Erin Geiger: 0:10

Hey everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of Clover. Today on the show we have Dr. Farah Shroff. I am so excited to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Unknown: 0:19

Thank you so much, Aaron.

Erin Geiger: 0:21

We really worked with our schedules to make this happen, so I'm very proud of us. Here we are! Yay! And you're in Vancouver, is that right?

Unknown: 0:32

I live in Vancouver, on the west coast of the.. yeah, I'm on Musqueam Nation, but yeah, this is an MST, like Musqueam, Squamish, and Slaver Tooth area, but yeah, I'm a part of it, yeah.

Erin Geiger: 0:43

Oh my gosh, incredible. I have not been to that area, and Vancouver, or you know, I've always wanted to go, so I wanted to ask you about it, because I was like, oh, it seems like an incredible part of the area.

Unknown: 0:56

Oh my gosh, right now this, like, it's blooming, everything's in bloom. We've got lilac floating through the air, and the cherry blossoms are there. And then the wind blows, and we see these beautiful pink petals. It is absolutely spectacular to be here right now. Yeah, well, you've come, come at this time. Yeah,

Erin Geiger: 1:20

I would love.. I know it's such a dream. You're gonna have to send me a picture, because now I want to see.. I want to see what you're seeing. That's incredible. Oh, just sounds gorgeous. Okay, so my listeners know I always jump right in, because I get all excited, and so I would love to kind of hear sort of like your journey or your origin story, kind of like take us through what got you to where you are today, and I always love when people, you know, also, you know, if you're comfortable including like personal stuff too, like I did this, and this is happening in my life, because it's not just, we're not just working, you know, we all have other things going on in life. So, anyway, if you, if you wouldn't mind, kind of walk us through your journey to how you got to where you are today?

Unknown: 2:02

Yeah, of course. So I was born in Kenya, in East Africa, the mother continent, and that's something I'm really, really proud of, being born in Abbot. I left when I was three, so I don't.. I don't speak any Swahili anymore, or Kikuyu. I, my parents were born in India, and so I also spoke Gujarati and Hindi as a little kid, which I also speak terribly now. So, my all like these heritage languages of mine are kind of disappeared, but still, like, in my heart, really important part of who I am, and so, yeah, when I was three, we came here to the lands of the Coast Salish nations, and so this is really home for me. And shortly after we got here, my mom got really, really, really sick. She got a woman of color disease called systemic lupus erythematosus, and so my child is, so I guess I was about four when she got that diagnosis, and my childhood was really kind of buffeted about by being in the intensive care unit at Vancouver General or St. Paul's Hospitals, and, and you know, going into that special little family room, where the doctor is telling the family, you know, you might have your mom for another day or two, but she's definitely not going to live for more than six months, and so that was kind of like my entire childhood was like, oh my gosh, my mom isn't necessarily going to be with us, and so what, you know, what, what does that mean for me as this little growing kid? What does this mean for my dad and my sister, and you know, and the fact that we were just new in a new country. So, yeah, my childhood was definitely shaped by health issues in all of that, and all of the, you know, the sort of roller coaster of what that means, and also by my mother's own journey at learning how to address something, which had had been deemed an absolute no go, like she had been told she was going to die, and and she just wasn't willing to accept that, and so it was a pretty amazing thing to watch my mom go from, like, just, you know, flat out with machines keeping her alive, to doing a lot of yoga and changing her diet completely, like cutting out red meat, and it just eating, you know, healthy food, and of course the whole family came along when mom did that, and so, so, yeah, from a very young age I recognized, to you know, the, the, the importance of health and the real importance of women's health, and yeah, I think what I recognized, I think maybe, maybe I was kind of. Like, you know, still in elementary school, I've always been a pretty ambitious little kid, like very people would have always told me I was driven, like anybody who met me, like in my first few years of university, like that's just sort of like the way that I am, and I think partially it's the culture, like I've been raised to have a lot of discipline and focus, and also I'm a yoga teacher, and there's some.. there's a practice in yoga called Drishti. Drishti is one-pointed focus, and I practice Vipassana meditation, and the first part of the pasta is anapana, which is essentially focusing on the tiniest point, like maybe like even smaller than the tip of your pinky finger, and really sometimes I just do it for three hours, so

Erin Geiger: 5:52

incredible,

Unknown: 5:55

so focus and discipline, and just like work, work, work, that's just it's kind of in my DNA, and so I think what happened to me, like you know, as a kid was because there was so many times when you know, like in our culture, families sort of everything, and mother, the mother, like the word mother in our languages is like the most sacred word, really, and so the idea that that that I would lose that was was huge and I just remember being in in you know one of those those rooms and people you know my my auntie was there maybe and then my grannies moved my you know both grannies moved from India and Pakistan to be, to be with us, and I realized pretty young that being driven by the material markers of success, like, you know, of course, when I was a kid, it was always about getting the higher grades, and, and then, you know, that, but then later it's just like getting that bigger job, and having more money, and having the nicer house, and having the bigger car, and all of those things that our society tells us are the benchmarks of success. I figured out pretty young that really all that mattered in those moments in the ICU, when it was like it was so scary, because you know, I'd been crying and we'd all been crying and hugging each other. What really mattered in those moments was that we had love and support in our family that we were there to take care of each other, and so I feel like, yeah, that, and then a trip to India and Pakistan when I was about 15, our parents took us to their birthplaces, and both of them had very, very difficult childhoods, because in the end both of them lost a parent to murder. Both of my parents lost one of their parents to murder, and so they both had these pretty tough childhoods, and they both were really poor, and my dad much more than my mom. I think my mom was sort of managed, her family had managed a little bit better, but I recognized in that moment this kind of that same thing that that life isn't what, like, you know, what I'd sort of thought it was all about was like I really thought this idea of buying a Porsche would be really, really cool, and being really rich and being a lawyer, like my dad, was kind of what it was all about, and when I went there I saw these people with their entire lives on the sidewalk, everything they owned in a pot, one steel pot, and I realized that those weren't people separate from me, because my mom and dad, who kind of had a very rough time, they weren't quite that poor. The community that we come from is called the Parsis, and we're a very tiny community, and we take care of each other financially, so they got, they got housing, and they got, they got care, but, but I realized, like, you know, a lot of people will go to a place where there's a lot of poverty, and all they'll think of is how fortunate we are, which is a beautiful form of gratitude, and I absolutely felt that, but what I really felt was that these were my kith and kin, these were these were essentially just extended family living on that on that sidewalk, and that by some total accident of birth I was living in the west side of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and my dad was a downtown lawyer, my mom was a social worker. My mom actually did really well with all of her lifestyle changes, got a master's degree, aced her job, you know, did really well, lived a very pretty long life with quite a bit of disability, but lived a pretty long life, and so I recognized pretty young that that life is so much more about caring about other people, and about service, about serving other people, and all you know those, those lessons taught me that. So they've really shaped absolutely who I am today. I work in global public health, in the kind of humanitarian end of medicine, and and I founded. Global not for profit organization called Health Together, which serves to uplift the health of women. You know, I got influenced very young about the importance of women's health. Yeah, and the environment. So we also do work to improve the health of the planet, and I founded a social enterprise, which is all about teaching women and couples about the beautiful rhythms of the female body, it's called symptom thermal method, and it's a method that can help a woman to get pregnant and also help a woman as contraception, and yeah, I think it's also because I look back at my granny and my mom's lives, and the granny, my mom's mom, she was raised in colonial India under, I guess, the English, the times of the English, and for her third child, she didn't want to have that child, and she went to the Catholic doctor and said that she didn't, she didn't want to bear this baby and was told that it absolutely wasn't going to be possible, so she ended up having that child, and then my mom, because of her illness, ended up having an abortion of her third child that she really didn't want to have, so I've been very, very tuned into essentially like uterine well-being and women's sexual and reproductive health, just looking at the example of my mom and my grandma, and then also the choices that I had in my life, being raised here, getting a good education, and being becoming a feminist at a pretty young age, and you know, just really recognizing that so much of what I'm doing on this planet is uplifting other sisters, aunties, cousins, you know, uplifting particularly women like me, like the brown girls, brown girls, and racialized women of the planet, so yeah, so this stretchy, our social enterprise is very much focused on teaching couples the rhythms of the female body and the high fidelity scientific connection between cervical mucus and female fertility, and so that, that, that's one of the things that I guess came from this sort of lifelong learning about what I'm here to do,

Erin Geiger: 12:29

yeah. Oh my gosh, there's so much in there that I was like, oh, I want to, I want to talk more about that. Oh, I want to talk more about that. Your work is so needed and so impactful, especially now, like you know, women need to have that agency over their own bodies and over their own health. And so, thank you, first of all, for the work that you're doing, because it's, it's beyond needed, especially in today's age. And so, just thank you so much. And when you mentioned, oh, like the fun Porsche, and all of that. It's funny, because, because we - I mean, most of us think that, right? But then when you go to communities, and sure, materially they have less, right? But they're so happy, they're so happy, and they don't want what we have, necessarily, you know? And they're like, no, we have our family, and our, you know, it's fine if our, all of our things are in a box, like, you know, and it's like, so it's, it just opens up your eyes, it's eye-opening to see, to see that as well, you know, just like, not assuming, well, of course, they want what we have, and they're just like, no, we're actually, we're good, like, you can

Unknown: 13:39

write on, yeah,

Erin Geiger: 13:40

yeah, you can kind of keep what you got, so, so, yeah. When you.. I'm so great that your mom.. it sounded like she were recovered. It sounds like she did have some, some disabilities to manage, but that she came out of that.. like, what was that like when you saw your mom come out of and defy what the medical community was telling her? You talk a little bit about that.

Unknown: 14:11

It was transformative.

Erin Geiger: 14:12

Yeah,

Unknown: 14:13

it was amazing to see how my mom had this kind of healthy disrespect for her physicians. She loved them and they loved her, but she didn't think that they had the answers, because they didn't.

Erin Geiger: 14:24

Yeah,

Unknown: 14:24

nobody does with lupus, nobody does with some, some chronic conditions. They like, they can keep you alive, but they can't really do so much more than that. And actually, the most transformative moment in my mom's health journey, from my perspective as the little kid going through it was when she got really sick in Mexico. We went, we would go to Mexico because India was so far, we couldn't get there over like the Christmas holiday period, so we'd go to another spicy, warm place with really, you know, friendly people, and we kind of. Look, we kind of looked the part right, like it fitted really easily in Latin America. So we would go there pretty frequently, and one time my mother got, like, she had one of her lupus flare-ups, and she, like, she was down, and we had made my mom was this vivacious kind of, like, she'd walk into a room, and people go, "Who's you know? She goes, "U, beautiful, and she just had this beautiful aura around her, and she could make friends. She didn't even speak Spanish. I was the one who was the family translator once I learned, but my mom didn't even speak Spanish, and she made friends with Patricia of Regalos Patricia, which was this lovely clothing store. She was, of course, a fashion queen, so she was in there shopping for clothes, and, and when Patricia found out that my mom got sick, she got on it, like she was helping my mom do absolutely everything and anything, including she called a shaman, a Mexican shaman, and the shaman, he burned some herbs, and so the whole family's there, around Mom, you know, she's really weak, like not doing well at all. She's not in the hospital, but in Canada, she probably would have been in the hospital, and and he said to her, "You have to stop eating red meat, you have to start eating more vegetables, you have to sleep more, get get lower down on your stress and just focus on trying to be happy every day, like he just gave her, like, the basic essentials. This is what life is about, and you have to get down to it, lady, like you just gotta get your act together. And he said it, he didn't say it the way I just said it, he said it with so much love and attention, with, you know, like with the gravitas of a very wise man, and yeah, so I've never forgotten him, and I know it's not a secret, that it's not a secret, then that a lot of my work, like really my two tracks of my work in public health are natural, natural health, natural medicine, and social justice, right? So those are like the two tracks of the work that I do, and all of this started so young, watching how yoga, food as medicine, like all these things transformed my mother, so along with mom's health being transformed, of course, we were transformed.

Erin Geiger: 17:10

Yeah. Oh, that's incredible. And then when you mentioned, you know, when you all were in the hospital, kind of like surrounding your, your mom and comforting each other, it just reminded me that my, my dad just recently passed, and this is actually my first podcast episode that I'm recording since then, just kind of like piecing my life back, and we were the same. There was like, I have a very large.. I come from a very large family, there's 20 of us kids, yeah, especially when you said social work, I was like, "Oh my gosh, because my parents had eight of us biologically, and they adopted 12 and were foster parents, and all 12 kids had special needs, like the whole thing. And so there was 11 of us around the bed, you know, with him and everything, and I think he chose when he was gonna go, you know, kind of a thing, and everything, so it just reminded me of that, and then when your mom was doing social work, I mean, that's such an important job as well that we all need, you know, so that's incredible. So, yeah, so thanks to your mom as well, and your dad, we need lawyers.

Unknown: 18:17

Yeah, my mom, my mom did psychiatric social work, and her job was deinstitutionalizing patients in a mental institution called Riverview, and her way of doing that sometimes was to bring the patients to our host for lunch. I got to meet a lot of our patients, yeah. And it's no wonder that I do public mental health work today, too, right? Like all these things that happen in your childhood, and, and I'm sure, Aaron, that you have lots of stories from how your parents took, like, all that love they had in their heart and just embraced all these kids, right? Huge impact, right? You know what I feel when our loved ones move on, like they're now our ancestors. I felt this, especially you'll be surprised when my mother in law died. I, I loved my mother in law beyond belief. She was one of the most kind and loving, giving people I'd ever met, and my husband's Iranian, so my, my, my mother-in-law has been through literally hell, like she's been through hell, and I will not describe it, because it's so, so, so harsh, and she came out of all of that with just the biggest heart and loving people, and, and when she died, I, I took two weeks off work. I told my medical students, like, yeah, I, my mother-in-law died. I'm not, I'm a, I'm not, I'm not coming. I can't, can't, I can't be there. And, but what, what I remembered when she died was just how loving and kind she was, and that if I really wanted to keep her alive, that one of the things I could do is try to. A little bit like her to try to keep her alive by, by being that way, right? Like, I do think that's that is how we keep people alive, right? We take what we loved about them and we try and become that.

Erin Geiger: 20:13

I agree with that. I agree with that so much. Yeah, and just like surrounding yourself by things that they loved, and you know, and then when, when my dad was, and he went on home hospice, so it was nice, he could, he was at home, and everything, we, he loved big band, and like swing music, and so we would play that, and you know, and it's like kind of keeping them alive in that, that way as well, so anyway, to me, to say that, just reminded me, so I thought I'd share, but so, gosh, global public health is, I mean, if there's anything that needs attention today, it is that, and so I'm just curious, like, then you also mentioned, like, yoga and meditation, so, like, how do you marry those two worlds, right? So you know you're just like, okay, these two worlds do not need to be separate, and they actually kind of need each other, right? So, it's like, how did you kind of shift that, like realize that, and how did I kind of shift the way that you lead as well? So, curious.

Unknown: 21:12

Oh yeah, well, back when I was writing my master's thesis, which was in England, and it was on working-class women's mental health, I did this diagram as part of it, looking at how, and I don't use this language anymore, because it doesn't work for me anymore. Looking at how we need both the soft path and the hard path to better mental health, and the soft path was that one where we turn inward, and there's that, that much more yin or shakti way of being, where we're very gentle, kind, compassionate, very loving to ourselves, and one thing that I really, really have learned working in women's health is that that deep ability to really care for ourselves is possibly the most important thing in women's health. Most women are taught to serve and take care of everybody else, and that is so beautiful. That is absolutely a karmic reason for us to be on the planet, and sometimes we do that, and most times actually we do it at the sacrifice of our own well-being, and so the soft path, if you know, if I was to still use that language, is so much about that turning inward and really learning to listen to know who we are at the deeper level, and, and you know, we have these practices in yoga where we're just about to go into shavasana, into that deep relaxation, and we ask ourselves this beautiful time. You just pop in the question, Who am I? You just need to discover that deeper part of self and unshaped by the need for all of these things, pretty clothes, high status, whatever it is that we think we're supposed to be as women to just be at just to be with self at a very like profoundly deep level. Yeah, like when I asked myself that question, the first answer I got was a beam of light, you know, like what are you at that at that deeper level. The second one was a joyous dancer. I do love to dance. That wasn't a surprise. And then, and then, like most other times, it's I'm a nobody and I'm a nothing. I'm a nobody and a nothing, like it's so important, you know, just to be like that nobody and nothing in this work. Just because having that level of humility is always going to help us lift each other up. Yeah, and then what I called in those old days the hard path was a path which I'm very much on, and have been really, really since my parents took us to India and Pakistan when I was 1415, which is a path of doing feminist anti-racism and decolonial work, and I guess eco-feminist would probably be best, because you know, working for the earth as we work for women, and so that path is really important to me, and you know, I think right now when there's a war on the uterus, that's that's a war on women, and and it's it's not an exaggeration to say it's a war, it's a war that's absolutely what it is, and so when we break the bonds of competing with each other as women, we are breaking the bonds of patriarchy. We are not allowing those voices to take over. We are loving each other and supporting each other as sisters. To me, that is absolutely so powerful and so important in this time when sexism and misogyny are just rising and trying to, you know, they're trying to crush us. I wrote a song called Fuck Patriarchy, so sorry to use that language, but when I was thinking about the women of Afghanistan, yeah, gotten into songwriting as a way of expressing these things, just because it. So, like, you know, some of the stuff that I work in, it's just tough, it's just hard, you talking about maternal death rates from totally preventable things, and so I write poetry, I mean, not good poetry, I try, right, I do, I do songs and I dance, and, and, and that just gets the message across easier, so yes, my, it's very scary for the powers that be to hear a strong brown woman saying that she's proudly an eco-feminist who does anti-racism and decolonial work, and I say it really, really clearly. I don't yell it, I don't puff my chest up, but I'm just very clear that that's who I am, and my professional life is essentially a mirror of who I am at a deeper level, so at a deeper level I am a sadhaka, I am somebody since I was three years old, like that was one of the things that my parents taught me was yoga, like they were learning and I was learning with them, and now I've taught yoga in 60 countries around the world, like wherever I go for my public health work, I just teach yoga, so yoga, meditation, dance, those things are just, they're, they're who I am, like that's it's really important me to do those things, and so yes, I'm running a randomized clinical trial to see how we can treat an ignored global public health problem, osteoporosis, an older women's disease, which, depending on which part of the world you're in, a woman who falls and breaks her hip with osteoporosis has somewhere between a 20 and 70% chance of being dead within one year.

Erin Geiger: 26:40

Wow,

Unknown: 26:41

so that includes Canada, like the 2030-ish percentage points chats are here in our country, and then India, where we're running the trial, is it gets closer to 70, just because of these, these hysterectomies, these full hysterectomies that are happening, which, which creates a precipitous fall in hormone levels, which then can bring on early, early menopause, and then a higher risk of osteoporosis. So, so, yes, the hard path for me is very much about, about, about looking at the structural issues that are facing us, the systemic issues that are facing us, and that's why I like to do policy work and get at the top of institutions to make sure that we're working at the structural and systemic level to up and these deeply, deeply oppressive forces, and so, yeah, so bringing those two things together was absolutely just who I am, and, and, and in the end, you know, because I've just, you know, again from that yogic perspective, only known to be myself, because that's the spiritual practice, know yourself and be yourself, and of course, love yourself, like at the end of our meditation practice, we, we said metabah, metabah is loving kindness, that's a, that's a Pali word. So, yoga is in the Sanskrit language, and the pasta is in, is it Pali? And Pali is a little bit younger than Sanskrit, and, and so, Metabah means loving kindness. But first, we send the Meta Bhavana here to self, and then we send it to all beings everywhere, so that's that's part of the spiritual practice, and then from there you know everything just grows, like if you, if you want it, if you want everybody to be well, all beings, that means plants, animals, humans, everybody to be well, then it just, it makes sense, that's you know, you would do something like global public health, which involves doing environmental and planetary health projects. Yeah, it's okay.

Erin Geiger: 28:50

It does, it does make sense. And you've, you've like actually shaped these like pretty major, you know, health strategies, these policies, as you've got you, and you mentioned you touched up a little bit upon like the structure that you work within and everything, so you've seen these critical decisions be made, and so, but I'm curious on the other side of it, where do you think folks, we could say institutions that are, you know, involved in this, where do you think they're still like kind of over complicating or missing the point entirely, when it comes to improving health outcomes, especially for women and underserved communities. You have a front row seat to this, you're involved in this, so it's kind of like, where do you kind of think they're missing the point completely, or they're over complicating it? You know, what are your thoughts around that

Unknown: 29:42

there's a stuckness in institutions and I'm really, really grappling with how to address this. There's there's this kind of this inertia the institutions have to change, and it's partially just because they're so deeply embedded. It in the status quo, and we have, for decades in this country, had a gap between rhetoric and reality, between theory and practice, between policy and practice, and that I mean, it seems to be.. I don't know whether it's a uniquely Canadian problem, but many of us who work in policy talk about this big gap that we have in this country, and so we've got the talk, we've had it for decades. Canada is a leader since, like, like Mac La Long was Minister of Health in the 70s. We have, we have done the talk, we have led, we led England, we led the US. We led other reports after these, this 1974 report came out on how health was more than medicine, you know, that was a big revelation at the time, right. And so we know, like, you know, for somebody who does health policy for a living, we know that we need to, we need to have, we need to eliminate poverty. We need to, the polite language of public health is that we need to lift up social status, so social status inequities. We need to equalize those, which basically means we need to get rid of racism and sexism, hetero-sexism, ageism, all the forms of oppression which make people unhealthy. This is not just political rhetoric, it actually bears out, so that the people who have the least power and the least money have the worst mental and physical health outcomes. So, why do I always continue to work for social justice? Because that's the bedrock of good public health. We can't change public health unless people have more money and more power, that's just it. That's that's public health 101 I actually have to spend sometimes half of entire term with my students, teaching them that decade after decade after decade after decade of research from all over the planet has shown us that, and yet everybody thinks more access to medicine, more access to medicine, that's all we need. I mean, we are so lost in that formula of, you know, better health equals more medicine. So, yeah, we really, really need to look at, like, really like equalizing our social world, and then we also need to look at how we deal with our inner world, right? The inner world. So, yeah, that, that is it. But, yeah, the answer to your question, in terms of why women and communities of color and people with disabilities and indigenous communities and elderly people continually are left out, you know, the structures were never built for people on the margins of our society, and it's, it's, it's absolutely ludicrous to say that women are on the margins, because we constitute about 50% of the population, and yet I am constantly standing up in boardrooms of power and saying, okay, well, I'm not quite sure that I see how women are being addressed here, and and there is an entire edifice of medicine and public health and virtually every institution that has anything to do with health, which has treated women as little men, so we are so far behind when it comes to understanding women and heart disease, women and mental health, women and and HIV, women. I mean, we, it, I was an HIV and women of color researcher for 10 years, and for the first decade of HIV, we know that about half a million women died of HIV complications not being diagnosed because we thought that women were going to have the same symptoms as men, and we didn't. We didn't, and it's the same with heart diseases. You can name any disease category you want. Our bodies are completely different in many ways, men, you know, we have the same arms and legs and all of that stuff, but we have different hormones with so much of us is completely different, and so we're finally starting to get really good research, usually led by strong and powerful women, on how, like, just for example, like aging for women should be done. We now know the two super powerful

things: 34:18

if you want to age well as a woman, you need protein, you need good sources of protein, and you need resistance. You need to be doing stuff which are pushing and pulling your muscles, so that your muscles push and pull your bones. I'm a yoga teacher in the, in this bone yoga, and it's exactly that that we do. It's really, really hard yoga, because you're holding a position for a long time, and you're working your muscles, and your muscles are pulling your bones, and that's what your bones love. They love to be pushed and pulled. So, older women need that, and Who would have thunk like that? Is just not what you know medicine has told us in the past. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's definitely a lot. Road, my friend, it's a long, long road to get to the place where our structures and our institutions are going to move beyond the rhetoric, because the rhetoric, especially in a country like this one, is still there. I haven't talked yet about the fact that I lived in Boston for a year, 2021 22 so I feel very.. it's like my second home. Boston has become my second home. I fell in love with Harvard. I was awarded this amazing fellowship at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and it was like there I found my tribe. I totally found my tribe at Harvard, and so I'm so like my planetary health project, that's entirely with colleagues at Harvard, a Musit project I'm doing here, entirely well, not entirely, you know, people are based here, but yeah, but was rooted in a project with two Harvard colleagues, so because I'm so tapped in to what's happening there, I see how words like equity, diversity, inclusion are being absolutely smithereens, smashed to bits, and so the fact that we live in a country where those words are still in the healthcare system being honored and respected, at least, at least for their rhetorical value, it means something to me. It actually means a lot, right? Yeah,

Erin Geiger: 36:16

yeah, it's like, thank goodness, you know, those are still a part of the conversation, you know, and it's like, let's talk about that access and equity, like, so you know, you've obviously, you know, over various populations and geographies worked within health equity, and so, as you've kind of progressed in your work there, what have you seen, whether it's through communities or systems that kind of like fundamentally changed how you think about what access or equity really means, like I would love to hear your perspective on that.

Unknown: 36:49

The story that comes to mind was when I was a more junior public health professional, and I had the honor of working in Nigeria, so Nigeria is a place where often the world's best minister of health comes from there, and that is true today in 2026 Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, I worked with him at Harvard, he's just like, like he is truly a phenomenally brilliant man, and he's back in his old job leading the Ministry of Health again in Nigeria, so when I was there way back then, Ransom Kuti was the Minister of Health again, like the world's best Minister of Health. So that was a true honor working there. Brilliant colleagues loved the work I was doing, community health planning and training of community health workers, super fun. I'm a short South Asian woman, and Nigerians are usually a lot taller, and I love driving, and so it was really fun. Like, I would be driving this huge bus, sitting on two phone books, and having these tall dudes like sitting in the bus with me. It was super fun. That we had so much fun. The trainings were super fun, and as part of the community health planning, I again had the honor of going with my colleagues, the only Canadian, the only non-Nigerian person in the gang, but they would do all the protocols in advance. So this is, we were doing village health planning, and so they would go in advance, and they would ask the chief, say we're coming, we're coming, we're working with this Canadian NGO, we're coming to talk with you about how we can improve health in your communities, and what you know, what we're going to.. it's like a planning exercise, and so the chief would say, "Yeah, sure, we'd set the date and the time, and then off we'd Trundle into the village, and I cannot tell you, this is the most brilliant way I have ever seen in any country, and I'd worked in a lot of countries for work norms. Basically, what would happen is we would arrive, and typically they would tell us to come kind of in the morning. The first thing they would do would be to pour libation to the ancestors. So, most African countries, the ancestors are to be venerated, and is so beautiful, so beautiful to sort of say a prayer. Thank you to the ancestors. We're about to do some work together. We've got these visitors here, they pour a little bit of food into the ground for the ancestors and ask for their blessing, and that it was not as short as I made it, right? It's a process, and so everybody would be, you know, in this very sort of place in their heart, and then often we would dance, and I already told you the joyous dancing part of me, right? So it's like, yeah, yeah, let's go, let's move, let's move, and so yeah, and and so we would dance, and it was like this was, remember, this is a work meeting, we're here to do work, right, and so have you ever done this in Canada? Like, does this ever happen? You know, I've never seen this in our country. So, and we're dancing, and we're sweating it, like we are not just like stretches one song. We've got live drummers, and we're like, yeah, I'm moving it, and like we're really like we are really like getting down, like you know, and all. People are like they're bending their knees and like really shaking it, and we're like we're looking at each other, we're laughing and we're smiling, and you're like dancing is just joy, isn't it? Right. And then, and then they would have killed some animal for us, a goat or a chicken or chickens, and then we feast, right? So then we're like, we've eaten all this fresh food. Sorry if you're vegetarian, really, really fresh meat, but and then, so this is probably three hours later that we arrived, and then the chief, in this very regal way, again, never seen this ever in a Canadian context, even just the manner in which the chief would address us, and it was always a he would say, oh, welcome to the village. What is it that you wanted to talk with us about, right? Like, after all that, yeah, right after all this. And now we have built relationships, we have, you know, we've been in our hearts, we've been in our bodies, we've, we've fed our tummies like we're happy campers, and all of a sudden, when now the work conversation starts, we're ready to really rock it, because we, we have a level of trust, like you know me, who comes from a totally separate country, all of a sudden feels really welcome, and at one of those meetings we said to the chief, Can you tell us what's like, what's going on for your village, and at other meetings the chief said, well, would you like to go on a walk with us, and we can show you the water sources. Oh my gosh, the things that I saw, like walking out and seeing how long people had to walk to get to water sources, and how dirty the water was that they were getting their water. Those were like really eye-opening, but the thing that I will never forget is when we were, we were in a village, and it would never be the chief alone. He would always invite village people, you know, his own viziers, his advisors, and everything would obviously be there, but he would just invite anybody who wanted to come, and so he, he said, okay, people, let's, let's, let's tell these folks what, what are the health issues, and so people would say, well, we don't have a road into the village, and you know, lots of different issues would come up, and then, and then one woman really quietly stood up, and oh, she was, oh, just never forget her, so tall, and she, she, she rose up with a lot of humility, and she said, I'm an older woman, and you might not recognize that, even though I can't have children anymore, that my health needs are still really important, and so is my sister, and you know, and my cousins, and everybody else in my age group. And please don't think that women's health is only about child bearing and about reproduction, because we have a lot of years ahead of us, and we're very contributing members of the village, and we have needs, and, and the way she said it was just like she spoke so much from her heart with such eloquence. I don't know if you've ever been to an African country, but the way that people speak is often like there's a, there's a culture of learning how to orate, and so she spoke very eloquently, and I've never forgotten her, and I did devote a large part of my life to preventing maternal mortality, because that was one thing I couldn't live with, you know, women dying of basically bleeding to death from a preventable condition, postpartum hemorrhage. So I have, and I continue to do that work, but, but this work on osteoporosis is essentially now heeding the call of this beautiful woman who said, please do not ever forget us, and so the postmenopausal woman has become a very important person in my life, and it was because of her. Yeah, I would say she started. She started it.

Erin Geiger: 44:04

Yeah, I mean, that's huge. I mean, the whole, like, perimenopause, menopause.. I went to get my hormones checked, and I'm going to go back and do it. I didn't end up doing it then, because it was like, well, it might not be covered by insurance, and you know, and everything, and it was just so frustrating, because it's like, how is it not covered, you know, it's like it's, it's mine, it shouldn't be mind blowing at this point, I guess, sadly, but you know, and I was like, well, whatever, I guess I'll go back, and I'll pay whatever it is, you know, but it was just, yeah, and so it's like, it's our bodies, like you said, were different than those of a male body, and we have hormones, and we go through perimenopause, menopause, you know, and it's real, and it be supported, so yeah, so very important work, 100% agree. And I am curious, so I could talk to you forever, and I have so many questions in my head. We need to think a part two. What do you, what do you think, like when you're working with like policy human practices, and you're thinking about leadership? So, for women that are stepping into more visible roles, we, we, we spoke briefly before we started recording on how you know our listeners kind of run the gamut between people just starting out in their careers and like seasoned leaders, so women stepping into more visible roles. What do you believe we need to unlearn in order to lead in a way that's actually sustainable and impactful. Love your thoughts on that.

Unknown: 45:47

You know, so many women still believe they're not good enough. Yeah, and and that's a really, really tragic reality of patriarchy and and childhood upbringings, and then what happens is, there's like little voice inside us that just repeats that you're not good enough, you're not good enough, you're not good enough, and so for anybody who does want to step up into a position of any authority or power, I really like my, my wish for you, my sisters, is that you, that you get rid of those voices in your head, which have told you anything, but like I am enough, I am brilliant, I am a leader, I am vibrant, I am visionary, whatever language you can start to have yourself talk to be that which is affirming and giving you the vision of where you are now and where you want to go, and if, if, if this works for you, how you want to lift others up to take you with you. For me, that always works, because you know it's never a solitary journey, but, but in many ways it's lonely, right? Lonely, right? I have to say, like, sometimes I do feel like, you know, you're in this place and it can be lonely, right? And so, yeah, seeking.. I always seek out mentors myself. I have mentors. I am so grateful to my mentors and coaches. I have coach, mentor, and yeah, and I need that support, so knowing yeah, but I must say the absolute deepest thing for women leaders is to root yourself in your own power and to know that you're a powerful woman, and to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and affirm how powerful you are, and, and to, and to be able to have body language that really shows that, yeah, it's really it, yeah, the body language is really important, really, really important, like just sitting tall and being able to take people's gaze, yeah, there's sometimes that stare down gaze that you might get from members of the opposite sex, and just to be able to sit, you know, just as, just to sit and hold that gaze, yeah, yeah, and, and you know, and like the shoulders, not here, not here, but you know, they're uncomfortable, and you know, just the whole thing, chin back, like just having, having your posture in a place where you're telling the world that you have authority and that your body shows that, and that you aren't cocky, arrogant. No, that's not what you're saying. You're saying I know what I'm doing, and I'm in charge, like it's the I'm in charge body language that's really important. And then the words that come with it, right, the words that come with it, not"please, may I be part of the team. No, I'm in charge here. Yeah, and what I say is what's going to happen, and I will be accountable for that, absolutely. And, and that's it's my vision. So, let's go for

Erin Geiger: 48:58

it. Yeah, it's like I have value, and you know your value, and it's like walking into somewhere knowing that you belong there. Yeah, immediately, no question. You know, there's no prerequisites. It's like you just belong in that room, yeah, at that table, yeah, in that conversation. Yeah, yeah,

Unknown: 49:16

absolutely. Yeah, I'm a martial artist, and I teach self-defense to women. I teach something called Go Girls Go, really fun four hour long workshop, which deals with a lot of those kind of ideas, and how to talk in a situation where you feel threatened, like it's a lot of it is breathing, being in your body, giving yourself that time, because a lot of times when you're, when you are breaking glass ceilings, you are going to be really threatening and threatened, right? People will find you threatening. I've been told that so many times, that men are scared of me, right? They're scared of me, and I don't mean to make them scared. It's, you know, and I.. I don't take responsibility for it, because it's not my doing that they're scared of me, they. Just, you know, they just haven't seen a brown woman who's so comfortable in her skin and her power, and you know that's tough luck, because there's lots of us, actually, there's a lot of us, but maybe you just haven't met us, right? So, welcome to the club, dude,

Erin Geiger: 50:18

it's fun in here. Come on, join us, we like feminine. Exactly. Oh my gosh, I love it. Okay, if people want to connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do so?

Unknown: 50:34

LinkedIn is a very, very good way to find me. So, Dr. on LinkedIn, our website for our not-for-profit is M A A, that's MA, most sacred word of the world, mother.med.ubc.ca that's one good way to find us. And then, yeah, and we've got the social enterprise also on that website. And then I can give you email and other ways to reach me. Yeah, I can. Yeah, tons of ways to find me. People find me,

Erin Geiger: 51:07

yeah, that'd be great. And I'll include those in the show notes. And then one quick fun question before we sign off, because we just love music over here, is if you could only listen to one music artist for the rest of your life, who would it be?

Unknown: 51:22

Oh? gosh, that's so impossible. Okay, I really.. this is really old, from like way back when. Judy Mowat.. I love Judy Moet. She was one of the I threes who sang with Bob Marley, and then when he passed, he.. she became her own singer, and her words are so much, there's so many, so many social justice parts, like sing our own song, we'll sing our own song, and fly African eagle, and they're just like super powerful songs, and her voice is like silk, yeah, just love her music, but there's so many others, oh my goodness, that I love, yeah, oh, I

Erin Geiger: 52:00

love, I know it's kind of a mean question, but I'll have to check her out. But thank you so much for your time. I am so glad we made this happen, and you're just a light, and I just.. I love it. So, thank you. I'm so grateful.

Unknown: 52:14

Thank you, Erin. Thank you, and thank you to, for you, for all the work you are doing in uplifting women. We need your voice. We need the voices of the women you're that you're broadcasting to the world.

Erin Geiger: 52:27

Thank you so much. Thank.