She got pregnant at 18, divorced twice, and now Zimbabwe’s first female transplant surgeon:

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Praise Matemavi’s dream since he was four years old was to become a doctor. She announced at the age of ten that she wanted to become a cardiothoracic surgeon because she was inspired by a team of medical professionals from Loma Linda University in California who went to Zimbabwe to operate on children with congenital heart defects at Parirenyatwa Hospital.

Her loving father purchased her a copy of “Gifted Hands” when she was in the fifth grade, which she read through in one evening. She became even more interested after reading Ben Carson’s well-known story. Rather than surgery on the heart, she would rather operate on the brain.

She relocated to the US at the age of fourteen in order to follow her passion and maintain her academic achievement. Matemavi said that she has always had confidence in herself to The Weight She Carries. I’ve always thought I was capable of doing anything. I always believed that I was capable of achieving anything.

When she became pregnant at the age of 18, her plans were almost thrown off. The pacesetter married the man who had gotten her pregnant to spare her parents, who were pastors, any embarrassment, but she ended up in a turbulent marriage that almost killed her.

Since she was not a citizen of the United States, she clung to her ambition and applied to nursing school in order to supplement her income. Eventually, after the birth of her second child, she decided to end her marriage because she thought it would save her life.

Matemavi left an abusive marriage and went after her ambition of becoming a physician. She studied for the MCATs and sent applications to several medical schools. Before long, she was in yet another rut. “So now I’ve passed the MCATs, but I don’t have a bachelor’s degree, and all these medical schools require one to get into their programs,” said Matemavi.

“I had all these interviews lined up to get into these medical programs because the schools were under the impression that I would have a bachelor’s degree by the time the program began.”

She made her ambitions known and addressed the academic advisor at Sienna Heights University with a well-thought-out plan.She answered, “I can,” when the advisor questioned whether she could finish the 60 credits needed for a bachelor’s degree in one academic year.

Matemavi, a single mother of two toddlers, felt confident in her potential to succeed because she had previously finished a challenging program to get ready for the MCATs.She had trouble at Lake Michigan College with inconsistent class schedules, so she switched to Southwestern College, which was 40 minutes away, in order to enrol in 20 credits per semester.

Matemavi, a twenty-four-year-old, would leave her kids with a nanny each morning so she could go to class. She worked the 3–11 shift on Fridays, spending the following Saturdays with her kids and going to church. She worked a double shift on Sundays from 3 p.m. to 7 a.m. On Mondays, she would get ready and head straight to class.

“I had a timetable.” I hoped to finish medical school by the time I was 29. “That had to happen by any means necessary,” she explained.

In the fall of 2005, she convinced her advisor to allow her to take 30 credits, and she passed every class that she took. The next semester, she took 30 more credits to complete her bachelor’s degree.

At last, she enrolled in medical school and was married again. Sadly, her demanding schedule made it impossible, and she got divorced while she was a resident.Matemavi was devastated; she had gone through two divorces. She stayed faithful in spite of the challenges.

Not too long after, she was struck again. Just two months before Matemavi was scheduled to graduate from her residency, her mother, who she thought to benefit from her accomplishment, passed tragically from inflammatory breast cancer. She had less than a week to grieve her mother due to her hectic schedule before going back to work.

The trailblazer girded herself once more and set her sights on a challenging goal: she desired to become a transplant surgery specialist.She went on to say, “I decided there and then that I was going to do the most difficult thing there is to do…whether it was pediatric cardiac surgery or transplant surgery.”

She persevered in the face of discouragement from her medical instructors, becoming the only woman in her residency class.She persisted and completed her training as a transplant surgeon, enduring long flights at night to obtain the components needed for transplants.

The trailblazer acknowledged that there were moments when she felt most undercut, especially when she visited hospitals to collect organs and the staff, who usually assumed her accompanying assistant was the surgeon, struck up a conversation with him right away.

“I just let them go ahead because I know they’ll have to come and talk to me eventually so I can tell them what kind of equipment I need and exactly how I want things to go,” she told me. “It’s one of those things I’ve had to learn to deal with and it doesn’t bother me much anymore.”

She remarried, this time to a man who appreciated her enthusiasm and didn’t take offence at her work schedule—she was on call every day and put in roughly 120 hours a week.

Matemavi is one of the youngest and first female transplant surgeons in Zimbabwe, yet she spends most of her time in the US.

Her novels, “Lessons for my Daughter: Adapted from Life Experience” and “Passion and Purpose: Black Female Surgeons,” which highlight the resilience of women in the medical field globally as they pursue their goals, are listed as works of accomplished writing by New Zimbabwe.

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