The AIDS hospice reeked from disease and neglect. And is what I had to deal with when my two parents and younger siblings all succumbed and later died when I was a young boy of nine years. Each time I visited the institution, I was met by emaciated AIDS victim who were recovering at various stages of end of their lives. I watched desperately as day after day, the “in-mates” gave up home and died…oh how I hated the morticians who always collected their bodies with a vengeance! This was because the reality of my only know family members having to one day go through this process started to dawn on me when my own father suffered from a stroke that had severely affected his speech. Friends and church members arranged to have him transported to the General Hospital for a long-overdue appointment. It had been weeks since he had been outside. After waiting for two and a half hours, he was called in and then needed to wait another two hours for his prescription. Hungry, my father though by then very frail requested that I fetch him something to “keep his stomach warm”. Even though I knew my father had lost his ability to chew due to a sloppy jaw, I went out and brought him “githeri” a traditional dish that I knew he liked. When it arrived, dad took his first bite. Suddenly, his face lit up with the biggest, most radiant smile. He was on top of the world because somebody bought him what he adored. Unfortunately, the elation did not last long and he suddenly started to gasp. By then, we were still on the doctor’s office queue. By the time we realized that dad was choking from a bolus of unchewed food, his already anemic skin was already turning blue. The doctor subsequently dashed out of his office to try to help only to declared dad dead in just a few moments. This was the lost memory I had of him and the rest of the family as I vowed never to return to the hospital neither the hospice. What had so upset me about my day with dad? Before then nothing in my personal experiences had ever stirred my young intellect like that. I kept feeling guilty that I had killed my father with an offer of a favorite meal, then when I recalled that he was already terminally ill and too weak to chew, I projected my pain and anguish to the health workers as I thought that a lot of what transpired was because there was no professional person to immediately attend to dad. I made a single-minded commitment to medicine a mist a myriad of financial difficulty that had made me have to skip both elementary and secondary school for years until I found a merciful sponsor to support me through high school. However tough the financial distress has been, nothing has deterred me from the resolve; all I want is to be a doctor. At first I had to struggle to get myself to like science. Being the first person to go to high school in my family, I did not have a role model and thought that sciences and mathematics were too difficult for a poor kid. However, when I met Mr. Mapesa my high school principal, he identified the passion in me and help me to focus. I started to enjoy science. From general biology to advanced cellular/behavioral, the study of the biological systems, especially the most complex of them all, the human body, has been a delightful journey with new discoveries in each new class. The compassion I have for poor patients has given me an insatiable appetite to study medicine. Unlike many other schools, Chongqing Medical University openly encourages such breadth of study, believing the skill sets developed through different subjects to be universally interdependent and pragmatic in the real world. Through Chongqing university system, I would work towards my MBBS. I will also have an opportunity to simultaneously to hone my knowledge of the Chinese culture which is definitely unique. In 2023, I would graduate from Chongqing knowing my education over the past six years helped build my foundation as a better critical thinker who can apply core medical and surgical skills to be able to bridge the capacity and skills gap in in Africa.