I will always remember the effect of a civil war in Nigeria that left hundreds of thousands of children malnourished. Tens of thousands of the rural population were afflicted with different types of diseases. Malaria fever was prevalent, and it was the main cause of death among children and infants. I can recall vividly sitting in an empty room after the end of the civil war in 1970, and assured my self that I must go beyond the confines of my continent – Africa to seek knowledge so as to assist in alleviating the suffering of my people. After I had graduated from high school, my dream of coming to the United States of America was far fetched reality. At that time in my life, coming to America was almost impossible. My family lost everything during the civil war. The civil war forced my parents to abandon their properties in the northern group of provinces, and returned to their ancestral home in the southern region. The soil is sandy and porous – the region suffers from soil leaching and soil erosion due to torrential rainfall. Harvests from our farms after six months of toiling under the heat of the sun were scanty. We barely eked out a living. Life then was harsh, and the future was blink. In spite of the odds confronting me, I was determined to forge ahead no matter what.
After the civil war, I went back to school to complete my high school education. In 1971 I graduated from high school. I worked briefly and enrolled in a private institution under the auspices of the Seventh Adventist Church in western Nigeria. There, I complete a two-year diploma in business education. Andrews University in Michigan was affiliated to the Seventh Adventist College, and thus, it facilitated my opportunity of obtaining a visa for the United States of America. I attended North Texas State University, Denton Texas where I spent four challenging years to complete my first degree program. My aspiration after high school was to become a medical doctor. I knew my resources were limited, and going to medical school with limited amount of money was an unlikely impossibility. Based on these constrains, I opted to at least obtain a college degree in business.
I was in Nigeria last summer and the standard of living is still remarkably low and the average life expectancy is extremely low when compared to that of the industrialized nations. My observations have inspired me to pursue a degree in public health. I have the intent to assist in educating the masses in any third world setting, and to held rural areas to establish health clinics under the auspices of the World Health Organization, or through other none profit organizations. Presently, I am interested in epidemiology because it is a scientific method used to investigate, analyze and prevent or control a health problem in a given population. It gives me the opportunity to perform statistic based research aimed at controlling, or eliminating infectious diseases. As a research...
