I tasted the flavour of journalism in the depth of medicine, and I found it hard to transfer to journalism to do it as a main course to excel in. The taste is sweet, adorable, and magnetic and so are the mentors who encourage me to continue writing alongside my medical career. This made me pursue the two despite their nature and heaviness to be pursued by one person at a time since all of them need maximum commitment.
Medicine is an elephant journalism is a giraffe, and I am a lion myself. I will succeed in them. But every piece of advice I always receive from the readers never parts with sticking only to medicine, which drew my own attention one day to think and ask myself, is what I write useless, and nobody encourages me to keep up? But l later realized that they were worried about me dividing myself into two as I could excel in them 50%, 50%, and not 100%, 100% at the end of specialization.
Take my assurance, I will do them; I will definitely succeed in them. I wanted to cite two funny stories of a hyena and a gluttonous Dinka man known as Chol Muong. A hyena saw two dead animals in the early hours of the morning, not far from one another and it got confused about which one to go to first because it thought that when it went to one animal, the other animal might be eaten by uninvited hyenas or taken by humans before it quenched its hunger for meat.
When it arrived at a junction, it got stranded, wanting to go to one dead animal and wanting to go to another at the same time, and time passed by until morning. Obviously, day hours are not for wild animals but for people. Shortly before the hyena decided on what to eat first, a group of three armed men following the same road accidentally found it and when it tried to run, it was shot dead on the spot. The greediness has made the hyena miss the dead animals.
Secondly, Chol Muong was given two invitation cards with the same arrival time, one from his sister’s household and another from his relatives. He woke up early the following day to prepare to go to where he was invited. After a distant walking, he came to where the road bifurcated, with the right branch going to his sister’s house and the left going to his relative’s.
He stood for a while pondering over what could happen if he went to his sister’s house first before he went to his relative’s and vice versa. He got confused, and all he could do was to take a few steps towards his sister’s house and came back and take a few steps towards his relative’s house. He did not completely want to miss one invitation, so he did that for nearly an hour until he was relieved by a passer-by who did not hesitate to ask him what the problem was, which he narrated very well.
The passer-by told him to go to his relative’s house first because he could not be waited for much as other relatives might be present and the whole program would continue normally, but he could be patiently waited for in his sister’s house because maternal uncles are close to God. Things were (or are) not started before they arrived.
Choldit acceded and proceeded to his relative’s house, and he found people almost beginning the program. He enjoyed himself much and told people he had another invitation somewhere and he was excused. On arrival at his sister’s house, he found people waiting for him and when he settled, the program started.
He would have missed like the hyena had it not been the passer-by who advised him to do so. I do not want to be either of them, rather taking these examples for my own benefit in the course of running the two careers. I vividly know that wanting to become “this” and “that” at the same time puts one on the verge of failing, but the good news is that I’m there already.
The author is a medical student, University of Juba.