College Admission Essay

By Sanju Poudel

In summer 2003, my aunt suggested I deliver babies. That was what volunteering at her small town hospital in Bharatpur, Nepal meant to me anyway. The more she insisted, the more frustrated I became, fearing what I felt would be another one of my parents’ ways for me to build character. My aunt, on the other hand, was determined to show me otherwise and literally dragged me to her work on a rickshaw. Throughout the ride, I did not hold back my aggravation. After all, what did I know about small time hospitals? 

Nevertheless, I had certain expectations of the well-known hospital before entering. I pictured succeeding red-bricked buildings with tidy carpeted rooms and people arriving in cars for minor checkups. I imagined how in each room a doctor with a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his/her neck would be consulting individual patients.

However, the very moment the rickshaw slid through the gate, my naïve conceptions dissolved into disease, disorder, and destitution, the truth of what was in front of me. Hesitating to get out of the rickshaw and stepping into a foreign world that was threatening to suppress my innocence, I closed my eyes. I closed my eyes to the make-shift wooden stretchers carrying frail men and women stomaching their inevitable deaths; I closed my eyes to a young girl with a tattered school uniform and undone ribbons leading a blind woman by the hand; I closed my eyes to the sorry, languishing environment that I did not want to be a part of. 

My astonishment peaked when entering the maternity ward. In what I considered a room fit for two patients, there were fifteen women sprawled in rusting metal-framed beds and sheets on the floor. In the little gaps about the room were green plastic pans where the women would uncomfortably station themselves to urinate and vomit in. I immediately imagined all of these women in nice comfortable beds in their own separate rooms which was the way my mom had given birth to my younger brother in New York.

The longer I stayed in the hospital, the more I wanted to reach out to these people. Although the hospital had initially been a place I was reluctant to even see, I ended up visiting everyday that week even if merely to speak to the patients. It was because of this day that I finally understood why my aunt refuses better paying jobs abroad. Her strong conviction of returning to her native land and using her education to help her own people has filtered into me. Before this event, I had always planned on living in New York and indulging in its luxuries. Now, however, the prospect of going back to my country and living among a community I can lend a hand to is much more appealing. At the end of the day, I was very thankful that my aunt had pushed me into an experience I now consider a crossroad in my life.

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