13/01/2024
From Being An 18-year-old Mother To Becoming A Professor of Surgery.
Meet Prof Praise Matemavi, Zimbabwe's first female Transplant Surgeon.
At age 18, she fell pregnant and ended up in an unplanned marriage that threatened to derail her dream of becoming a surgeon.
Being involved in an unplanned marriage, she ended up enduring physical, mental and emotional abuse. At age 23, she got divorced with 4-year-old and 2-year-old children.
“It was devastating, I became pregnant when I was 18 out of wedlock and ended up getting married."
"I didn’t know how I was going to ever fulfil my dream. It was sad because that was the one time I saw my dad cry. I got married because I thought that it was the best thing to do," said Prof Praise Matemavi.
As a single mom of two, she worked as a cardiac nurse to put herself through medical school and she was the only woman in her residency class.
Professor Matemavi fought her way to the top in a male-dominated field despite hearing discouraging comments like, “Girls don’t belong in an operating room,” from some attending physicians.
Against all odds, she obtained a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine from Michagan State College of Osteopathic Medicine and completed her general surgery residency at New York Presbyterian Queens Hospital and her multi visceral abdominal transplant surgery and hepatopancreatobiliary fellowship at the University of Nebraska Medical Centre.
Prof Praise Matemavi is currently an Associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, USA.
She is the Author of 'Passion and Purpose: Black Female Surgeons' and Co-Founder of Rose Gift Foundation, which aims at empowering and elevating disadvantaged girls and women in Zimbabwe and the Mississippi Delta.
