When Anisa Ibrahim first stepped inside Harborview Medical Center’s Pediatrics Clinic in Seattle, she was a 6-year-old child receiving health care. She and her four siblings arrived in Seattle after living for a year in refugee camps in Kenya. The family had fled Somalia due to the war and its aftermath.
Today, Ibrahim is a pediatrician who directs that very clinic, which focuses on serving lower-income, immigrant, refugee, and minority populations.
As a young refugee, Ibrahim witnessed a great deal of poverty, malnutrition, and disease in the camps, and at one point her sister contracted measles. She says she always wanted to be a doctor, and is grateful to the pediatrician at Harborview who not only took care of her as a child, but who supported her as she pursued that dream.
Ibrahim, who advocates on behalf of immigrants and refugees, said she does not consider herself an exceptional human being, but one who was simply given a chance.
“There are millions of refugees right now who are not being given the opportunities that I have been given,” she told CNN. “And if they were, they would do incredible things.”
