Where dreams come from, is a podcast featuring successful people from around the world who have pursued their dreams to arrive at a station in life. I'm your host, Sanjeev Chatterjee. I'm a professor of cinema and journalism. And in my creative life, I make documentary films. I started this podcast to explore what it takes for people to follow their dreams, even while being true to who they are, at least, who they believe they are. Amy Leeman, my guest today, trained to be a surgeon to be a better doctor than the ones who had treated her when she was much younger. She found a passion in working with underserved communities along the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the past decade, her original dream of creating the Lake Tanganyika floating health clinic has evolved into something much more holistic. Mr. Leeman Welcome to where dreams come from. Thanks for having me. I think you grew up in Chicago, can you share with us early memories of growing up,

I actually grew up in Evanston, which is a suburb of Chicago, or Northwestern University is, I was always a rebellious character, not in a bad way, not in a rule breaking way. But in a, I do what I want kind of way. So I kind of came out of the womb that way, my parents tell a story that maybe I was too. And I was saying the F word. And my father said, Amy, if you don't stop saying that word, I'm going to wash your mouth out with soap. And of course, I kept saying it, they took me and held me over the sink and said, stick your tongue out. And I stuck my tongue out. And he put the tongue. And I turned him and I said, I'm delicious. So if I had to say like, what's a metaphor for my personality, it would be that

and school friends.

I had some medical problems. And I actually didn't go to school for most of fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, and part of my freshman year in high school. looking backwards, I have to say that I really appreciated the fact that I had been insulated to a certain extent from a kind of peer pressure that I think can be very negative, particularly tween girls can be kind of mean and undermining. I feel like in a way missing that period of my life made me particularly non susceptible, let's say to peer pressure. And then I went from never going to school, and sort of only being around adults, to going to boarding school, I went to boarding school in Connecticut, I think, because I hadn't been to school, I really wanted school. And I had always been a very avid reader. And I was always interested in science. You know, I had nerdy interests, I also made some of my closest friends that I'm, you know, who, with whom I'm still friends. But, you know, I definitely wasn't the average high school student,

it's really interesting to me, that you said that you came out of the womb the way you are, and then not having to go to school basically, inoculated you against any kind of self doubt, that can be injected by peers.

So I had a lot of confidence as an adolescent, in my ideas, and in my ability to ask questions, and was unlikely to conform or change because some peer teased or belittled me, you know, I was like, okay, that doesn't matter. But it doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that it was good feelings. Of course, I had feelings, but it was like, okay, but on balance, what's more important, you know, that somebody who probably has a whole laundry list of their own insecurities and issues, things having mean to me or labeling me in some way, or you know what I'm what I want to do with my life.

What is your first memory of phenol wanting to be something?

This is a weird memory. I remember being quite young, maybe three at most four. And I remember sitting on the floor, and what I imagined is that I unzipped myself out of my small trial body and out stepped like a woman. Okay. And that I had, and it was like I was having a vision of my future as like a three or four year old. That is something that was a very powerful visualization at that time that I have never forgotten.

That's a very strong image that's three or four years old. Are there events that made you think maybe I'll do this or do that down the line?

When I was ill, and interacting with the medical community, my initial reaction was, I don't want to be a doctor, because I think these people are jerks. I don't like the way I'm being treated. So for a certain period of time, I rejected that whole premise that I you know, I should be a doctor. And then it was later on when I was in college. And actually, when I was pregnant with my son, I thought, you know, that's not the reaction you should have, the reaction you should have is that you could be the doctor that you think people deserve. You could treat people like humans

medical school, what was that? Like?

I went to medical school as a single mother. That was challenging. But I mean, I, you know, having a certain amount of perspective, you know, understanding why are you doing what you're doing, very helpful to me to put all of the the work and the and the and the balancing act and the kind of pressures in a kind of context.

Are you saying that it was easier for you to deal with it?

Maybe I mean, because I certainly didn't think oh, this is the hardest thing that's ever happened to me. I was like, I chose this, I know why I'm here, I'm not going to be like, Woe is me, it's so hard.

One of the common themes that is emerging in the various conversations I'm having for this podcast, is that in many of the cases, I can't say all adversity plays a role in how people embrace the idea that I have a mission in life or purpose in life, and I will go after it. And they do very well. Have you thought about that?

I mean, I think we're actually living in a time right now, where challenges and adversity are almost always characterized as negative and diminishing to the personality of a person. And I don't want to say that there aren't kind of an infinite number of terrible things that have happened in the world and happened to people that justifiably and rightly injure them make things hard for them. I work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, okay. So I'm very, very well aware of how, you know, patently awful existence can be for certain people. But I think that that framing requires a kind of counterpoint for today, if we were to like D politicize everything and talk a little bit more about psychological formation, and all that sort of stuff. You know, the reality is, is that learning to work through adversity, and learning to work through pain, I think is a very important step of losing a layer of ego centrism, you know, my feelings are not at the center of the universe, to me is actually that real step that is the departure from adolescence into adulthood.

How did your interest in the Democratic Republic of Congo begin,

I actually was always interested from the time I was a teenager in Sub Saharan African politics and literature. When I was a boarding school, I audited a survey course at Yale, and it was taught by the Kenyan writer in googy, watse ongo. And so we've read a lot of literature, you know, by by African authors, and it was there was a lot of that kind of post colonial experience, reading about political oppression, and social oppression through an African voice. So I was always very interested in those kinds of topics. And then I knew a lot about the history of the Congo.

When did you first get there?

I went to East Africa, right after I graduated with my friend, I was newly 18. And we were kind of Tootle, doodling around Kenya. And it was a really, you know, it was a fascinating really enriching experience and to do so with a Kenyan, rather than see, you know, have these experiences through a lens of being like a tourist. And then you know, I was very, very close friends with the Tanzanian at the University of Chicago, and we did some traveling in Tanzania much later on. And I finally ended up going to the Congo in 2009.

What did you see and experience in that time?

Congo, to me is, it's like the theory of everything that nobody understands that if we look at where we are, where we're at a kind of crossroads of can we engage in climate stabilization for the planet? Can we migrate to green technologies and things like that, you know, Congo is actually at the center of that discourse. And there are kind of two principal ways in which That's true. One is, you know, we're probably 10 years away from a different kind of battery chemistry that doesn't require cobalt. And you know, as of today, 70%, of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And then there's this sort of the climate stabilization side, which is that, you know, the second largest rain forest on Earth, is in Central Africa. And the majority of that footprint is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and, and so forth. conservation is absolutely essential in this part of the world. But how do we compensate low income countries to do better environmental management and forest conservation than we did ourselves?

Were you thinking you're going to go there and do something I was very

interested in sort of looking at the lake, Tanganyika basin, as a kind of epidemiologic unit, if you will, that there are all these people who lived around this vast body of water, that we're facing the same barriers to care and access, and that there was a way to think about, you know, providing service in a more holistic way there. So my interest in in in going to DRC, was always, you know, as a as a medical person, as somebody who thought about service delivery, that kind of thing,

the idea for the clinic, when did that emerge?

So I had actually been on the Tanzanian side of Lake Tanganyika, maybe a year or two before, and I got stranded so to speak, in the lake, Tanganyika basin, because it was at the tail end of the rainy season. And the airstrip were supposed to be picked up was washed away. And we had to drive, you know, not that far. Okay. But took, you know, I don't know, 1214 hours to go a very short distance, because of the fact that the roads were completely. I mean, it was like mud tracks to kind of traveling through these areas and seeing how can it crippled the infrastructure was I just started to think, Well, you know, what, if you just reach people by water,

what did it take to make it reality?

I mean, probably the single most important thing was the thing that I was born with, which was justice, stubbornness, tenacity. But, you know, it was very iterative. It was going to these places and meeting with various political people, both in the health space, and well beyond that, and the government's, you know, talking about these ideas, trying to understand how one operates there. And what we do now is we, you know, reach people using little boats, you know, we visit these health centers around Lake Tanganyika. And you know, primarily, we focus on the Congo side of the lake.

This conversation is kind of fascinating to me, because you go there as a doctor, but the things you're talking about go well beyond medicine.

That's absolutely true. But I've always thought about medicine in that way. I I've never thought about population health, if you will, as somehow being divorced from a lot of these other factors. This is part of the reason why I've also kind of occupied this space in the larger aid and development world is kind of like the bad girl, because for a long, long time, the approaches in global health have been organized along disease verticals, if you will. And funding goes down these disease verticals, etc. And I was at a sensibly this doctor talking about health, but I was talking about all these other kinds of things like the environment, and climate, and, you know, socio economics and politics. And they were like, you're breaking the rules, because you're talking about these complex ecosystems as if that's our responsibility and global health. And for me, particularly, in fragile states, in, you know, kind of conflict or post conflict environments, the communities that are trying to survive these challenging conditions. They're facing a whole range of diseases. So maybe they have the highest incidence of malaria, but they also have the highest incidence of tuberculosis, childhood diarrhea, and they're also starving.

So given the topic of of this conversation, where dreams come from, how would you help us wrap our head around a mission for yourself? And when does it emerge?

I've been on a very interesting journey, where I know that I'm singularly interested in certain things. I'm singularly interested in service delivery to very vulnerable people. I know that I'm singularly interested in the African Great Lakes, I know that I'm singularly interested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but that, what is my role? What should I do? How can I be most effective, I basically just needed to embrace that role is being kind of like a gadfly, too big aid, because of who I was, and my personality and my unusual position in this space, that I could be the voice, I could stir up the pot, I could poke people and ask them to reevaluate these kind of long held assumptions. My biggest role is is just being that kind of irritant to the system.

Your role is geographically specific, but really broad and scope. I know that you've edited on your body, the geographic specificity, belief, will you tell us the story about that?

I was, I was basically shipwrecked, when I was a newbie, like Sega, deca, I was out on the water. And we were going to take this motor boat up to the Mahalia National Park. And, and these gigantic waves came in and like basically, sort of sunk the boat, we were close to mahali. And we were inside the boundaries of the park. And because of the bad weather, the you know, Rangers would routinely, you know, patrol. And so they came down, and they saw us and then we organized, you know, everything that needed to happen after that, after we had been, we sort of figured out how to get inside the park, I ended up holding kind of like an impromptu clinic, in the hallway, and lots of patients came to see me to ask me about their health problems. And then the last patient that I saw was a woman who was suffering from postpartum depression. And I found that experience to be really interesting, because how people think about mental health issues in different cultures can be incredibly variable. And what I found interesting is that, you know, her husband had said, you know, there, why don't you go and ask that mazinga doctor, if he has any thoughts about what you're experiencing, and sitting with her and kind of talking with her and explaining that it wasn't, you know, a fundamental flaw of her, there are these things that are happening. And here are the kinds of things that we can probably do for you, where we don't have access, you know, to antidepressants or something. But here are some things that you could do that might make you feel better, and even just talking about it made her feel better. And so I thought, you know, it was like a moment of just I had to be in our head to be out of this journey. And so that was when I decided, Okay, well, your can never really be lost if you have a map. And how can you be like totally in, I came back from that experience that I just said, Okay, I'm gonna attach to the map of Lake Tanganyika in my bag, then everyone's gonna know, right, everybody who lives around there is going to know I'm in. I'm not passing through, I'm not a tourist. And this sort of symbolism, right of locating myself in in a place.

We've talked about your single mindedness. But we haven't talked about the courage it takes to just land up in the Congo, as a woman, American woman, and then push force.

I mean, I would characterize it less is courage, and more is humility. Yes, you have to have a certain amount of courage. But the way you actually get something out of that experience, and you create important connections, and you're able to do things is by not having preconceived ideas, and being led by them, Congo is an extremely surprising and in a very positive way, often place where, you know, how people have lived through these kind of generations and generations of, you know, kind of complex and challenging experiences, and emerge as vibrant, fun. engaged, people are really part of Congolese culture, you know, like, less up, it's like, a philosophy of fashion, which is that, you know, in Kinshasa, you can be you can be poor, you can maybe live in a tiny dwelling with a Corrugated Roof, but you decide that you're going to work and spend money on some kind of designer suit, or you put these outfits together that are unbelievably creative, and colorful. And then you go out and you walk in the neighborhood, no matter what is happening, you know, you're going to embrace like fashion, beauty, creativity, you're going to project your personality, you know, around you, despite your material circumstances.

What is your dream for the Congo? in the future?

I'm actually kind of working on my dream right now that is separate from my dream is a healthcare provider. My dream is somebody who's interested in healthcare services. What I'm hoping is, is that what I talked about, you know, before about Congo, sort of being like, the theory of everything, for the issues of the day today is that we can figure out a way to elevate the Congo in the process of a more global conversion to you know, Green Energy and Climate stabilization.

Amy lemon, thank you so much for this candid conversation. I truly appreciate it. You're welcome. Thanks so much for inviting me.