Dusty roads mean dusty shoes. When one can get them. Otherwise its just dusty feet. Which actually wouldn't matter so much, if every other part of your body is dusty. Hair not washed in weeks, mud-caked eyes you don't bother wiping away because they cake up in a matter of hours again. Nose half -blocked with snot from the cold at night, dried with the gusty winds that blow across the desert. The back of your throat dried up from the dust and parched from the lack of water. Muscles tired and fatigued from lack of nutrition and from having to walk to and fro from the water holes to the tents you call home.
To the average person, this would be torture. To you, it is a fact of life, just another day in the short life measured in half the span of normal adult years. What you wouldn't give for a cool drink, a cool bath lasting longer than a minute, a chance to wash behind your ears and clean, fresh and softly pressed clothes to wear. A meal that would leave you full instead of wishing for more.
A chance to get out of the circumstances surrounding your everyday life is unheard-of. If you were told 'there is more to life than this', you would probably laugh. For you, life is simply about survival.
Hundreds of miles away, a medical student contemplates the mountain of work before him, turns around and selects his Windows Media 11 playlist of choice on his laptop and sighs. "Why were exams ever created?"
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