It Takes a Village
The thing people don’t often realise about me is I am incredibly stubborn.
My reaction to my biology teacher telling me I couldn’t get the grades needed to study medicine at university, and the careers counsellor who, at our first meeting, told me she thought I would make a good athlete - was to scoff, spin around and walk away with my head held high thinking about what they would say when I proved them wrong. It was never an IF, but always a WHEN.
In hindsight, I don’t blame them, I was a 16yr old black girl with probably a thick Nigerian accent, a love for cheap brightly coloured second hand clothes and a very bad hairstyle (there was only one black hairdresser in Southampton then and I could not afford her). I didn’t come from a school recognised for its excellence. I lived by myself and could often be seen cleaning the classrooms before and after classes with the caretaker, and moonlighting in a McDonalds uniform by night.
Future doctors didn’t look like me or have my struggles they probably thought. It was my mission to teach them different. So when I wasn’t working my three jobs to pay for my rent and upkeep, I was studying into the early hours and rollerblading up and down Burgess road in my breaks. In my teenage years not only was I stubborn, but I was fearless.
I remember it was May 98, the sun was shining, and it was results day. It was the day I’d get to stick two fingers up at the doubters and would merrily swan off to Leicester university to study Medicine. My mum had travelled from Nigeria to spend a few weeks with me and was waiting at home for me to get back (this was pre mobile phone era). We’d have a celebratory magnum ice cream. I needed an ABB in my A levels and I got a BBC. I spent the next 4 hours ringing universities in clearing and hoping for that miracle. It wasn’t to be and so I went home and had a really good cry with my mum. Isn’t it amazing how at any age all we want when we are really hurting is our mum?
She was so unwavering in her belief of me getting into medical school that it silenced all of my own doubts as well as those of my teachers. I decided to redo my 2nd A level year and reapply to Medical school.
My mother died unexpectedly in the November of that year. I took two months away from school and travelled with family to Nigeria and Cameroon to bury her and came back to England with my 15yr old brother in January before my modular exams. Unsurprisingly I got D’s across the board in Chemistry, biology and maths.
That medical school dream had become a fantasy and I didn’t how to rescue it. I had tried hard work, resilience and grit but it didn’t look like it was working. Since I couldn’t imagine another career and medicine was all I wanted to do, I kept my jobs to pay the bills, studied longer hours, slept even less. I became even more blinkered because it was medicine or bust.
After I got back, the caretaker at work kept me in a job (even paying me whilst I was away burying my mum). meaning I wasn’t in more debt and my bills and rent were paid. There really are no words for how that made me feel – blown away a million times over. My maths teacher Miss Axby gave up her lunch hours daily to help me catch up, my new science teachers Mr Edwards and Mr Craggs were thoughtful, patient and kind. If they thought that I might not make it to medical school, they certainly never showed it.
Out of what was probably the toughest most life changing time in my life came unexpected and undeserved outpourings of love. These strangers nurtured me from my most fragile and out of that dark place they were real reasons to be cheerful for me. Then and now.
My young adult life was shaped in no small part by wonderful people who probably didn’t see themselves as heroes in any story, but in mine their faces and actions are indelibly inked all over my person. An African proverb that my mother quoted all the time talks about how it takes a village to raise a child - and after her passing these random strangers somehow had become a big part of my village.
While one might assume this story is about my triumph over adversity, I have to wonder if it’s really about connecting to others on such a personal level that whilst we see and acknowledge our subconscious bias, we move past it and really just are people who care for other people though their fragility.
People truly ‘seeing’ other people and fitting into their ‘life puzzle’ is such an incredible act I am blown away when I think of it.
And thanks to my village, I did it. I am now a military doctor, as well as a wife, mum, sister, and friend who with her own ‘village’ runs a charity called The Namu Project to work with West African communities using skills we have available. In my spare time I love to craft by crochet, sewing, pottery and ceramics and take marathon run-cations around the world raising money for the charity as I go.
It takes a village.
Mina Endeley