Canadian physician Maureen Mayhew presents Hand on My Heart, a memoir of her time spent working in Taliban-occupied Afghanistan. Her work is an honest and introspective examination of her Western cultural assumptions around gender, tradition, and belief, and of how her experiences challenged and shifted her perspectives.

Hybrid events are held in person, you will also be able to watch it live streamed from our Youtube channel.

Location: Room C400, UBC Robson Square

Type: Non-fiction

Moderator: Leanne Boschman

Reader: Maureen Mayhew, Hand on My Heart: A Canadian Doctor’s Awakening in Afghanistan (Caitlin Press)

About The Moderator

Leanne Boschman is a Vancouver Island-based writer living and working on the traditional territories of the Cowichan Tribes and Malahat Nation. Her poetry has been published in Geist Magazine, Prism international, Other Voices, Dandelion Magazine, Room, Arc Poetry, and Grain. As well, her poems have been published in several anthologies. Her collection Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal was published by Leaf Press in 2009; in it she explores colonial narratives of settlement and the lived experience of women in labour markets and domestic settings. Leanne completed her PhD in the Languages, Cultures, and Literacies program at SFU and has collaborated as a curriculum developer and educator in several BC communities. She presently works with adult learners in the Pacheedaht First Nation for Vancouver Island University. Leanne’s second collection of poems is entitled Here at the Crux (Silver Bow Publishing, 2022).

About The Reader

Maureen Mayhew earned a medical degree from McGill University then spent a decade interlacing treks to remote corners of the world with rural medical practice across Canada. In 2000 she accepted an offer to work in Afghanistan with Médecins sans Frontières. That decision changed her life, and motivated her to return to the country many times over the ensuing years.

Wanting to better address the health challenges she had witnessed in Afghanistan, she completed a Master in Public Health degree at Johns Hopkins University, and a fellowship in mixed-methods research at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her work has been published in peer-reviewed, scientific journals and portrayed in two educational films. Enamoured by her experiences in Afghanistan, she wrote articles sharing what she learned in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and contributed to the book Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of its Participants.

As a Clinical Professor in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC, she has instructed students on topics in global health, refugee health, program evaluation and remote primary health care.

Currently she works in the BC Physician Health Program where she helps doctors and trainees face challenges related to mental health, relationships, high pressure work situations, and career and life transitions. She also has a private Life and Leadership coaching practice that aims to help doctors thrive and reach their full potential.

Hand on My Heart: A Canadian Doctor’s Awakening in Afghanistan is Maureen’s first book and is illustrated with her own photographs.