He filled out the quiz...
He had not studied the day before, he did not know what to do. His whole future depended on that test. But, things did not go well... the pandemic, the issues with his family, the lack of jobs, the superinflation, the hunger... it was all very difficult and his problems only piled up. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, and he wanted to be able to help people.
But he didn't have adequate study opportunities. He lived in a third world country and things got harder and harder. The president sold off the food stocks and that turned prices into real bombshells for poorer families. It made people need three sub-jobs to buy rice, beans, the basics of food in a South American country.
Their dreams of becoming a doctor were slipping away from their fingers. His dreams of being a doctor were slipping away from his fingers. One day, who knows, he might have the chance to dream again. But that day was probably not today. Because he looked at the page filled with his answers and nothing there seemed to make sense.
Nothing there was saying to him "you did it, my boy, you'll be a doctor..." And the anxiety, the depression... the clock ticking...
She has given three paths her cancer and her body could take.
She was given three paths that her cancer and her body could take... radiotherapy, chemotherapy and an experimental study. As she was a US citizen, the costs of any of these could be very high for herself. She had no health insurance.
She was a young mother, her three children needed her. Her husband had left home and she was on her own, being poor, she could not afford full health care. The other day she saw that in some places there is free cancer treatment, but for this, she would have to sell absolutely everything she had - an old car - and go with her children to a new country. With nothing. To be poor outside your nation. Would she survive?
Why was life so costly for her? She went to church, she prayed, she worked hard at more than two jobs, she looked after her children like a good mother would, she taught them to be honest and said they would only have a chance to change their luck by being studious. The eldest was 13 years old and he was already starting to think of ways that were not very correct, but that could help his mother to have a dignified life. He saw her working for all those other people. She just wanted everything to be easier... but it wasn't. And she, she knew that very well. And she knew that if she died, everything she taught her children and the faltering faith of her eldest boy... it would all be in vain...
the scream of a hawk
... echoed at that moment. And the boy finishing his university admissions test and the woman with a decision that would change the course of her entire existence heard that cry. It was the cry that would unite their existence forever and ever.