"I’m someone with nothing to lose, because I don’t have corporate interests, I don’t have corporate allies – I’m not worried about whether I will get thrown out or whether my company gets thrown out of a country that we’ve criticized."
"The Palmyra Hotel is the story of every Lebanese living through the country’s ups and downs – from its Golden Era to what are now some of its worst days. And now more than ever, the Palmyra Hotel is a looking-glass for me. It is the perfect symbol of cross-cultural communication over time."
"If you want to really shift health equity in communities, you have to sit with community organizations and people asking questions in ways that community health workers do, who have understandings of communities in ways that physicians don’t."
"We’ve failed to reckon with the deep inequality that existed before COVID-19. I’m hoping as we go into the future, past COVID-19, that this is really a reckoning – especially in healthcare but in every sector – that we have to pay attention to our most vulnerable populations."
"The people who are responsible for the content that lands in our newspapers or that lands on our television screens, 90% of those people do not look like the rising majority of America."
"Even though the right thing to do from a medical standpoint is still to stay apart, we understand that the economy is really suffering and really hurting. We have to make every effort to reopen the economy with the least risk. It’s not going to ever be without risk, but we just need to use the strategies that are going to mitigate the risk."
"We see patients coming in, and it’s up to us to serve them. We recognize our status as a safe-haven region for reproductive health care. We’re intent on protecting that for our patients locally and for those beyond our borders as well."
"We’ve got to acknowledge that while we are employing social distancing practices to have very major benefits for the epidemiology of this pandemic, it also has a lot of other implications for people, and mental health is one of them."
"There’s so much public policy that can help us be a care-seeking society. That’s what advocacy means to me: to speak and enter the public forum, to fight for our patients, to say that when we create structures in our society and in our public policy, we can do better to honor every person’s dignity."
"When women are centered, everybody does better. … When you help women and especially, multiply marginalized women, the ripple effects of that help everyone. And if we want to build the kind of society that we want, that’s the path forward."
