Description
He carried water before he could carry a schoolbag.
He grew up in a small village in Eritrea with no clean water, no electricity, and no school. To bring drinking water home for his family, he walked two to three kilometers to the well and back every day, carrying a jerry can nearly as big as he was.
That well ran dry half the year, and when drought rocked East Africa in the 1980s, even dirty water became hard to find. His father never learned to read or write, but in the middle of war and drought, he made one decision that would change everything: his children would go to school.
He lost his father as a young boy, but he never let go of the dream his father had for him. So the boy walked fourteen kilometers a day to school and back, year after year.
As a young man, he won the visa lottery to immigrate to the United States. He had no family support and little self-confidence. He was shy and timid, anxious about the unknown, but excited by what was possible and determined to make something of himself.
Then came the grind: minimum-wage jobs, night classes and chemistry homework after twelve-hour factory shifts, teaching himself a new language one word at a time. In the end, he earned an engineering degree and built a steady career.
Where he came from, a toothache meant a pair of pliers. At twenty-six, he sat in a dentist’s chair for the first time in his life, ashamed of his bleeding gums. The care he received that day changed more than his smile.
In his thirties, the calling had grown so deep that he did what almost no one understood. He walked away from a secure engineering paycheck and started over from zero, for the second time in his life, chasing a dream in a field he knew nothing about.
Relentless is the true story of how that boy from the well opened his own dental practice in Texas, where his very first patient waited months just to be the first to sit in his chair, and how he went on to earn two professional fellowships in a single year.
It is a story about desire and what it costs, and about a lesson his father gave a small boy who fell while pushing a red bicycle up a steep hill:
“Get up and wipe your tears. If you want to ride a bicycle later, falling is part of the fun.”
If you have ever wondered whether it is too late to change your path, whether where you started decides where you end up, or whether one more fall is one too many, this book will remind you to get up, wipe your tears, and keep going.
