We must rewrite our stories to question assumptions about our own actions, intentions and values, and every taken for granted about others, particularly those with less power (patients, students, less dominant colleagues), and every unthought-through acceptance of the status quo, even that seemingly written in stone. And we must elicit and listen to the responses of peers. Listening critically to the stories of those peers also enables developmental learning from their experience. It is the exploration of experience, knowledge, values, identity that matters, rather than any attempt to arrive at a ‘true’ account (Doyle 2004).

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead.

The woman who raised me
turned and said, don’t be scared
I’m your mother, I’m here, I won’t let them through.
My mama gave me conviction.
Women like her
Inherit tired eyes,
Bruised wrists and titanium plated spines.
The daughters of widows wearing the wings of amputees
Carry countries between their shoulder blades.

- Emtithal Mahmoud

Hakim

The wise. The learned.

Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depricate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.
Frederick Douglass 

When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.

Ethiopian proverb 

A question of politics

Let us teach both ourselves and others that politics does not have to be the art of the possible...but that it also can be the art of the impossible, that is, the art of making both ourselves and the world better.

Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia,1990