Book: Hand on My Heart

released Jan 27, 2023 (Canada) and May 23, 2023 (worldwide), Hand on my heart in paperback and e-book is available at:

Independent bookstores worldwide
Caitlin Press
Chapters-Indigo
Barnes & Noble
Amazon. Wallmart, Target and other online/physical book sellers

About the author

Maureen Mayhew is a family doctor, a clinical professor at UBC, and a certified leadership coach for physicians. She has spent three decades providing culturally diverse, primary care and leading public health programs in Canada, Asia and Africa. A life-changing Doctors Without Borders mission to Afghanistan in 2000 inspired her to spend the next decade supporting Afghans to rebuild their primary healthcare system. Her memoir, Hand on My Heart: A Canadian Doctor’s Awakening in Afghanistan invites readers into her personal tales that grapple with concepts like how to celebrate differences in beliefs, values and ways of being.

About the book

When Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) offered to send Maureen Mayhew to Taliban-occupied Afghanistan, she refused. And yet in April 2000, wrapped in a Pakistani outfit and chador, she stepped onto the Afghan dust for the first time. Walking toward Taliban immigration officials, she did not know that she would return to this country seven more times over the span of a decade, learn to converse in Dari, the Afghan language spoken by Tajiks, and develop lasting relationships with women, men – even members of the Taliban – and families through her work as a physician.

In her memoir, Hand on My Heart, Mayhew juxtaposes her experiences as a foreign, female physician in Afghanistan with an exploration of identity as a professional woman in the twenty-first century. Travelling from one remote outpost to another, sharing cups of tea in secret, muddling through language barriers, and brokering trust with patients, she finds her Western beliefs challenged and tries to make sense of her own struggles with gender roles. With curiosity and tenderness, she reflects on moments of disorientation, fear, wonder, joy and personal growth. Hand on My Heart is a moving account that takes readers along an uncharted path into mysteries of the human heart.