“If you had the opportunity to travel back in time and change the past, would you do it?” For the first two and a half years of my college experience I would have said yes. I have faced many challenges and stumbled countless times but recently, I have learned to see the beauty, growth and blessings in adversity. True power comes from standing in your own truth and walking in your own path. For most of my life, a career path was assigned to me. My eight-year-old peers wanted to be power rangers and fairies, but I was thrusted towards being a cardiologist. It was drilled into me since birth that the only acceptable career paths were medicine, law and engineering. As a result, I operated around other people’s expectations, never able to find …show more content…
Within the past nine months, this familiar feeling washes over me on a daily basis. Six thousand miles away, my people are being assaulted by a dictator while I remain in a country that, despite its faults, has freedom of speech and a democratic system that limits the reign of power-hungry individuals. Cameroon is currently being torn apart due to the reverberating effects of European colonization. Not factoring in cultural dialects, Cameroon overwhelmingly Francophone. This diversity amongst Cameroonians has sparked a social hierarchy similar to the Hutu/Tutsi socialization that sparked the Rwandan genocide. Anglophone people are denied jobs, education, and basic human rights while our land is looted for natural resources. This past Christmas, one of my aunts and her children narrowly escaped death as their village was burned to the ground by the government. Luckily, her and her 5 children were able to make it to safety in neighboring villages. Unfortunately, her husband was separated from them amidst the chaos. We have not heard from him since. A village that was once full of life is now full of ash and overrun by wild