I'm from war torn country, I was in a refugee camp, internally displaced when I was in grade four due to war. I also overcame challenges: like loss of my father when I was about to enter medical school. He was the provider in our family of 8. And my mother who was a house wife had to step up and started working/ serving tea to constructors. I was the oldest of our family and had the responsibility to keep the promise, so started working teaching along the busy medical school life. I also started working (fetching figs by travelling more than 10 km... & selling them).

I grew up in Eritrea, where all the high school students, about 20000 students, were taken to a desert called Sawa. It's an arid, inhospitable environment with a marked shortage of water supply. In Sawa, we were supposed to spend one year for both 12th grade Education & Military training in the desert. We had to wake up every morning at 4 am, mainly for running, throughout the year. If you failed the Matriculation exam by the end of the challenging year, your only fate was to be a soldier. My stay in Sawa taught me a lot. Not only did it teach me that flexibility is the only way to succeed in adversity, but it also emboldened my deep-rooted feelings to contribute to the field of Medicine. I witnessed scarce medical supplies to support the myriad of infectious diseases we were enduring. This scarcity touched me, especially seeing many students suffer from severe diarrhea due to insufficient water and medical supply. Despite this, the only thing they could get was paracetamol. I could see much falling due to the heat of the scorching sun during military training & were beaten by the hierarchy for malingering. I withstood this and was among the few students who managed to score the full mark in the matriculation exam by the end of the year. I also was awarded the top 10 student award from all students in Sawa in that year and the Best student in Chemistry general knowledge