From the Classroom to Crisis Zones

On a dusty road in Yemen in 2018, Houthi soldiers pulled Amy Leah Potter's car over at gunpoint. The country was engulfed in civil war, and the government had fallen under the control of the Houthis, a military group many consider to be a terrorist organization.

Amy Leah, a nurse, health-care advocate, and Lakehead alum, had just arrived in the Middle East with the humanitarian non-profit Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders. After an hour and a half of negotiating, MSF secured Amy Leah's release after reassuring the Houthis that she was there as part of an agreement with them to open an emergency room, two operating rooms, and patient care wards.

 Amy Leah (right) in Yemen with an MSF colleague. This distinguished alum has a Bachelor of Administration (1998), a BA in Political Studies (2000), a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (2003), and an RBA in Psychology (2003) from Lakehead.

"We treated anyone who was injured in the conflict—women, men, and children," she explains. The fear Amy Leah felt that day dogged her throughout her two assignments in Yemen. "The conflict was so close that bullets were hitting the safehouse and medical facility, and the walls were shaking because of the shelling."

The journey from Thunder Bay, where Amy Leah grew up, to working around the world has been a winding one.

Before completing her nursing degree in 2003, Amy Leah earned business administration, political studies, and psychology degrees at Lakehead. "I couldn't make up my mind about what I wanted to do—my brothers still tease me about it. I ultimately gravitated to nursing because I felt that if I could help others, I should."

Since making that fateful decision, she's been a nurse in Canada, the United States, Guatemala, the United Arab Emirates, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Gaza as well as Yemen.

Her first overseas job was in 2007 while on a break from a full-time nursing job at a large Seattle hospital and a part-time job as an organ donation coordinator.

She went to mountain villages throughout Guatemala with Servant Ministries to provide basic health care and to screen people for common illnesses. "It was such a rewarding experience that it sparked my vocation for global health."

Several sojourns to Guatemala were followed by a stint as a clinical mentor at Tanzania's national hospital and three years at an opulent new hospital in Abu Dhabi.

A family seeks health care in Guatemala. “People walked for miles to get to our clinics,” Amy Leah says. To strengthen her nursing abilities, she earned a Master of Global Health from the University of Manchester and a Diploma in Tropical Nursing from the University of London.

"I was a nurse and an assistant nursing manager in Abu Dhabi, where I had to learn the correct protocol to deal with royalty who were patients there," Amy Leah says. She left Abu Dhabi in 2017 for her first MSF assignment—a rotation in Sierra Leone doing pediatric care.

"It was a huge shock to go from Abu Dhabi, where people were drinking coffee with gold flakes sprinkled on top, to a place where children were dying because there weren't enough beds and equipment to treat the rampant malnutrition and disease. All the books don't prepare you for that, but the staff from Sierra Leone taught me everything, and I made a lot of great friends."

While spending a month at a makeshift MSF clinic in southern Gaza, Amy Leah captured this photo of a bomb explosion.

In 2024, she went to Gaza, where she found overwhelmed hospitals and ambulances dumping people on the floor. "There was also constant bombing—one mental health worker lost seven family members."

Amy Leah's career recently took a new turn. She's become a policy and advocacy senior specialist with Operation Smile. At this nonprofit, which is based in Virginia where Amy Leah now lives, she campaigns for better access to essential surgeries for people around the globe.

"It took me years to realize that you're not going to make the difference that you hope," she says, "but the little victories make it worth it."