In 1999 Jemilah Mahmood MD was so moved by the suffering and deaths of innocent women and children in Kosovo that she founded a medical relief agency that could respond to such crises. The Malaysian Medical Relief Society, which became known as MERCY Malaysia, has since recruited hundreds of medical professionals and thousands of other volunteers to go into communities stricken by wars or natural disasters.

When she began, there was no Malaysian organization doing such work. Mahmood says she modeled MERCY Malaysia on Medecins sans Frontieres, an international team of volunteer doctors and nurses, based in France. Mahmood’s team includes volunteers from all walks of life and Malaysian ethnic groups; they serve those in need without regard to race, religion, culture or national boundaries.

Organizing and recruiting took Mahmood away from her own promising career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, but she was undeterred by those who wondered why she would so sacrifice her own medical career.

Mahmood began that career at Kuala Lumpur General Hospital. She\'s since been a research fellow at the prestigious Tokyo University and a fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the UK.

Working in war zones always carries the risk of physical harm, and in 2003 Mahmood was shot in the hip during a MERCY mission to bring medical relief and supplies to Iraqi hospitals. When doctors at a Baghdad hospital tried to attend to her wound, she refused, telling them she didn’t want to take time and medications away from their Iraqi patients. Instead, she continued her work until she had time to remove the bullet herself and tend to the wound.

Mahmood has received many awards for her extraordinary work, one of the most interesting being the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award from the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College in the US. She was the first Malaysian to receive that award, created to celebrate human rights and non-violence. The dean of the Chapel said of her: “She is an exemplary human being who has caught our attention with her undying efforts of providing medical and humanitarian aid through MERCY Malaysia to those who are suffering.”

Mahmood is now chief of the UN\'s Humanitarian Response Branch, working on strategies for fostering reproductive health around the world.

Awards or no awards, bullets or no bullets, Jemilah Mahmood goes right on, leading her teams into the most dangerous places on earth, bringing all their skills and compassion to those who are suffering.