Umaymah Mohammad has wanted to be a doctor for as long as she remembers. She traces her ambition to the story of her mother, one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by Israel to Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and who contracted polio as a toddler. Despite living with the debilitating disease, Mohammad’s mother went on to raise five children and obtain a graduate degree in the US.
It’s the story of a woman who “overcame unbearable medical circumstances”, Mohammad said. It also taught the Palestinian American about “the sociological determinants of health”, she said, as Mohammad believes displacement contributed to her mother catching the disease, due to the poor sanitary conditions entire communities of Palestinian refugees faced at the time.
