I was born in Banda Aceh in 1974 to a middle-class family. I completed my primary and secondary education in my hometown, Banda Aceh. Afterward, I continued my education at the Faculty of Medicine, Gadjah Mada University, and graduated in 2001. At that time, Aceh was in the middle of an armed conflict between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian Army, and Aceh lacked general practitioners. Therefore, I decided to return to the area and serve my community in a rural health center in the Aceh Besar district, which was one of the ‘red spot’ areas in the conflict. I enjoyed my assignment there. It gave me an insight into how a community can survive the predicaments during a man-made disaster. At the end of 2004, a tsunami hit the area, and I was pregnant with my second child but survived the disaster with the help of my community. Although initially, I ignored their guidance to run away from the giant waves, they insisted I run in the right direction. Therefore, I felt I owed so much to them and was responsible for paying them back. When I pursued a master's degree education, I chose to enroll in the Master of Health Profession Education at Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and my master's thesis explored the “Designing a Disaster Management course for the Faculty of Medicine” and graduated in 2011. In 2015, I proceeded with my doctoral-level education at The University of Sydney, Australia, and incorporated the idea of listening to disaster-affected communities in my PhD thesis. I completed my ethnographic research on doctor-patient interactions in four disaster-affected districts in Banda Aceh and completed my dissertation in August 2020.