February 04, 2013 - 11:59
Question 1:
Define your career goals and educational plan to get there:
OK, this part about how you grew up in Uganda in a caste system and medical care is scarce and unsanitary...you can keep that...
Describing in detail how your mother and brother died because the practitioner didn't wash his hands...
you might not have room for that until the last paragraph...where I think you should summarize it briefly in the context of why obtaining a nursing degree to instate hygienic practice in your own traditional medicine practice in Uganda is of personal importance to you.
And all of these statistics about deaths caused in Uganda from easily preventable medical malpractice...you don't really have room for them. You'll just have to say something like...many deaths can be prevented through basic hygienic practices.
Question 2:
Describe something that has impacted you in the last 10 years, and what you learned from that experience.
OK, you can keep this part about Joseph Kony killing everybody in your village, but when you say that you and your three sisters escaped only because your village believed you had a spiritualistic leopard double...this is really interesting, but leaves the reader wanting more information than you have room to answer. You could say something like...My three sisters and I were the only survivors, and the entire village was burned down...and this part, about how your step-father sold his house in the neighboring village and disappeared, leaving you and your sisters alone to take shelter in a hog house for a week....will have to be condensed to something like... we found ourselves homeless. And then when you say that you found out your grandmother was alive, and after traveling for two weeks to find her she suffered a heart attack and died because she thought you and your sisters were ghosts, and then you talk about how you buried her....I think, for the sake of condensing, something like...We found ourselves homeless and without any family after our grandmother, who was our only living relative, died of a heart attack when she saw us in her village, as she believed we were dead. It's a lot to say in one sentence, we can retool it, but you get the idea...does that make sense? OK, this section about you washing your sister, who is so thin and who has a mysterious skin condition, and how you didn't know how you would care for them, or where you would turn, and how alone you felt...you will have to summarize it somehow...you definitely have a lot to say, here, but something like...maybe....we were totally alone, and without resources. And then you talk about how you began volunteering with UNICEF for the free lunches, and not eating them so you could bring them back to your sisters, but then you began to really love volunteering....that's good, but could be worded a little differently...like, I turned to UNICEF for help, and then realized that I found deep satisfaction through volunteering....and then all of this section about how you learned some useful skills, and that you had a passion for helping people...that's all on point. Keep that.
And you don't quite get to question 3, because you've started crying, you apologize profusely to the student. You have been wanting to tell him how strong you think he is, how sorry you are this happened to him, or anyone. But you don't say any of it, because it's not your place to suggest to somebody like him that you are in any place to understand enough to feel sorry. And your shift is over now, and your replacement is there to read question number 3. You feel like you are the scum of the earth because you have somehow turned this into your sadness. With each suggestion, he would tell you he was grateful for your help, but you were nauseous because you didn't want to tell him to cut any of it. Afterward, you wanted to call somebody to talk to because you're crying in your car and you want somebody to commiserate that shit is so fucked up, but you force yourself to realize that your pain is infinitely puny- having to tell somebody else how to edit their hell into 250 words, you can handle that if he can. It's been an hour, though, and you're still crying. You think about how you just wished you had made more eye contact with the student. You google image search Joseph Kony and you seethe at his image to direct some of this. You think about how it's not your place to feel this mad when the student didn't seem angry at all- he only talked about how lucky he felt. It's not your place to feel any of it, you feel like shit right now because you're even writing about it, but you felt a great necessity to record it, so you did.
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