Awakening Doctor
The Awakening Doctor podcast explores the personal stories of those who work in the medical and health professions. Each episode aims to highlight the humanity of an individual doctor or healer, and thereby challenge and transform social perceptions of the profession and the individuals who practice it. Join Dr. Maria Christodoulou as she meets with colleagues, leaders, and educators in healthcare to reveal the human side of being a medical professional.
Awakening Doctor
Dr Yumna Moosa, Truth-Teller
In this episode of Awakening Doctor, we meet Dr Yumna Moosa, a clinician-scientist, mathematician, mother, activist, and truth-teller.
Fresh from her PhD graduation, Yumna speaks with striking honesty about navigating motherhood and dealing with the breakdown of her marriage while completing her studies. She reflects on how trauma can disrupt even the most resilient among us, and how the love and support of family and friends helped her to reclaim her vibrant, fiery self.
She also recounts taking a public stand against bullying and harassment as a medical intern, and the price she paid for speaking truth to power. Together, we explore the uncomfortable reality that junior doctors face many of the same challenges even today, and reflect on what it means to pursue excellence in medicine without being dehumanised.
Amidst the seriousness, Yumna shares the passions that keep her grounded in joy - from motherhood, dancing and capoeira to mathematics, teaching and the celebration of learning. Join us for a heartfelt conversation about resilience, courage, and the power of truth-telling.
If you enjoy these conversations and would like to support this work, please consider donating to our podcast fund using the link above. Your contribution helps us cover production costs and keep bringing you great content. No amount is too small and your support means the world to us. Thank you for listening!
Host:
Dr Maria Christodoulou
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Disclaimer: The views and experiences shared are those of the individual guest and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or the Awakening Doctor podcast. All accounts are personal and have not been independently verified. No responsibility is assumed for the accuracy or completeness of the information shared.
Welcome. I'm Dr Maria Christodoulou, and this is the Awakening Doctor podcast, a space where we discover the personal stories of those who work in the medical and health professions. Join me as I explore the hopes, the fears, the aspirations and the real-life challenges of those who carry the title, responsibility and privilege of being a doctor. Joining me today is Dr Yumna Moosa, clinician-scientist, mathematician and truth-teller, whose interests span medicine, microbiology, bioinformatics, motherhood, activism and the ethical use of AI, amongst many other things. Welcome, Yumna, it's wonderful to have you with me here today.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Thanks, Maria, I'm really excited to be here.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I want to start by saying congratulations. Y ou graduated with your PhD the other day.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I did, I did.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:How was that for you?
Dr Yumna Moosa:I was on a high. I'm coming down a little bit now, but it was...
Dr Maria Christodoulou:When was your graduation?
Dr Yumna Moosa:1 4th of May.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:That's literally two weeks ago.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yeah, so it's quite recent, but it was such, such an adulterated joy. I didn't know that I was going to succeed. It was a very difficult journey. It was a very difficult few years, both academically and life wise. And so then, having reached the point that it's done, that it's finished, that I've got it, like, the degree is mine. Such, such deep joy. It sounds braggy what I'm about to say. Um, I've always taken my academic abilities for granted. I haven't really struggled academically. Medicine was fine, school was fine, my master's even was fine. I started it with reasonable sureness, with reasonable comfort that I would finish it and succeed. This wasn't the same.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:In what way?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Gosh, where to start? There were numerous life challenges, which perhaps we'll get a chance to speak about, but also academically, a PhD... there isn't... There aren't questions that, there isn't a framework, that you must learn the knowledge and then spew it back. I can do that.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I can give examiners what they want. I can figure out what somebody wants from me and give it to them. That's different with a PhD. You have to find your own question, you have to answer your own question, you have to make your own contribution. And so you don't know that you're going to get the right answer. And maybe you don't get the right answer, it's just not so certain.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So is the point, do you think, to get a right answer, or is it to ask the question?
Dr Yumna Moosa:I think it's to ask the question and to answer it with rigour. But, like I said, it's fundamentally different to what I know I'm very good at doing, which is figuring out what somebody wants me to say and then say it to them, and then they're like clap, clap, clap, clap. Well done, you said what you're supposed to say.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So now, to be on the other side of a journey where you had to come up with your own question and answer it with rigour for yourself, what does that mean?
Dr Yumna Moosa:I love science, I love being driven fundamentally by curiosity. It makes me feel alive. But the other thing I want to do is I also want to teach. So the combination of those two things. It's trying to figure out what comes next, and that's the stage I'm in.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So it's an interesting threshold, kind of like who you were and who you thought you were going to be, and now this potential of who you might become.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes, it's a really wonderful moment. This conversation comes at a really beautiful moment in my professional journey. I mean, I think there are many moments of infinite possibility, but this feels like another one. It feels like a moment that I can turn in any direction I wish.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Very exciting place to be. When we spoke last time, you told me that you were not planning to go to your graduation.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes, I was not planning to go to my graduation because I thought it was silly. And you're going to sit there for a few hours while people walk across the stage. And my mom convinced me to go because she and my dad wanted to sit in the audience and clap. Right. Good for them. And so they did. And we went and I sat in the audience and they clapped, and my mother was right and I was wrong.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Is she allowed to hear that?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Is my mother allowed to hear me say that? Yes, absolutely. It's something in my growing older. I am realizing more the ways in which she is right and I am wrong, and so increasingly acknowledging that that is okay.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So what did it mean for you to actually cross the stage that day and have them in the audience clapping for you?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Oh, it was so wonderful. It was such a beautiful marking of a moment. And also the UKZN graduation just has so much flavour, it has so much Africanness that the UCT grad I don't remember having. People dancing across the stage, mothers coming in and dancing, trying to dance on the stage and having the security guards holding them back. It was wild. People singing, people stomping, people crying. It was so much feeling, so much humanity in it. I was expecting to sit there and be like...
Dr Yumna Moosa:But there was a lot more and I was so happy to be part of it. When I went to return my gown, because you wear gown and the funny hat and all those things and I went to return it.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:The wizard's outfit.
Dr Yumna Moosa:The wizard's outfit, yes. So I went to return it. And then, when I went to return it, I bought it. And I bought it for two reasons, and the one reason is, I couldn't bear the thought of my child not seeing me in aforementioned wizard's outfit, b ecause he's a Harry Potter fan.
Dr Yumna Moosa:And the other reason was in that moment, in that day, I just felt like I wanted to be a professor. I want to teach, I want to do work that allows and enables other people learning. Also, I want other people to have the experience that I had. And the other thing I really like about graduation: it's a celebration of learning, and I'm not a huge fan of formalised religion. Faith is important to me, God's important to me, spirituality is important to me. You can use a variety of language to describe it, but I think in that moment, in that ritual of celebrating learning, I found something I believe in. Because I do believe in that, I believe in humans applying ourselves and our minds and pursuing our curiosity to learn about the world that we are in. It ended up being really meaningful. My mom was right.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:That's amazing. I have this image of you in your wizard's outfit and wondering how your seven-year-old reacted to that.
Dr Yumna Moosa:He was nonplussed. He was like, oh okay, and then he went off to play with his cousins.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You can't be both mom and wizard.
Dr Yumna Moosa:N o, no, it was not possible. But I did get some beautiful pictures of him with me. I had a party after. When I came back to Cape Town, because the graduation was in Durban and I had a party, I donned my outfit and got some nice pictures with my son.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Nice. So motherhood in and amongst finishing medical school, doing a PhD.
Dr Yumna Moosa:So motherhood was I was pregnant in community service and then finished my master's in his first year of life and then started the PhD in his second, well, one and a half year of life. So it was quite a time. But then the other thing was that my child's father became very unwell in the second, second year of phd, somewhere around then, and our lives became quite chaotic, including some really chaotic behaviour, some violence, us having to leave our home for a time, and then in March 2020, it was COVID. So then there was a global pandemic and in that time, more acrimony, more hostility, and we were divorced in November 2020. At this point I was in Cape Town, because my family's all in Cape Town and I was at the stage of the PhD that I could do it from here. To the extent that that was possible, because obviously it's lockdown and so no help, and so I'm looking after a small baby while trying to do PhD. But yes, to the extent that it was possible, I could do it remotely and I did.
Dr Yumna Moosa:But then the following year or two after that, there were more court cases, there were variation orders, there were forensic assessments, there were the whole host. All the things that can happen when two people disagree about something happened, and it's a strange thing to speak about it. And we, we spoke about this more candidly when we weren't being recorded and you asked me a question that I found quite powerful. You said, only say things that you would feel fine for your son to hear, and I really, really liked that. It really helped me think about how I actually want to speak about these experiences going forward, because I don't want to not speak about them at all, because they were part of it. I am a survivor of gender-based violence. That is part of the story. I don't think it serves either him or my son or anyone, not admitting that, because it's so common.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It's so, so, so common and even having had this experience and then sharing it with other people, it's even more common than I realised.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:A nd I think it's often a dilemma in that we don't assume that someone who's a medical student, who's studying, who's doing her master's and her phd, who seemingly has it all together, might be dealing with something like that in her personal life or at home.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yeah, absolutely, and that's a big reason I I mentioned earlier that I didn't know that I was going to finish this degree and that that was a big, big part of it, and realizing the extent to which something like that... living under threat, living in terror... meant that I couldn't function academically and professionally, and the insight that it gave me. Knowing the statistics in our country, the degree of trauma and violence out there, how do we expect people to learn and perform? Because I'm really an academically strong person, I'm good at learning things, I'm good at answering questions, I'm good at passing exams.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And you have resources and means and a family that is supportive and loving.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Absolutely, like, I had everything stacked in my favour, like everything was on my side, and there were two or three years when I could not function. I couldn't think, I couldn't meet my own commitments to myself or my colleagues, because it was psychologically impossible. And so many people have to function under those conditions.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And looking back now, what do you think helped you to get through it?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Supportive people around me. M y family, my friends, my supervisors. We were so loved and were offered so much grace and kindness and forgiveness and space to not be okay, because I wasn't okay for a long time and it was difficult at the time. M y self-esteem, I couldn't perform, but the people around us made the space for that and I'm not there anymore, which is... It's emotional to speak about. But also, I recognise that my reality is just so... It's so different now, and what I want now, and also why I'm speaking about it more now is, I want more people to have that, and I want more people to know that it's okay to not be okay and you can recover afterwards, you can come back. It's possible.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I wasn't sure we would speak about this today, about your experience and your divorce. What's it like to talk about it?
Dr Yumna Moosa:There's a tightness in my chest, a shortness of breath, a tensing of my shoulders. T here's pain. It's easier to talk about the nice things. It's easier to not talk about the hard things. As I say that, that is why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because I want that to be part, not I want that to be part of the story. It is part of the story. It is part of this success. It's part of what makes this success so sweet that there were bitter, harsh, terrifying, uncertain moments.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So there might be a young woman out there today listening to this story, finding herself in a similar situation to the one you were in. What would you say to her?
Dr Yumna Moosa:It's funny that you ask me that question, because there's a Quranic verse and the translation is after hardship comes ease. Surely, after hardship comes ease. And that is an idea that pulled me through an extent like years of years, years of pain. I think the Christian equivalent of it is this too shall pass. There was a sort of again, a tightness in my chest when I said that, because there was a general practitioner that I saw quite early on. She was our family practitioner, so she... It was me and my then husband and our child were all consulting with her, and she said it to me. She said, this too shall pass, and I was so angry with her. I was like, that is not a helpful thing to say, and it's so funny to be on the other end when you ask me that question. That is honestly what came to mind, and I wonder whether that also speaks to we were joking about my mother and admitting that she was right and I was wrong and how... maybe there's something about the passage of time and the cycles of life that give us insights that we simply do not have at a particular moment. And so you say, what would I tell her? I'm not sure that there's anything that she would be able to hear. But what I think we need to do for her, the people around her, is I think we need to support her and forgive her and make the space for her to go through the journey that she's going through and come out the other side, because I don't think there's a right answer. I think when you're in it, there isn't a right way to be.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Even when I was in it and navigating all of the court cases and the battles and trying to be strategic and trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do, I was almost plagued by the idea that there's a right answer, plagued by the idea that if there's something I could do, then this would stop. If I could just figure it out, if I could get the correct diagnosis, if I could figure this out, then it would just unlock peace. But that's not how it works. I had to go through it.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I mean, even as you're speaking, I can feel the turmoil, I can feel the emotions. There's a sense of movement and energy and like I don't even know what the word is to describe it. Chaos.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Going back there, it comes back. It's not that long ago, actually.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:How long ago?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Divorced November 2020. So not too long ago.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You got married quite young. You were still a student then.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I got married the day after my last day of medical school, so 24 years old, 2012. Yeah, that's also another way in which this graduation had its had a different flavour, because that graduation was, I think my graduation was a few days before, so I got married in court, so that was the day after the last thing. But then we had a wedding party and the party was close to my MBChB graduation, so I think that was also a little bit overshadowed. The graduation was less of a big deal. And then my master's graduation I didn't go to because Sabah was a year old and it's really not a priority to walk across the stage and have somebody tap me on the head and say I dub thee Master of Medical Science. So this one, I really made the space for it.
Dr Yumna Moosa:And it was meaningful.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I described you earlier as a truth- teller and then I went on later to say I wasn't sure we would talk about this part of your story, and I find myself feeling quite relieved, in a weird way, that you've been willing to share about the story and also mindful of that how we tell the story is important, which brings me to something else that has happened in your past where truth-telling has kind of got you into trouble. So on the one hand, I want to honour and appreciate your courage in sharing about what's been happening for you, but then I also want us to look back at a previous time in your life where you told the truth and where it had consequences. Do you want to say a bit more about that, because I think you know what I'm talking about.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I do. S o you're probably referring to my YouTube video that I posted in 2016 about my experience of bullying and harassment during my internship, and I had made some recordings of the various meetings with hospital management and seniors at the hospital, where they essentially threatened to derail my career if I didn't retract my complaints about racism and sexism and sexually inappropriate behaviour.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So my understanding is, at the end of internship there's a logbook that one has to submit to provide evidence that you have completed a whole lot of procedures and met the requirements to graduate as a medical doctor, and in that logbook there's a section where you can provide some feedback about your experience as an intern. Exactly. And in that logbook you shared some feedback about experiences of racism and sexism in the hospital with your supervisors.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Exactly, and then the consequence was remove this, make your logbook disappear, or we won't sign your logbook and therefore you will not be qualified to practice medicine as an independent practitioner. And that is what ended up happening for a while, and I had to go to the Health Professions Council to complain about this. It was quite amazing. They came up retrospectively with issues of professional incompetence, including a substance abuse problem, which is a particularly impressive one because the most significant mind-altering substance I use is caffeine. I have never smoked a cigarette, I have never used cannabis, I don't drink alcohol. It was a really impressive claim.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So they made claims to infer that you were not competent.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes. That's why they were not signing off my logbook, not because they were threatening me to retract what I was saying. But this all developed over the kind of six to nine months after I had completed my internship. This is after I had completed the whole thing, 24 months of it and, being the stubborn person that I am, I refused to back down and I fought with them. I said no, I am not incompetent. And the harder I pushed back, the harder they... That's when these very strange allegations of incompetence came out. I was like okay, cool, like, I am imperfect, I would have made mistakes. I'm fresh out of medical school. I can absolutely get things wrong, but the claims you're making are silly. Like that's a silly claim. Make realistic claims. But they wouldn't have been able to make realistic claims because they weren't even paying enough attention to what I was or was not getting wrong.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Right, I'm aware that the entire time you've been talking about this and the same thing happened when you were talking about challenges of the last couple of years. There's a big smile on your face throughout.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes, my therapist has commented on that before. It's very difficult to go to the soul space. The smile is a protection. Joking is a protection. It makes it less scary, but it's actually very, very scary. It's extremely painful. I'm conscious that I'm not in it. I've said that before, but also today, this week, it is fresher than it was, in light of Dr. Mazwi's death, and the renewed focus on bullying. B ullying of interns and junior doctors. And for me, the hurt in my heart is, it's like 10 years after I made a fuss, how is it still happening to the point that someone can die?
Dr Yumna Moosa:A group of us went to the HPCSA stakeholder engagement yesterday to put that on the agenda, to ask the question, what is the HPCSA going to do about this? And some of the responses were what you perhaps would expect from the HPCSA, but also so painful. If I don't have a smile on my face, let me be honest. I don't know her name, but she was on the board. She said junior health care workers shouldn't allow themselves to be exploited, and I was like wait, wait, wait, wait. So are you arguing that we allow ourselves to be exploited? Because, really, coming back to what you said earlier about me having all the resources in the world. I have all the resources in the world and I fought this as hard as I could fight it, and the best the HPCSA could do for me in my case, was quietly allow me to re-register and proceed with my career, which I'm very grateful for. I'm grateful that I am now a really practicing doctor, happy about it, but we're not doing enough.
Dr Yumna Moosa:If people can still die, if people can say I'm sick, I can't come to work, and the supervisors can say I expect you to report for duty and for the tone of the space to be such that this person's capacity for self-protection is so broken that they can die. And even today, I had a conversation with senior colleagues formerly involved with the HPCSA and that I knew from their involvement with my difficulties, whatever. And he had this comment that was something like, well, it's really complicated, you can't know what really happened. F ine, but somebody is dead. A person who said I am too sick to come to work is dead. How much evidence do we need for it to not be too complicated?
Dr Yumna Moosa:We saw the WhatsApp chat, we saw the interaction where Dr. Mazwi said I'm too sick to come to work, and his consultant says I expect you to report for duty. We've all seen that. So how complicated is this? And I think part of the problem actually is the fact that we focus on maybe it's finding the right person to blame, and then everyone must defend themselves. Now, the consultant must defend themselves, the hospital must defend themselves.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:A nd it's an isolated thing.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:It's that consultant. If we take that consultant out of the picture, then this won't happen again.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes, and I know in my heart that that is not true, because I felt this and numerous other people over this 10-year period have felt it and have communicated with me, and we have supported each other through their journeys. We know that it's not an isolated incident. It's the way that it works.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And when you say it's the way that it works, what is it?
Dr Yumna Moosa:It's the culture of the profession.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:But we are the profession. So what do you think it is that creates that culture?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Early punitiveness, harshness, criticalness and I want to make the distinction between criticalness and excellence, because I believe in excellence, I believe in hard work, I believe in struggle, but if we break people down in the formative years of joining the profession, we shouldn't be surprised that we grow up into people and doctors and seniors who treat other people badly.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:That's one of the things that has puzzled me. I was a medical student between 1985 and 1990. I graduated in 1990. And many years later, when I got appointed to go back to the medical school and be part of faculty and teach, one of the things that I really was passionate about was contributing in some way to changing the culture so that no medical student felt the isolation, the loneliness, the depression; that no other medical student went through that same struggle. And I spent time doing research, I interviewed students, I gave feedback to faculty, I worked as the relational transformation coach. I was part of teams of people with good intention and drive and initiatives to make change. I was part of conversations about curriculum reform. Good people with lots of power and authority in the system are working really hard to change this and it doesn't change. And then young students, junior doctors, go through this and then five or 10 years from now, they are going to be the cohort that junior doctors are saying my consultant is whatever, and there's abuse and there's bullying. How do the abused become the abuser? I guess is part of my question and the other side of it is also, and I don't expect an answer, but there's something around...
Dr Maria Christodoulou:We are told that, from the moment we enter medical school, in fact, even before. J ust the fact that we are even thinking about applying to medical school puts us in some kind of elite category, and it's viewed that way by society. And it's viewed that way by us too. And each of us has our own motivation for going to medical school. I will go as far as to say that for many of us it's an unconscious motivation that comes from our own wounding or our own experience of life, our desire to fix things or help save the world, or whatever it may be. And then we start medical school and we are selected on the basis of our diversity, our academic performance, and our vision and passion for making a difference.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And then we are required to conform to a set graduate identity. We've got to meet certain requirements and we are told in my day and I think it still happens sometimes look to your left, look to your right, only one of you is going to be here at the end. First lecture, first day. So this culture of you're privileged, but you've got to do what we tell you. You have power, but don't speak too loudly. I have privilege, but as a junior doctor, I'm on the front line and I'm actually just cannon fodder. And then what is it that's wrong with me that I'm not functioning, not coping, feeling overwhelmed?
Dr Yumna Moosa:I'm deeply unsettled by what I'm about to say, but I do think this is true. I think a lot of medicine is a colonial enterprise. It dehumanises everyone. It dehumanises the practitioners, it dehumanises the patients. It is an arm of a coloniser. And so what do we do with that? Because I think healing is needed. Healing is a worthwhile pursuit. I believe science is a worthwhile pursuit. I believe learning is a worthwhile pursuit. I started this conversation by saying I enjoyed graduation because of a celebration of learning. I don't believe that learning is a colonial pursuit, but it does feel like medicine, as it is practiced, is.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Yeah, for me to understand that, to understand this culture of medicine that doesn't change despite the best efforts of very motivated and highly intelligent people, is that we need to go back to our roots. And if we look at the foundations of Western medicine in particular, it is colonialism, it's patriarchy, and it's the whole notion of health as the absence of disease, the body as a machine. Anything human, vulnerable, messy, chaotic needs to be controlled, regimented.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It's psychos omatic, it's not real.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:E xactly. B uilt on those foundations. And then even science as an entity, as much as it's a worthwhile pursuit, it is the product of colonialism
Dr Maria Christodoulou:in its theoretical underpinnings and foundations.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I told you about my PhD work last time. I did a whole PhD in infectious disease research. I don't want to work in infectious disease research anymore because I feel again that the theoretical underpinnings of it is not human-centered, or at least, not centering the humans who suffer most with infectious disease. It's about contagion control. It's about preventing it from getting it... getting from the people who don't matter to the people who matter. It's not like okay, how do we reduce suffering? It's like how do we make sure it doesn't spread, because we don't want it to get to us? And I don't want to do that work. I don't find that inspiring. Yes, it must happen. Someone must do it. I also don't want the pathogens to spread, but I don't want to be doing that work. I'd much rather be doing work that supports people's immunity, so that the spread of the pathogens don't actually matter. So the pathogens can just be there and not make people sick.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Well, you, said earlier that healing matters. What is healing in your mind?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Finding balance, returning to balance, because there are these life moves, and so there are moments of moving to one extreme and to come back from the extreme, and I think that's the current notion of health that I'm working with, because I think it applies to our physical bodies as well. I mean it's homeostasis, it is rhythms that are conducive to life and longevity and reduced suffering. So that's the framework that I'm finding most helpful now. T hat we can go to extremes in various ways. Your blood pressure can be too high or too low. Your blood sugar can be too high or too low. You can be overweight, you can be underweight, you can be anxious, you can be lethargic. All of these are states of extremes and if we can identify those imbalances, we can come back to balance.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So you and I are actually having this conversation b ecause you listened to a conversation I had with somebody else, Dr. Lisa Africa. You reached out and I suggested we meet because I remembered that you were the student that had spoken out about bullying and harassment back then. But the thing you said to me when we first connected was that listening to those episodes or that particular episode had given you hope again, had given you a sense that, oh, there are doctors like this. I want to be a doctor like this. I think you said something along those lines.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Sounds right.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:What was it that you heard? Because you said like you were feeling quite demotivated, you weren't sure you wanted to be a doctor, and then there was something about that conversation that made you go oh, actually, I want to be this kind of doctor.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It was a humanness. A care. I don't know if I have the right words.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Because you assume all of those things about doctors. T hey're supposed to be caring. W e are supposed to be caring, and all of those things. But there's something about perhaps... Maybe care is not the right word. Respect p erhaps? Seeing a patient as a whole person whose knowledge and opinions matter and is indeed the world's leading expert on themselves, and that can coexist with scientific rigour. We haven't spoken so much about this today, but first and foremost, I think of myself as a mathematician. I love there being a right answer, I love precision, I love logic, I love form and structure in thinking, clearly delineating A, B and C, and therefore you can conclude without a doubt if A, B and C are true, then D is true and nobody is going to disagree with you within the black and white rules of those systems.
Dr Yumna Moosa:That's what you can do with mathematics. I love that. I love that it doesn't matter who's saying it. It doesn't matter the shape of your body, it doesn't matter your accent, because what you say or what you write or what you put forward is either true or false, because it's internally consistent. I love that. It makes me happy, it makes me feel alive, it makes me feel all the good things, and I want that to be able to coexist with compassion and human-centeredness, and I think that was something that I resonated with in that particular interview, but then also a number of them that you've done subsequently.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So let's go back a little bit.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Why medical school? What made you decide to be a doctor?
Dr Yumna Moosa:So I spent all of my life up until age 17 not wanting to be a doctor, because both of my parents are doctors and my brother's a doctor. So any family event I would go to, they would say so, are you going to be a doctor? And I said no, absolutely not. I was going to be a mathematician and then I was going to be a maths teacher. I got told that being a maths teacher is not ambitious enough, which to decode is you don't earn enough money, which they're right. We do not honour our teachers enough, we do not remunerate our teachers in accordance with their value to our society.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Then in matric I went to volunteer at Red Cross Children's Hospital as a clown and I went there and got dressed up and went to play with the sick children. And in that moment, while we were playing, a doctor came in and saw one of the children and I just had this feeling oh, imagine I could do that. I couldn't just play with children, I could actually help them. Spoiler, 20 years later, I now think that playing with children may actually help them in a way that injections may not. But that was the moment where I thought, oh, maybe I do. Maybe I was wrong for 17 years.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So I want to check. That part of you that until then had been saying, definitely not, because your family members were all doctors. What was it? Was it just a teenage rebelliousness, or what did you observe about being a doctor that made you go, I don't want that?
Dr Yumna Moosa:I think it was a thoughtless rebellion actually, because I've always been interested in the human body. I'm a very sensitive person, sense-wise, emotionally, I'm very sensitive. One of the things I loved about studying medicine is understanding the physiological basis for what I was feeling. I've always been interested in that, always been scientifically, mathematically inclined, and have been raised to be of service, so it did make sense as a career path. But again, if you're asked that every time you meet anyone, then no, I need to chart my own course and be independent and completely different from my family. And look at me now.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Well, let's talk about your family, because, as I understand it, you come from a lineage of truth speakers and activists and courageous people. What's it like to come from a lineage of bold and courageous truth-tellers and activists?
Dr Yumna Moosa:It gives me a lot of comfort in the difficult moments, in the moments of conflict that I have found myself in in my adult life. I remain very conscious of what the generation before me lived through. I remain very conscious that all of the challenges that I face now, the threats are not nearly as sharp and pointy and that makes it easier. After my YouTube video, people were calling me bold, courageous, did things that other people wouldn't be able to do and whatever. But in the context of my family, but also the South African anti-apartheid struggle, people took much, much, much bigger risks and made incredible sacrifices, and I think it's worth us remembering that, remembering what they sacrificed for, because we can't throw that away. It dishonours that sacrifice to just give it up. No, we want a free South Africa, we want a non-racist, non-sexist, inclusive society that is less unequal, that laws apply equally to everyone. We don't want there to be this extreme disparity between the rich and the poor. People died for that, so we must continue the work.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You wrote an article a few years after that truth-telling episode, telling junior doctors that the risks of speaking out were greater than you had anticipated and that what you had discovered was that you were alone in the struggle, and that truth didn't matter as much as power did. What's your stance on that today?
Dr Yumna Moosa:The way that that was editorialized is different to how I would have done it. It was written saying I wouldn't do it again. I would absolutely do it again, but I do also think that's true that power is more... It's not that p ower is more important than truth, necessarily, but power can easily overcome truth if we do not hold to it with discipline, if we do not keep speaking that truth when the pressure is on us to not speak. And there's so much pressure on us to not speak.
Dr Yumna Moosa:The example that's happening across the world now is the images of children being blown to pieces in Gaza. All the evidence is there, but a dominant narrative is a dominant narrative and a dominant narrative will speak over any amount of evidence. I think when I started this journey with the YouTube video and the recordings and I heard those recordings and I was so, myself, was so amazed by them and I thought, this is so obviously bad, this is so obviously wrong. That showed me, oh, evidence doesn't necessarily matter. What matters is the choices we make, and we can make choices. I don't feel hopeless about it. I don't feel like it's meaningless, but I do think it's not going to be like the pretty mathematical solution, the A, B, C, D, Q, E, D which I wish it was, but it's not. It's the hard work of choosing to do the difficult thing every day to build the world like we want it to be.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I'm reflecting on how many topics you and I have touched on from gender-based violence to bullying and harassment in the medical culture and the culture of medicine, to politics and all these different domains and how I notice, even in myself, the anxiety that comes up as we start broaching a particular topic, how risky it feels to open up a conversation, or even, you know, we were speaking about the culture of medicine and we made some very interesting points, I think each of us, and then we segued into something else, and I wonder what that is in myself, because I don't have the answers, which I don't. Is that because we're both afraid of this recording device that's going to capture this for eternity?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Absolutely. I think that's part of it.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:That's definitely part of it for sure. But I wonder if it isn't that same collective thing that makes good people collapse in the face of adversity. It just all feels so big and it all feels so much bigger than you and me. And yet one of the reasons I started these podcast conversations was that if we could just tell our stories, I really do believe that it's stories that are transformative. And so for somebody to hear your story and to hear that actually you were brave enough to speak out or you too have experienced gender-based violence, they feel less alone in that moment and maybe that gives them the courage to take the next step that they need to take.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:But what I'm seeing a lot of, I guess in medicine too, and in the younger colleagues that I'm having the opportunity to engage and interact with is not just a rebellion against the culture of medicine, but a beginning acknowledgement of their own complexity, I think. Maybe not the right word. So the part of you that is finding ways to embrace your love of mathematics with science and biology and humanity, and I feel like that's what medicine is calling for is like that very diversity that makes us the most eligible candidates for medical school is the thing that gets drummed out of us in the medical curriculum. So bright, smart people finish medical school and then, when there's no posts available for them to specialise, have no idea what they're going to do with their lives. People who have multiple interests, passions, potential.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes. It makes no sense. It's like systematically disabling people.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Yes, exactly.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Personally, I think it's a huge movement towards something new. It's an opportunity for people to get creative again and to be forced to get creative again, to start rethinking medicine and to start rethinking what it means to be a doctor. Yes, clinician is one part of it, but, coming back to your interests, I think AI is going to start replacing many of those clinical things that we do.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Absolutely.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So what does that mean? What does that leave us with? And could it be that AI frees us up and you've spoken, I know, about how to use AI so that it's ethical and that it allows for humanity and for dignity and all of those things. But what if it frees us up to do those human things?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Absolutely. I think it's a moment for that, and I'm so excited about what that can bring. I remember as a medical student, being desperately frustrated when they got us to memorise algorithms. You must have done that. Those sort of like emergency care... If the blood pressure is this, do...., and then you had to, like splurge out the algorithm to get the marks. A nd I was like, why are you making me do something that a machine will always do better than me? Why don't you ask me to design an algorithm? Why don't you ask me what this algorithm cannot deal with? Why don't you ask me what the biases are for this algorithm? Because the task you are asking me to do, a machine will always do better.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And at the same time, perhaps it allows for a different measure of eligibility success. That some of that algorithm stuff can be turned out by a robot, but some of this human stuff
Dr Yumna Moosa:Not yet.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:N ot yet yeah.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Maybe never, but definitely not yet. Who knows.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Some people say that you can use a AI therapist.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I've heard about that.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yeah maybe it's my age, maybe I'm technologically backward, but I still see the value in a real human.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:It's definitely my age, because I'm much older than you.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I do think that there is an element in human interaction that is not quantifiable, not replicable. It's that thing of, you a nd I started this conversation a week ago and it was a very different conversation. There were things you said in that meeting that was like, we must definitely say all those things again, and a week later, those things don't feel as... I mean they were important, they are important, but today something else is here. It's a different moment.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You're different, I'm different. The world has moved on. Something else is happening, and one of the hardest things for me as a podcast person and as somebody who is a Virgo and a perfectionist about everything, is the fact that these conversations can go in any direction, and that I can't always predict what my guest is going to say or how I'm going to respond, and I'm not always going to have the perfect word or the right response in the moment, and there've been times when I've been tempted to edit out things I've said and it hasn't been anything that dramatically changes the flavour of the conversation. But it's so interesting for me this thing of getting it right, getting it perfect, which comes back to body as machine.
Dr Yumna Moosa:And there being a 'perfect' existing.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Yes, perfect existing.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Which I don't think it does necessarily.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I don't think it does either.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I think the very nature of being human is vulnerability and fallibility and all of those things. So yeah, at risk of getting into philosophical debates, which I feel I can do quite easily with you, part of the purpose of this conversation is to tell your story, and we've touched on motherhood. We've touched on your decisions to do medicine, your PhD. I've also read somewhere that you described yourself as a tree hugger and a mermaid and that you love to dance. Tell us a bit more about that side of you.
Dr Yumna Moosa:There are so many sides, is the truth. I love being alive, I love the broadness of human experience, and so I explore lots of different things. A recent, very, very absorbing hobby has been salsa dancing, or rather SBK, salsa, b achata, k izomba, which is Afro-Latin partner dance. So I used to dance before I got married and then my husband didn't really dance and then I didn't because we did other things together. And then when I stopped being married, then I started dancing again and I rediscovered that passion.
Dr Yumna Moosa:And there's something really amazing about being in the moment t hat is required in a partner dance. Y ou have to feel and respond exactly as things are unfolding, and it's an embodied practice of a way of being that has informed a lot of the rest of my life. We spoke about perfection. It's not about perfection. It's about being in that moment and being receptive to what comes and moving forward with that to create something beautiful. There's all sorts of other complexity. There's gender, men tend to be the lead, women tend to be the followers. I find that quite challenging, but also something that I enjoyed leaning into and exploring, because it was a space in my life that I didn't have to lead. There's a lot of other spaces that I take control and I manage and this was like, I am not learning to lead, I will follow. You will sort it out and I will respond. And it's been so wonderful and I've transitioned probably... Let me not say transitioned. I still dance.
Dr Yumna Moosa:In fact, I'm getting on a plane tonight to go to Joburg to dance for the weekend. That's why I'm going. There's a Cuban salsa dancer coming from Mozambique to Joburg, and so it's a Cuban salsa and reggaeton weekend. I live a good life. But so then, the other thing that I've started exploring is capoeira, which is a martial art. So it's still in the moment, call and response dynamic. But instead of seeking harmony, you seek competition. Y ou are trying to achieve dominance, you're trying to win the game, which is a very different energy.
Dr Yumna Moosa:So I'm exploring that and playing with that
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Beautiful. I love that kind of embodied way of exploring relationship, really. Relationship to yourself, relationship to the other.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:A few years ago I did tango lessons, and particularly argentine tango, which is the close embrace tango, and one of the reasons I signed up for lessons was because I also love to dance.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:But there was an element of this idea of... I think I'd just ended a relationship and I was questioning my own dynamic in relationships and it was that thing of how can I step into this close em brace with another human being, be completely attuned in that moment and be so present that I can move with them in that moment, and then walk away, which was often very hard for me to do in complex relationships, and it was such powerful learning terrain, really. And also, we talk about leaders and followers, but actually… I had this idea in my mind that being a follower was a passive thing.
Dr Yumna Moosa:No, it's not.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You can't be led if you're passive. So this really turned on its head for me, this idea that to be a follower was a passive thing, or that I was giving up some kind of agency if I followed, and that actually my perfectionism and control thing was a way of not following or leading.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes, and then having that conversation of gesturing to communicate something and having somebody else respond. Having the follower respond, and then the lead gesturing again. So I'm really enjoying that, and the other part of it, it was very much part of healing an impaired sense of self and healing the capacity to self-protect, which is also something we spoke about before. Learning what feels nice, because sometimes you touch someone and it doesn't feel nice and learning that my body actually knows. S he can feel, does this feel safe or does this not feel safe? And that was switched off for a long time. That ability to discern was dysfunctional, right and so it had to come back.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Yeah, and I think medical school trains it out of us. Again, it's like this paradox that you are so immersed in learning about the human body but in ways that dissociate you from your own body. I remember having a mentee that was struggling with anatomy and physiology in second year and she came with some some piece of work around the lungs and she had not made any connection between what she was trying to learn and understand about the physiology of breathing and what happens in her own body when she breathes. And I was blown away by the fact that we still do not teach anatomy and physiology in a way that makes it come alive in a way... And then I thought about how we learn about the human body by dissecting dead cadavers.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Not by moving, not by...
Dr Yumna Moosa:This is what happens when you...
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Exactly, you know, and so for me it was true that I finished medical school. I was this big brain, totally disconnected from any notion of having a physical body. And then, of course, then if you're that kind of entity, it's all of that. Then you can work 36 hours non-stop and skip meals and not sleep, and...
Dr Yumna Moosa:But you're not so good at feeling, being attuned.
Dr Yumna Moosa:A conversation with my mom comes to mind recently and I guess this is a consequence of being born to two doctors and essentially conditioned into this path is my parents are the loveliest, kindest people in the world. I was sick and I don't really like taking medicine for any reason, right, and I wasn't going to take it and my mom was like no, you can't be sick, you have a child to look after. And I found that so interesting because, yes, I can be sick, it's okay to be sick. It's okay to not take away my symptoms so that I can be the perfect version of myself for my child all the time. Sometimes I can be sick and sometimes he can see. It's okay that she's sick and she's not reading with as much enthusiasm and she's not jumping around and pillow fighting with me and she's not carrying me on her back, she's just sitting and it's fine and I don't have to take medication so that I can perform.
Dr Yumna Moosa:And there are moments when I do have to take medication so that I can perform, but that is not the default truth. That is something that is quite different from my parents and their generation and ours, and I mentioned before. Their reality was different, the threats they faced were different, but I think there are costs to that. There are costs to pushing through no matter what. It's not a clearly superior way of being. It is a way of being that must be understood in a context, but must be understood to have consequences.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Right, it's a survival strategy.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It's a survival strategy.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I spent years in survival mode. I don't want to live the rest of my life in survival mode. I choose not to. To the extent that I can, to the extent that I am able to.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Coming back to this idea of you standing on a threshold now, of possibility, for this next stage of your life. What's the dream, what are you hoping this next phase will hold?
Dr Yumna Moosa:I want to teach.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I don't know what that looks like exactly. I think part of it would be at medical school.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So that means being an academic, right?
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yeah, I'm interested in subverting young minds, I'm interested in working against the forces that try to undermine individuality and trying to make space for people to be ourselves, while also encouraging excellence, because excellence does matter to me. To find a way to hold both. And how can excellence come from a place of inspiration rather than a place of punishment and threat? And can it? I think it can, but I'm willing to hold that as a question to learn. Very exciting, so excited.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And as I sit here, I have this sense that neither of us knows what that's going to mean or what it's going to look like, and that even your fantasy of it in this moment may be far removed from what it actually will bring.
Dr Yumna Moosa:My life is not at all what I thought it would be, but it's infinitely better. Say more about what you thought it would be. So I didn't see myself married, having a child. I saw myself being very career orientated, doing something very ambitious and intellectually challenging and working all the time, and then I fell in love and immediately knew that this is the person that I wanted to marry, and he wanted a child. I didn't particularly want a child, but then we had a child and it is the biggest blessing of my whole life.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It brings me more joy and meaning than absolutely anything else, and if being his mother were the only thing that I do for the rest of my life, I would be satisfied with that, because he's just...
Dr Yumna Moosa:He's everything, and a lot of the other work that I'm doing now I frame in my own heart as building the world that I want him to grow up in.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It gives a framing and the meaning to everything that the whole rest of my life and that was never part of the plan. plan then I certainly wasn't planning to be doing this on my own. When that happened and the consequence of all of these unplanned eventualities and all the... the battles and the court cases that ended up with essentially a 50-50 shared situation of me and my former partner, of our child. Like now, I have the best of both worlds because I have a child and I have half of my time because people who are still in relationships with their partners don't have as much time and freedom as I do. I would never have designed it like this, but it's so fantastic. I do get to like go for a dance, spend a weekend at a dance festival, and I also get to have this beautiful child, and I also get to have this career. I can just do all of it now.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I can relate. So my daughter was four and a half when I got divorced and we had a similar situation of 50-50 custody split and she would spend a week with him and a week with me. We changed that a little bit later when she got older, but it forced me to have a life separate to being a mother, which I think many of my friends and peers who were in the mothering role full time didn't always have the opportunity or the freedom to pursue, and there were times when that felt like a freedom for me. But it's so laced with all the cultural stuff about what it means that as a woman, you want and design and crave a life outside of motherhood and mothering, you know, guilt and shame. You know, like you should be devastated in the week that your child is with their father, but actually it was liberating.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Kind of nice also.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You described yourself as a fire brand earlier and I can see the fire.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Really, I can see the fire. There's such passion, there's such energy, there's such dynamism in you as you speak. It's beautiful.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Thank you.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Anything, I haven't asked you about that you'd like to share?
Dr Yumna Moosa:I want to come back to the comment you made about the fire and the dynamism, and also to reflect on coming out of a relationship in which my sense of self was deeply harmed. This is an audio recording, so you can't see what I'm wearing, but I'm wearing bright colours. I often wear bright colours and on the... I think it was the last day before I left our home in Durban to come to Cape Town, I opened my cupboard to pack my clothes and all I saw was navy, blue, black, grey and brown, and in that moment, I became aware of the extent to which I had lost myself. Like, literally, my colour had seeped away. So, yes, it's finding me again. This is me. She is fiery, she is a lot, and I love her.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You talk about her in the third person.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I am a lot and I love me.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:What advice would you have for a young firebrand who finds herself in medical school today and is feeling the colours seeping out of her, or a woman in a marriage who's feeling that way?
Dr Yumna Moosa:You know it's funny. I don't know what to say, and that makes me feel sad. It makes me feel sad that, even being on the other side of it, not having the answer, I want the answer. I want to be able to say, oh, just x, y, z, but I've got nothing. Maybe again, have faith, but I also don't even feel like you can say that to a person. I don't think there's anything to say. I think that's what I would take away. And I said it again earlier. I don't think there's an answer. I don't think there's anything to say. I would want to be with the person, be present with the person, choose in every moment, in every opportunity that comes, to enact a different future. Yeah, I don't think there's anything to say.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And sometimes that's the hard part of being a doctor right, there isn't something we can do, there isn't something we can say, but we can be with someone, and even as I asked you the question of what would you say to them, and you began saying well, I don't know, I'm on the other side of it, but I don't have anything to say. For me it was that thing of, ja, what might have helped me in those kinds of situations in the past was that reminder that I'm not alone, because anything you might say to me about how it's going to get better, or why it might get better, or that this too shall pass, like intellectually, I would get it. But when you're caught in those experiences, it doesn't feel like there's ever going to be a way out. And then there's something hopeful about being reminded that other people have been here too,
Dr Yumna Moosa:And other people are here right now.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Other people are here right now.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I like that. That resonates, that feels good, and it's something that gave me a lot of strength. I was not abandoned, I was not alone. I have been surrounded by love throughout, and that did make a difference.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Well, yay, you gave an answer, there's an answer. Yay.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:The mathematician in you must love that.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I know.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You know, I will say that the other thing that stands out for me in this moment is the thing that drew me to coaching was that it was this idea that, instead of focusing on what was wrong with people and how to fix it,
Dr Maria Christodoulou:you could focus on what was whole in people and you could hold space for them to remember that, or to reclaim that.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And it felt, at the time when I was introduced to coaching, like such a fundamental shift.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:It didn't mean we didn't talk about the past, it didn't mean we didn't explore how you got to where you are today, but it meant also that I did not look at you and perceive you to be wounded or perceive you to be deficient in some way or another. That my stance, and certainly the attitude I bring to a coaching relationship and actually, hopefully, most human relationships, is, you are whole and if I can hold onto that when you're struggling to remember it, you'll reclaim it again and I must let go of any notions that I have about how you're going to do that and when you're going to do that and why you're going to do that and really just stay with you. And maybe, from time to time, I have a story that awakens your imagination, or I can share one of my experiences that might be useful for you, and maybe I can share a tool which might be a drug or a homeopathic or whatever. But what we're working towards is the remembering, the remembering of your wholeness.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Yes, exactly that. Reminds me of... So one of the other things that I have dabbled in is care clowning, so a principle in that... So you play with children in hospital. That's how I did it. There are very many ways to do it. That's how I did it, and the underlying principle there is you play with the healthy child within a body that is not always in good condition at that moment, and we went into burns wards with children who couldn't move, but there's a person there and if you think creatively, you can play with a person regardless of the condition of their bodies, and the joy that that brings. It's magic.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Yeah, and the healing that that brings, because if we are only seen in our brokenness, we miss the essence of who we are.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It's incomplete.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Anything else, Yumna?
Dr Yumna Moosa:No, I think that's all.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:The last line on my notes here says, guiding principle from the river to the sea.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I think I read somewhere that you lived by that as a guiding principle?
Dr Yumna Moosa:So, what's so funny is that was a UKZN interview and she asked me to fill in a questionnaire. From the river to the sea is the slogan for Palestinian liberation, but the person who wrote it, didn't understand that at all and she wrote from the river to the sea means that she cares about the planet and connection to... I don't even remember what she wrote, but I giggled to myself that she totally missed that. Yeah, I feel a deep connection to the Palestinian struggle.
Dr Yumna Moosa:I feel very conscious that Apartheid South Africa was established in 1948, which is when Apartheid Israel was established, and that our reality is essentially a counterfactual to that reality. And it became particularly stark for me after the October 7th escalation that I could have been there. If I was born there, Yumna Moosa, firebrand. A ll my same personality attributes there, my life would have been very different. Here, I get like nasty threats and you can't like study medicine. There, I'll get blown up for being a doctor. I prefer this. Like, it's horrible.
Dr Yumna Moosa:It's horrible but
Dr Yumna Moosa:I prefer this.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:But that's also an acknowledgement that context matters.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Context matters and also to understand the bigger world.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:And that we are not separate from that bigger world.
Dr Yumna Moosa:No, no, we're not. So, yeah, I have a deep emotional connection to the Palestinian liberation because I think it's about human liberation. I think it's about our next steps in realizing that we are all connected.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:What is your cultural and ethnic sort of ancestry?
Dr Yumna Moosa:My family is Muslim. My dad was born in India. He came here as a one and a half year old baby. W hich part of India? Maharashtra, so a very small village in like a... He was born in a manger. It looks like a manger. You can't stand up in it. It's hay on the bottom. It's crazy for me to think about how far he has come in his own one life, b ecause we went to visit. I've been to India a few times and we went to visit the place that he was born in and you wouldn't... I mean, he was smuggled into the country. Like, my dad's an illegal immigrant essentially. He's no longer illegal, he's now a South African citizen, so I can say it, it's fine, but those were the circumstances of him coming in and his family before that, I think they were Yemeni. My mom is a mixture of some indigenous, some Indonesian, some Indian.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:So lots of diversity.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Lots of people from all over the place. What I love about my phenotype is in most places in the world I can go and look like I'm from there. So North Africa, southern Europe even. South America. So I've got the sort of like brown curly hair thing that could be from a lot of places and I like it. Brazil. I recently went to Brazil and they all thought I was from there.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:One of the things that I do in my work is that I do ancestry testing with people for that very reason of reminding us all how connected we are, because when you see our ancestral origins, if you go right back, if you go far enough, we are all actually connected.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Every single one of us is connected to every single other person on this planet and we forget that and we create all these ways in which we divide and separate and, yeah, it's bad.
Dr Yumna Moosa:And so we will continue working towards the coming together and the recognition of our connectedness.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Thank you, Yumna, for bringing your particular brand of fire and passion and vitality to this conversation, for your willingness to tell the truth about your story, and I'm aware that we have kind of glossed over some of the detail, but that feels appropriate and for who you are in the world and the energy that you bring. I'm very excited about what this next stage will bring for you.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Thank you, Maria. Thank you for this opportunity to speak. There is healing in storytelling. There is healing in speaking difficult truths and not being afraid of it.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:Or being afraid and speaking anyway.
Dr Yumna Moosa:Or being afraid and speaking anyway. And so, yeah, thank you for this, thank you for this opportunity.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:You're so welcome.
Dr Maria Christodoulou:I'm Dr Maria Christodoulou and you've been listening to the Awakening Doctor podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please share it with your friends, f ollow Awakening Doctor on Instagram, Facebook and Spotify, and go to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate and give us a good review. Thank you so much for listening.
