WHILE others hold onto jobs they hate like a woman from Chipata settles for a hairstyle she didn’t ask for after being taught a painful lesson by a Kabwata hairdresser with zero remorse and five bundles of bad attitude, 29 year old Esther Majariwa has decided to change the plot of her life entirely.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1H9nJEaDrH/?mibextid=oFDknk
Born and raised in Lusaka, the firstborn of two children, her heart had always beat for babies and birth cries. Unlike the Tonse Alliance, Midwifery wasn’t a Plan B, it was her Plan A, but life, as it often does, handed her something else.
Esther is now a registered midwife who came out as the best student in Registered Midwifery at Apex Medical University.
After completing her secondary school at Kabulonga Girls in 2010, she found herself staring at limited options.
“I couldn’t afford to study nursing or midwifery then. So I went with what was available and that was teaching,” she recalls.
Once a teacher of the subjects that tell you how to behave and fear God (Civic Education and Religious Education), Esther shocked her family and friends by saying “isenough isenough” for teaching and turned her back on the chalkboard in favour of babies, birth cries and blood pressure monitors.
A few years ago, 2016 to 2019, Esther was in Kitwe, studying how to shape young minds and recite the rights and duties of a good citizen.
But deep down, her real dream was to be the woman standing beside a pregnant mother, whispering and shouting ‘push mama, push’ like a motivational speaker with a stethoscope.
But alas! Midwifery was expensive and her bank account was giving come back later energy at the time and so she settled for teaching.
By 2019, she was a full on trained secondary school teacher ready to dish out Bible verses and national values and the only thing missing was a school willing to hire her.
Esther stayed home as there were no jobs, not even in those schools where you are paid a K700 and thanked with a Coke on Teachers’ Day.
“When I graduated, I tried to find a job. Teaching, anything really,” she says. “Nothing came up. I was unemployed for years.”
By 2021, watching her peers get into universities and pursue their dreams, Esther reached her breaking point.
“I considered advancing my studies in teaching. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted,” she shared.
In 2022, she continued with her pastry business and raised enough money for midwifery and enrolled at Apex Medical University to pursue her childhood dream, Registered Midwifery.
It wasn’t cheap, so she says, as nursing programmes have a reputation for draining pockets faster than morning traffic at 10 Miles drains patience in Lusaka. But Esther was determined to attain her goal.
“Some people told me I was wasting my teaching diploma. That I’d regret it,” she shares. “But midwifery was my first love. I couldn’t let it go.”
While many would have joined the long queue of hopefuls praying for the next 30,000 teacher recruitment, Esther went left and followed her dream.
She dove headfirst into midwifery school, navigating anatomy and hormones the way she once navigated definitions of patriotism and the 10 commandments.
2025, she graduated as the best in her class, a top midwife, ready to catch babies like she was born with a catcher’s gloves.
Her advice to the many Zambians stuck in jobs they hate more than dry nshima and dry fish? “Start over. Life doesn’t care about your diploma if you hate waking up for work. Don’t fear what people will say. People will talk even if you succeed, fail or simply stay in bed all day. Just make sure you’re not stuck in something you don’t love just because you fear to begin again,” she said.
Now running a small pastry business while awaiting deployment, Esther still smiles when she speaks about her time at Apex.
“I remember getting awards during training. It confirmed what I always knew that I was born for this,” said Esther.
By Catherine Pule
Kalemba, May 19, 2025
