your mind, consciously or unconsciously. When I was young, I would tell myself it’s not because I’m different I won’t be as good. I always made a huge deal of being good at everything. That’s how I coped with it. You react by overperforming, or underperforming.”
Inspired by reading Camus’s The Plague and Jean-Pierre Willem’s memoir of working in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Dr. Liu decided in her early teens she would become a physician who treats the world’s poorest patients. She trained at McGill University and obtained specialties in pediatrics and emergency medicine with those goals in mind.
In 1993, when she was doing an internship in intensive care at Sainte-Justine, her supervising physician, Dr. Joaquim Miro, invited her to her first MSF meeting. Three years later, she would complete her first mission to a refugee camp in Mauritania...
She went on to serve in war zones such as Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and other disaster zones, such as Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. She’s frequently been under fire over the years, has slept with boots on for a quick escape, and worked undercover in Syria in the past year to avoid being kidnapped."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...ticle21183104/