What COVID-19 is doing to my dream
Essay from Jeremiah Lucas Opira Memorial Contest 2021
Author: Lamunu Naume Lorna
2nd runner up, Category 2
By the way, what comes to your mind when someone says “deam”? I know most people think a dream is just merely the nightmares or, let me say, the sweet thoughts they get when they’re asleep. For example, you have gone to some place and you’re being chased by some fierce animal and it’s almost close to catching you. Scary, isn’t it? Or let’s say you had a dream that you were living in a castle of your own which has luxurious cars and hundred plus servants. Sounds sweet, right? I know it is but in this case, the dream we mean is just the way one imagines and pictures a future of his/herself, getting an imaginary drawing of yourself which simply says what you want to have in the future and how you want your future to be, that’s it. You can’t just relax and sit quietly, the dream will pass then. It needs the hard work you put in and coherence so as to achieve, especially when reading books, going through college and passing well. Then you’re done and good to go.
Anyways, that’s that, everyone has a dream, just like I personally see myself someday in the future treating patients and being one of the best doctors working in a good hospital. I’m striving for it wholeheartedly every day and night to achieve this dream. But as you know there are always challenges in everything you do and this time our main problem here is the pandemic. This has greatly affected my dream in a number of ways:
- The spread of COVID-19 in 2020 resulted in a massive lockdown which hindered most sectors of the country’s economy, especially within the education sector. There were no schools open and no study was going on for a long period of time which delayed the study process. Parent’s income reduced drastically during this pandemic and this led to poverty. A case in point, let’s place it this way: my mother works for an organization and due to the lockdown brought by COVID-19, her salary was reduced since there wasn’t much work to do and the company is going bankrupt since there are no donors. This has shaken my dream, even until now.d
- I lost certain life changing opportunities due to the pandemic. Let’s make it simple, during the time before the lockdown was put in place an organization had promised to sponsor my education. I had opted for a course of certificate in nursing which was to start in August 2020. Schools were closed by then and my studies were postponed until 2021. Now things have all gone wrong, the organization can’t sponsor more children, including me, because there are no donors and the organization is going bankrupt. They are unable to sponsor more children, so I can’t get the opportunity to study the course since I come from a poor background. You feel my pain, right? I know. I still have hope I’ll someday fulfill this dream, sooner or later.
In addition to this, I feel very dull right now since all I learnt in school have faded and when I do read a book, I can hardly remember anything afterwards. That’s because we’ve had to stay at home during the lockdown for too long to keep our minds sound and remembering has become harder than ever.
All in all, COVID-19 greatly brought me down to my knees. My dream is being crushed right before my eyes. Now I’m helpless, I don’t have hope of going further because I’m unable to do so. I badly wanted to achieve my already set dream, but now I guess it’s useless. I can’t grip harder onto it, so now I just watch myself losing to COVID-19. Life is full of ups and downs and this is one of the downs. My life is a mess and one of the reasons is because I’m watching my dreams hanging on the edge of a cliff because of COVID-19. I still believe I will be a doctor one day though.