Caring in Crisis and Responding to Hate: Dr. Suzanne Barakat’s Story

In this episode of Not Really Strangers, host Suzanne Ehlers welcomes her "name twin" — Dr. Suzanne Barakat, physician, humanitarian, and a leading voice on refugee health, asylum medicine, and countering Islamophobia. 

Dr. Barakat, who is from North Carolina, traces her connection to the refugee experience back to her own roots: from summers in Syria and then two years of high school there, to watching as an adult as the Syrian crisis forced her her extended family— who once all lived on the same street — to relocate  across the globe. She describes her journey as a doctor caring for those in crisis, including returning again and again to the Syrian-Turkish border, and shares her most recent trip topost-regime Syria to bear witness and help forge the country’s forensic response .

Dr. Barakat also shares the gripping story she shared in her popular TED Talk: when she was still a medical student, a white supremacist broke into her family members’ home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and murdered them while they were eating dinner. She asks the question: What if rather than “otherize” her relatives, the perpetrator of this hate crime had sat down and gotten to know them? And what can we learn from this unspeakable tragedy about the power of asking, as leaders, “Who is not at this table, and needs to be?”

This conversation raises important questions about our shared humanity and gets to the heart of what the Not Really Strangers podcast is all about.  

Topics Discussed:

• Growing up between North Carolina and Syria; two formative years of high school in Idlib
• The slow, devastating displacement of Dr. Barakat's extended Syrian family
• Volunteering on the Syria-Turkey border: clinical work under impossible conditions, language barriers, and dignity of care
• Otherization as the root cause of violence and genocide
• The 2015 Chapel Hill murders of Dr. Bakarat’s family and her fight to have them recognized as a hate crime
• Visiting Syria six weeks after the fall of the Assad regime; bearing witness to the destroyed town of Wulta
• Shaping Syria's national forensic response: missing persons, mass graves, and the imperative of local leadership
• Why justice, including narrative acknowledgment, is inseparable from peace
• Confronting implicit bias and the moral courage required to act
• Finding purpose after personal trauma: the SF Muslim Fellowship
• The dinner table as a question of inclusion: who is not here and needs to be?

Episode Resources:

• 36 Seconds Documentary
• Dr. Suzanne Barakat’s TED Talk

Resources:

• Podcast show notes
• Donate now
• Follow USA for UNHCR on Instagram
• Connect with Suzanne on LinkedIn

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hi, I'm Suzanne Ahlers, and this is Not Really Strangers, the podcast where we explore just how connected the refugee experience is to our everyday lives and to the social issues that matter most to us. Thanks for joining us for another conversation with a brand new guest here to share the story of how they came to realize that their story and the refugee story were intertwined. By the end of this episode, you'll see that in this global community, the distance between us is often much shorter than we think. Let's dive in. Here we are with my name Twin, spelled the same way with a Z and two N's. Suzanne Barracott, I'm so happy to have you on the Not Really Strangers podcast. Welcome.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

It's really a pleasure to be here. And it's the irony of the of the name, not really strangers and our name twins. Like, you know, there's there's so much to unpack there.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

There is. And um as a doctor, thank you for making time. I have some small sense of how demanding your schedule is. And this conversation I know was important enough to you that you carved out space for us. Um just an appreciation for the profession that you're in and the demands that it puts on you, and still wanting to storytell and wanting to connect with listeners is really important to me. So thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Thank you. I think storytelling is a really important part of um of the work and moving heart to change policies and a big part of that is narrative and narrative telling. Tell us where you're calling in from today. I'm uh in the Bay Area in Oakland, California today. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

And maybe it's the same place, maybe it's not. Where do you call home?

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Oh, what a complicated question to ask a global citizen. Um I was born and raised in North Carolina, and then in many ways, that is home. Um, and then I came out to the Bay Area for residency. Um, that's been home for over the last decade. But growing up, we used to spend a quarter of the year, our summers, in Syria. And I spent two years of high school living in Syria, going to my mom's all-girls public high school in Arabic. And so I remember even as a kid feeling like the airplane was this time capsule that would take me to a different place, a different time, uh, different people, different lived experiences, and then like plop back into a very different reality. Um, so it gave me from an early age, just what it meant to be from different places all at once.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Mm-hmm. And all those places can be home in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

I got to, you know, to the name of your podcast, Not Really Strangers. I think it was in those years that I really sat and wrestled with how as an an American-born US citizen, I myself had perceptions of people from other places in the world, including where my parents had come from, and assumptions about their humanity or about their needs or desires. And to have lived and sat on classroom benches next to them and to have seen firsthand their lived experiences and their struggles and their emotional kind of um roller coasters that they would go through and to realize as a child, as an adolescent, they are just as human as me, was I think the most formative uh takeaway that I made growing up that has really shaped, you know, how I live my life now and the work that I do. Um and in so, in a lot of ways, I think it was while it was a very risky thing, and I don't recommend parents plucking their kids in the middle of high school and taking them to a foreign country with a different language, um, it ended up actually being a defining uh chapter in my life.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

You started to tell this story. Um, and and I know more than my listeners do about your career and your important work, but will you talk to us a little bit about when and where forced displacement and and refugees became something so central and so important to you?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

So having lived for two years in high school in little town Idlib, Syria, where everyone knows everyone, family members were all within walking distance of one another. Um, I came back during college and did public health work and tuberculosis, uh, working with uh orphans locally. And it was just the place that I kept coming back and wanting to give back and work. And then as the crisis started unfolding, my own family became displaced. And I watched live, you know, via WhatsApp and videos and conversations as they over the years had to flee on foot and became displaced all over the world, where now, even when multiple family members are in Germany, they're still hours apart by train. And even with the fall of the regime, that's been over a year now, many of them have not come back because there's a lot of um, there's not a lot of certainty, you know, economic, educational, social kind of um opportunities that would compel them to leave what is a little more comfortable right now, which can tell you just how unfortunate the Syrian kind of crisis has been that people who can technically still come back still have not chosen to come back.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Um, and to have gone from being in this little social bubble where the family got together every couple days, you know, we all lived on the same street, to then being displaced all over the world. Um I kept coming back, you know, in undergrad, in medical school, in residency, working on the Syria-Turkey border, um, providing first humanitarian relief and medical work, working at a polyclinic, um, treating children with shrapnel injuries with no access to antibiotics, treating um pregnant women with no access to um pregnancy care uh and working in the emergency room in Gaziantep, being the only Arabic-speaking um provider, seeing, you know, brain matter on gurneys from people getting shot. I mean, it was it was so severely traumatic. And I kept coming back and feeling like, you know, this was just a drop in the bucket, but whatever I can do was still meaningful to that one patient. And I had some trauma happen with my family in North Carolina that by the time I went back after that, I I had to kind of mitigate my trauma exposure, uh, given my own personal experiences, that I was like, you know what, let me let me deliver babies because that's a happier thing. And I worked in the Gazi Antip State Hospitals also as the only Arabic-speaking physician. And it was also very traumatic. There were 14, 15-year-old girls who, you know, the alternative was get raped in a lipo or get killed. And so they were, these girls were had been married off to Syrian boys in Turkey and no access to, you know, any kind of prenatal care or um abortion care. And I was delivering babies to 14 and 15-year-olds. And it was and continues to be dark and heavy. A lot of my my training at UCSF was in family and community medicine, and my niche is refugee and asylum health. Um, and this was just a natural kind of woven into kind of my DNA of how I ended up in doing this.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Thank you. I mean, thank you for what you do, but also for your candor and courage and sharing with the listeners like how that journey has shaped you and also being very clear about the trauma that you've experienced, not only in your own family, but on the front lines of providing care in such a circumstance. I mean, I there's so many things that you just said that jump out at me, but I I keep I have this image of what you said of, you know, on the street and the family getting together on a regular basis. And then the next thing you know, your family is displaced to sort of all corners of the globe. And I I just want the listener to sit, to sit with that, right? Wherever you are, maybe, maybe you're in Arkansas, my family's in South Texas, and Sundays is when they get together and somebody makes a big pot of something and they sit in the backyard, like stuff that you take completely for granted. What if overnight every one of those family members is like thrown to the globe and you don't have the chance to be in community together anymore? The stuff that you take for granted, you're no longer like jostling at the table together, asking people to pass the dish. I just really want us to sit with that is the face of displacement, is no longer having that proximity and that like physical intimacy and the sharing of food and the kind of occupying of space together. Um so many stories of displacement are at the heart of that. And I'm I'm so sorry that that is what your family has experienced.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Thank you. I think I think you're also touching on a point of privilege that um, you know, I sit in a bubble of privilege in the Bay Area in the US, and I feel like my life is of these two extremes, and I have a hard time reconciling them. And and with it comes this enormous sense of responsibility towards not just my extended family, but to everyone who um has been displaced beyond their control. You know, I grieve that all of our childhood photos are in our home in Syria, our childhood home, and I can't access them. They're gone. I have no childhood photos of myself or my sibling that has passed away to share with my children and pass on those memories. But who am I to complain when people have lost everything? Um, their homes, their families, their livelihoods, their futures, entire generations lost, uneducated trauma that has not yet been unpacked and what that intergenerational trauma will look like and the impact it will have, not on just them and their lineages, but the world at large. Yeah. And we have never seen the amount of displacement in the world that we see today. And this expands beyond the context of Syria. But, you know, at one point, Syria was the largest refugee crisis our world has ever seen.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

But for the most part, Syria's been forgotten. I visited Syria six weeks after the fall of the regime and I was in Damascus. And um I had, while the city itself has not been as damaged as other places because Assad lived there, there was an employee from the White Helmets that kind of broke protocol and took me in his car, uh, in his little van. And he wanted me to bear witness to the town of Luta that had seen some of the worst chemical warfare that our history has seen. And the entire city, we were driving for minutes on end on a highway, and all you could see was destruction, blown out windows and doors, rubble to the ground. This is where he was from. I filmed minutes on end and I would stop and he was like, Doctora, Shufi, Shufi, look, look, bear witness to what has happened because no one gives a damn. And it was just like just even having another human shoulder with him in that moment that I bear witness the suffering that you have gone through is important and valuable. And his humanity seeing that someone is caring enough and that's all it takes to just hold someone through their suffering.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

I want to make sure our listeners, our listeners know that the that the that the civil war, the devastation in Syria stretched on for the better part of a decade, 12 years almost, 14 years, would you say? And that the fall of the regime, it would have been in the fall of 2024, that you you were there, then shortly there after that. And then when I had lunch with you, Suzanne, I shared with you that I had been in November of 2025, sort of just short of the one-year anniversary, and had been in Damascus and had visited some of the suburbs, had seen some of the devastation that you've just described. And and talking with families who the insecurity in going back, people don't want to go back because they don't know where healthcare will be. People don't want to go back because they don't know where their kids will go to school. People don't want to go back because they fear that the violence and and the conflict will continue because their houses have been bombed out. They have literally nowhere to live. So these are like the really practical concerns, but they're profound practical concerns. So I think there's this sometimes misunderstanding why when it's peaceful again, why don't people go right back? You've made your life in this instance. People have made their lives and built their families for 10 plus years in a refugee camp or a settlement. These are not ideal circumstances, but they have more there than they know they might have going back to. And I, like you, was so, I mean, min, I mean, exactly how you describe it, minutes on end of your phone's camera with just burned out, blown out building after the other. And you think, what how what how will we ever, how will we ever re-how will we ever do justice to the Syrian community and help them rebuild when there are stories of like such courage and resilience in people who want to make a better tomorrow, particularly the young people, um, which I know you also have have interacted with. Also, let's just, if you could just talk a little bit, because you said it on two or three different occasions. The only Arabic-speaking provider in multiple circumstances, what does it mean to come seek urgent health care and have one doctor who can interpret and translate for you? Like the demands on you from coming at every angle. Like just talk a little bit about, I mean, how exhausting that must be, but also how empowering to be the one that can do the interpretation.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

I had um, I was sitting in the laboring room where there would be four to five laboring women sharing one bed at a time in an open room. So you have like maybe 20 laboring women at one time. And as she is crowning, she is instructed to walk over to a delivery station with the stirrups where oftentimes unanesthetized, unconsented epesiotomies are performed. Um, there's a language barrier and no one is speaking to them in a way that they understand. Um, and they're traumatized. You know, there's this is not patient-centered care. Uh, and babies are delivered sometimes with complications, and there's no one to assess the baby until 24 hours after birth. And I had to run around and, you know, there were hip dysplasias and complications that I alone can't do. And the woman, the girls who would tell me, they would pray for me in between contractions. And the irony that they would ask me if I was old enough to be a doctor when I was literally twice their age. And they would ask me if I had children, and they would, they would make du'a and prayer for me. And afterwards to come and visit me one day postpartum and just to say thank you. Thank you for treating us with the dignity that no one has treated us with. They have treated dogs on the street better than they treat us. And this was a repeated sentiment. When I was working in a makeshift clinic, I had a woman who was seven months pregnant come in in preterm labor. And I had assessed her. I was still a medical student at the time. I didn't fully know what I was doing, but the cervical exam, I was like, there's some dilation. I can't tell you exactly how much at the time, but like she is going to deliver. And it was an experience just trying to convince her, please, you need to go into the hospital so you can get some steroids to help the lung maturity, to help this baby give them a chance. And she was like, I'm so tired of being treated like trash. I would rather lose this baby than be treated this way. And I sat with her in the ambulance, hand-delivered her to the hospital, gave my sign out in my broken, you know, English to Turkish, um, you know, with all these language barriers. And she came and saw me the next day and thanked me so much for treating her again with. She asked me, where are you from? You know, you're treating me with this compassion and this dignity that I have not seen. Um, and that is such a sad sentiment and a sad statement that so many people who don't have access to health care, don't have access to clean water, are in tarps without access to birth control or abortion care or antibiotics, repeatedly feel like they're treated like trash. My assessment of how we have failed other human beings that share our earth, regardless of where they come from, is otherization. When we other group of people, we rip them of their humanity. When we rip them of their humanity, you can justify anything against them, including violence, including a genocide and an eradication of entire people. And when you come and actually meet these children, these women, these elderly, these men, and you see that you know what, they want the same health care we do, they want the same successful, happy, healthy marriages that we want. They have crushes too, even in war. You know, they they want they need clean water, they want good futures for their children. We are all the same in that, no matter where we are in the world. And I struggle to comprehend why we keep repeating history's mistakes and allowing the evil and powerful to rip the humanity of the masses, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:27

That comment that you make about othering, I think is is so fundamental. And and of course we've seen this throughout, you know, throughout history. But as soon as you count someone else as less than or as non-human, everything and anything is justified. And uh the treatment of of those who have been othered with, you know, sort of lack of care, lack of compassion, lack of dignity, you really I actually think it's fundamental to sort of understanding what you're up against because otherwise it can't make sense to you. You can't put your head around it until you realize that, you know, it really is lifting this story of shared humanity. I mean, it's so fundamental, it's like what we're taught in kindergarten, and yet it doesn't penetrate for some. Um, so I just really the next question I have, you've you've answered it already in so many different ways, but I never want to presume. So I'm gonna ask it because maybe there's some last piece you want to put there. But I I think of your journey professionally, I think of what you've shared with us about your journey personally. And is there is there sort of one overarching message that you want our listeners to hear? Um, something you wish they knew or understood better.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

As cliche as it sounds, I think that we're really all more the same than we are different. And while it's a known tidbit, I think that we can all say, Oh yeah, I believe that. I think that the struggle then becomes reconciling within ourselves our own implicit biases that we carry subconsciously and aren't aware that we have, that then allow us to apply this otherization for another group of people. Because if everyone actually reconciled within themselves what their biases were, our world would be a much better place standing up for the rights of every human being to be treated with dignity, to right of life, to right, to all the human rights that we all deserve. Right. And I think the issue is the disconnect between, I still believe that most humanity and most people are actually all good. Um, but our blind spots, our biases, and then our cowardice to actually have the moral courage to face uh an injustice and and to say to lean into the discomfort of our privilege and say, what is my responsibility to ensure that others are not facing this and that I can uplift them as well. That's where the disconnect is.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Yeah. Yeah. I love the that reflection. I mean, that there's the potential is in each of us. And it it really is about having the courage almost to sort of reveal or admit to our own bias, our own shortcomings. You you touched on this just now, this well, actually earlier in the episode. Um, the theme or the name of the podcast is not really strangers. And I would love for you to riff a little bit on this idea of being a stranger. Um, what is it like, what is it, what does it mean to you? What does it mean in the world right now? Um, I think of your TED talk, I think of so many pieces of your work and writing that I've seen. Where's stranger for you?

SPEAKER_00 21:54

This is a loaded question for me because it brings up um personal trauma. That I've I've yet to share on this podcast. And it's that in 2015, my brother and sisters-in-law were executed in their Chapel Hill, North Carolina home by a white supremacist neighbor who didn't like that they were Muslim while they were eating dinner. And unbeknownst to the rest of the family, he had been harassing them repeatedly, including brandishing his gun and threatening them. And her my sister-in-law's mother and parents had advised her, like, just get to know him. You know, right now he's a stranger as you get to know him and he gets to know you. He'll know you for who you really are and will turn around. He's your neighbor, right? There has been this shouldered burden and responsibility as Muslims in this country to represent, you know, the second largest faith in the world. And it's exhausting when you're only ever seen in the lens of a national security threat. And here they were, you know, my brother was a dental student at UNC. He had just married Yasud, who was about to join him at UNC Dental. They had just come back from their honeymoon. They'd been married for only six weeks. And this neighbor um comes in and it was caught on film by my brother's cell phone, and he proceed proceeded to execute them. Sorry, I never know how to talk about this. It's been 11 years, but this is my defining trauma. Um and in my mind, you know, growing up, it was always be kind, smile, you know, turn them from strangers to friends with your warmth, with your compassion. I was a medical student rotating all throughout, you know, the the small pockets of North Carolina, even rural parts. And there would be patients who would refuse to shake my hand, um, who would refuse my care altogether because I wore a hijab and I was visibly Muslim. And it was like this challenge to bring them to the other side and help them see who you really are. And and instead it was the exhausting, like, oh, you're the exception and not the norm, when actually I was quite the ordinary Muslim American. And it was just this exhausting burden that up until my brother was murdered, it was smile and, you know, um convince them you're not evil or a threat, right? When my brother and sisters-in-law were murdered, it changed the narrative into no, I have to speak up and I have to um fight back this narrative that um was stolen from us. And even in trial, we uh my last parting words to my brother and sister-in-law's murderers was how would this day have been different for you and for all of us if instead you had knocked on their door and joined them for dinner instead and had gotten to know them? There was a documentary called Um 36 Seconds, Portrait of a Hate Crime that's available that follows the story and captures parts of this conversation. And I had been told by people later like how profound it was to how would it have been different if this person who had otherized your family had actually joined them for dinner and it doesn't matter what it was, like it could be a glass of water to see them for their humanity. Yeah. And I think about that a lot. And I think our world would be a much healthier, safer, more inclusive place that can allow for children and adults alike to thrive if we had actually focused on that humanity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Suzanne, I I can't um I can't see, of course, our listeners. I can see you. And I I knew this story, and of course, I've listened to your TED talk. We'll put everything in the show notes. Um I didn't know whether you would share on the podcast today. I I thank you. Um and for an answer to a question that I've asked so many times to so many people, I don't think an answer has ever moved me quite as much. I mean, in honor of your family and that that loss and that trauma, um, this distance between us and how much we can make of it, how much we can multiply it, how much we can, you know, amplify it unnecessarily. And then the option that we have, in fact, to bridge it, right? I mean, I I I I I don't I I would love to just sort of think about that opportunity to what would have been different if in that moment to come in and join at the table. Um and I also appreciate, too, though, that, you know, when I first asked the question, you you reminded us that I mean, as a as a woman, how many times are are many of us told to just be nice and to just to make friends and to make eye contact and to make other people feel at ease? And and I will tell you that for me, the narrative is, you know, that's how you bridge the gap. And and of course, in this this pursuit of shared humanity, we will continue to do that because it's the courageous and morally right thing to do. But I also appreciate that you've reminded us that there's a there's a cost in that to many people, that there is that uh you put yourself in a position of danger often, that um, that there are real consequences to being the one who is always building the bridge or at least trying to dismantle the mischaracterizations and the false narratives that surround. So I think for the first time since I've been asking that question, I'm I'm reminded, I guess, of just the um the the toll, the personal toll that that that creating the bridge can cost.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

It ended up actually also shifting my work clinically. You know, I had been going to the border numerous times, doing the humanitarian relief work, um, the classic doctor thing of save each patient, help them in any way you can, but feeling incredibly limited by how this was a drop in the bucket and not doing anything towards accountability and justice for these people. And after I experienced a number of violent, senseless losses, I shifted a little bit of my work into uh forensic medicine work. So documentation of torture and ill treatment to assist asylum seekers and refugees, um, asylum seekers and gaining asylum in the US, and also training Syrian physicians in Turkey on the documentation of torture that was then used with the ICC and the ICJ to prosecute war criminals. When I was in Syria, you know, six weeks after the fall, back in February of 2025, um, one of the things I did was meet with a number of um stakeholders between the government, uh, international organizations, local CSOs, um, impacted families to help shape what does a forensic, a national forensic response look like for Syria as it pertains to missing people and mass graves, um, in a way that it, as you had alluded earlier, ensure that this is Syria-led, but globally supported. And that's an element that's often missed, I think, in in the space of international org leadership, where we will often come in thinking we are the experts, but lacking sometimes the very important cultural on-the-ground context and nuance that is the difference between epic failure or success. And how do we combine and bring in and leverage local expertise, amplifying their dignity and humanity and their experience in and using best practices learned from other global contexts around the world to allow for a successful transition? And the realization that truly there's no, there's no peace for these people without justice and an acknowledgement about what that happened. And justice can look in different ways, whether it's it's legal or even if it's narrative or it's bearing witness or it's the storytelling to help people feel seen and that just an acknowledgement. What happened was not okay. Uh, before we can just move on and think it's just about, you know, it's not just the healthcare and the schools and the and the social opportunities, but it's do you acknowledge what happened to me that was so unjust and so wrong? And what's gonna happen with that? And you can't untether the two.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

I um it makes me think, I mean, what a a beautiful reminder. I think of organizations just because you were, you know, organizations speak is often, you know, we're data informed and we're evidence-based. And then you can think of, you know, a refugee-led experience or something like this national forensics response that's rooted in local knowledge, that that too is is data informed. That too is evidence-based. It's beginning in a space of lived and shared experience. My last question, and um, and I'm gonna say if if this is a question that you don't want to answer, I'm okay with that because um the story that you've just told of the murder of your brother and your sisters-in-law is around a dinner table. And the last question I ask is about breaking bread together and it's about a shared experience. Um and so I want to invite you to set that table for us. I want you to tell us what you would put um at that ideal, you know, sort of shared dinner with family from wherever, um, all over the world. Sourcing's not a question, chef is not a question. Um, if that's a if that's a table that you can imagine with us, I'd be honored, but I'm also respectful if it's not.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

My mind does go to the dinner table that my brother and sisters-in-law were murdered at. You know, it's seared into my memory, the photos from the forensics and seeing in court the unfinished meals that uh I am stuck with feeling like what what if you had just joined them for dinner? It's, you know, it's similar to the sentiment. It's not about what you said, but how you made me feel. I think the dinner table is less about what is served, but the warmth and the compassion that is sensed uh at the dinner table. Yeah. Um, and I think if you were to ask me how to shape it, one of my key takeaways with entering into more leadership spaces is always who is not at the table and needs to be. And I try and lead in in shaping these tables with that question because it's easy to exclude the voices that are most important to be at the table. And having been a member of minority groups that is often on the menu and it's targeted and attacked, I find that it is of utmost importance to center the voices of those most impacted because they are the ones closest to the solutions that are right.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

And it's less about the exact makeup, but just ensuring that in whatever goal you're trying to create with the setup or the table you're trying to create, you're always asking who's not at the table and needs to be. When I was in residency at UCSF at San Francisco General Hospital, it's it's basically a safety net hospital that only accepts underinsured or uninsured patients. So predominantly unhoused or substance use or psychiatric illnesses, a lot of comorbidities. I mean, it was my people. It was like my favorite place. And I learned so much about what it meant to be human. And it was during that training that my brother and sisters-in-law were murdered, and I had to come back to work to 80-hour work weeks of a very heavy trauma-focused place. And it became almost like a challenge for me to um get out of bed was one goal, if I can do that post-trauma. And then it was if I could turn one patient from being lying on their bed, looking down, not making eye contact with me, to looking up and smiling and having them feel that they were treated with dignity and respect, then that makes my day. Because that is treating someone how I would want to be treated, how my brother and sisters-in-law would have wanted to be treated. And it was this little game that I kind of had with myself that gave me a sense of meaning and purpose. Yeah. And I'd sometimes kind of look down at the pa from from, you know, lower myself beneath them, meet their eye contact until I see the smile and be like, got it, you know, and it becomes this thing that you bond over. It can be so small, but so meaningful. And you see their disposition just light up. And I realized in those interactions that actually a lot of our um black patients in San Francisco, many of them were Muslim because they would greet me with as salam alaykum and they'd ask if I was Muslim, and they were kind of out of community. And we cre we created what was called this like SF Muslim Fellowship, where we literally brought people together from um that I'd meet in the hospital often without a phone. We'd give them flyers and we just meet together and have a meal and have them sit together to just share whatever came to their hearts. And we had a local spiritual leader um uh come and kind of lead them in this whatever conversation came up. And it was over a meal. I don't even remember what exactly, but it was something that brought them together and made them feel pursued and desired and and that they mattered. Yeah. And that was priceless.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Yeah, yeah. That's a beautiful story. A beautiful story to end on. I think that we can be overwhelmed by all of the change that's needed. And I always say what a privilege it is to do work like you do and work like I do, that's sort of chipping away at some of the world's most vexing problems. And yet you have to be content with sometimes making change only one person at a time. Not everything is upstream, not everything is population level. Sometimes it really is getting yourself out of bed in the morning and having one patient who sees themselves differently because you saw them differently. Um, and so that is a beautiful story on which to end. Um, I'm gonna express enormous gratitude on behalf of all of our listeners uh for the courage and for the honesty and for all that you shared with us today. Um, to my name twin and now my forever friend, Suzanne. Thank you for coming on. Dr. Butticutt, thank you for coming on, not really strangers.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Thank you so much for having me, Suzanne. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 37:13

Beautiful. Thanks so much for listening. Your time is valuable, and it means a lot that you've chosen to spend it here. You can find today's show notes, including how to connect with today's guest, at unrefugees.org slash not really strangers. That's UNREFUGES.org slash not really strangers. While you're there, I hope you'll consider making a donation to the organization I lead, USA for UNHCR, to help us provide more support for refugees here in the U.S. and around the world. If this episode was impactful, please take a moment to review the show and share the episode with a friend or family member. This small action will help us have a much bigger impact. Thanks so much. Don't be a stranger.