Joanne Liu

St. Lawrence grad Dr. Joanne Liu recounts life as humanitarian

Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

peterblack@qctonline.com

Despite trying to alleviate an unimaginable amount of human suffering all around the planet, CEGEP Champlain-St. Lawrence grad Dr. Joanne Liu still has hope for humanity.

Liu, a McGill University medical school graduate, former president of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and longtime pediatric emergency doctor at Hôpital Sainte-Justine in Montreal, spoke on April 10 to a packed auditorium at her alma mater, describing, with the help of images on a screen, her life as a global humanitarian activist.

The content of her 35-minute presentation was essentially the same as the one she had been asked to give to New York University in March; that talk was cancelled at the last minute by university officials over concerns about references to the situation in Gaza and the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID.

Liu had studied her pediatric emergency specialization at NYU.

She began her talk, much of which she deals with in her new book, L’Ébola, les bombes et les migrants, by explaining how the daughter of Chinese immigrants who opened a restaurant in Quebec City 50 years ago ended up as a doctor working in many of the world’s disaster zones.

She explained she had “an existential crisis” as a teenager, during which she read Albert Camus’ The Plague, a fictionalized account of an epidemic in Algeria. Rejecting the main character’s pessimism, she vowed, “I would never trivialize death and I would fight for life.”

From there, her life followed a seeming path of destiny. She participated in the Katimavik youth program, which led to her enrolling at CEGEP Champlain-St. Lawrence. She recalled how she saw a poster in the campus cafeteria for the Canadian Crossroads International program and decided to sign up.

After three stints working in the West African country of Mali over the summer break, Liu said, “This is it, I want to become a doctor.”

Getting into medical school, however, was not automatic. She said former campus director Jean Robert, her student advisor at the time, had suggested she apply to McGill because admissions are partly based on interviews. “He said, ‘If you get an interview, you’re going to ace it.’ And I did – and you’re going to ace it too,” she addressed the gathered students.

“St. Lawrence gave me everything I needed to become a physician,” Liu said.

From her first mission with MSF in Mauritius in 1996, Liu has worked in more than 30 crisis zones, all the while moving up the worldwide organization’s ladder, serving as Canadian president (2004-2009), then international head from 2013 to 2019.

It was during her stint as international president that she had to deal with an exceptionally tragic incident in a war zone – the bombing by U.S. forces of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in August 2015.

Showing before and after aerial photos of the site, Liu noted how the airstrike was so precise the hospital building was destroyed, but “not a leaf was lost” on trees in a nearby grove of trees.

In the aftermath of the incident, which killed 42 people and injured 30, Liu led a campaign at the United Nations for it to adopt a resolution to protect the wounded and medical and humanitarian personnel in war zones.

Despite the measure, Liu said, “not much has changed” with regard to attacks on medical and humanitarian workers.

Liu described other memorable missions, including the 2010 Haiti earthquake, where the challenges of treating the injured were compounded by a cholera outbreak caused by UN forces dumping contaminated water; the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, where MSF workers ended up putting bodies in bags more than treating the injured; and the Ukraine war in 2023, when MSF organized a medical train to evacuate people injured in Russian attacks westward.

Liu, now 59, though winding down her international humanitarian missions, is still very active in humanitarian efforts, including as professor at the School of Population & Global Health at McGill University and director of the Pandemics and Health Emergencies Readiness Lab (PERL).

“In terms of the hardcore things I used to do, I’ve slowed down. I’m still going to do some overseas assignments, but probably not at the extent I used to, so I’m going to slow down a little bit.”

As for how it feels to speak to an audience at her alma mater, Liu said, “It makes me believe there will be people who will take over.”

During a question-and-answer session following her talk, a student asked how she could maintain hope given all the suffering and strife in the world.

Liu said, “The last chapter of my book is about hope. Despite the title – Ebola, Bombs and Migrants – it’s a book about hope. … It’s not because you don’t see a solution at the outset that you shouldn’t give it a try. It’s worth the fight because each time you change things, never at the level you wanted, never ever. Life is full of imperfect solutions. But I always say an imperfect solution is always better than no solution, as long as you’re not complacent about the imperfect solution and you strive for more.”

Liu was in Quebec City to participate in the Salon international du Livre de Québec. She was on a panel discussing the topic of finding hope in troubled times.