By Gift Peniel Awokunle
A little boy comes knocking at the door of the Out-Patient Department, smiling, with a runny nose, a mild fever, and frightened like seeing a deer. I said, “Come in, dear.” Mother said, “He has a fever.” I replied, “I am here to care.” In a trembling voice, she said he wasn’t feeling nice. The mother wanted a pill that could instantly heal. “I am in a hurry; give me a pill to relieve my worry,” she said. I demanded a blood test, white blood cell count, C-reactive protein, and blood culture. She yelled loudly, “Are you a vulture?” This test is going to take a while, and I don’t have the time or the money for a test. But I want a medicine that is the best. She said, “I need a pill right now for the bug to get killed.” As I heard, she revisited a pharmacy just nearby.
Spent hundreds of rupees thereby. Her child got better. Similar fevers came a few more times. She repeated the same act just as in rhymes. Strong IV antibiotics were what he was given. Blood infection was what he got. Small hand with a large cannula. Blood culture showed Salmonella. The ordinary and potent antibiotics couldn’t work. Costly antibiotics made the boy weak. Now after months of stay and cycle of amikacin, he was discharged with tons of medicine. The mother asked, “Why did my child suffer more?” The pharmacy didn’t treat the core. Your child was prescribed antibiotics for viral infections for which antipyretic could have been easily done. Now the mother asked “Was it AMR?”
Coming across these lines from a poem written by Aakrit Dahal, a medical officer and published by the Youth Against Antimicrobial Resistance project team in the global South (Kenya, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam) in 2020 took me back to a little girl named Peniel. Her story resurfaced in every line featuring confusion, urgency, resistance to testing, the overwhelming plea for a quick pill. The mother’s voice could have been her mother’s, as the fear in the murmurs are her family’s vivid experience. Everything in the poem was her lived life. Ten calendars came and went, yet her healing stood still like a rooted palm tree.
It all started when she was nine and in the twinkle of an eye, she had encountered countless scenarios of what it means to go head-to-head with AMR. Malaria struck like a superbug, never taking a respectful leave. It created a parasitic bond with Peniel, which defiled treatment and time. At 10, she was already at war. Urticaria, born from onchocerciasis, struck first. Itching robbed her glow, turning her fair skin into a painting of raised, dotted, darkened patches. Then came Scabies in deadly beauty, its unrhymed rhythm of rashes and unrest. Mectizan stepped in as savior, but the scars stayed. It took over three years before her skin remembered how to shine.
The cycle dragged on until 2021, as 18-year-old Peniel faced the fiercest blow of antimicrobial resistance. Two days of instant healing, the same medication lost its power upon the second treatment. Her body refused to respond, so a stronger drug had to fight back. In the early days of 2022 at 19, fluconazole, an antifungal, became her companion after the first treatment proved futile. She asked, “Why me again, AMR?” Her skin became scarred but finally glimmered at the end. In 2023, it was chaos in disguise as Typhoid wore Malaria’s shoe. By 2024, at 21, the war had left the body and entered her mind. Hours of injections numbed her. Days, sleep stole her. Nights, rest betrayed her.
“The wound is where light enters you,” said Rumi, the 13th-century poet. Jean de La Bruyere also added “out of difficulties, grow miracles.” These quotes exactly explain how AMR changed Peniel’s life. Peers and staffs in secondary school saw AMR as inseparable from her identity. What was once a health issue became her ‘normal’ in the eyes of others. This perception injured her self-esteem, but she did not let it dim her light. Instead, she found purpose through pain. Her lived challenges inspired her to study medical laboratory science in 2021.
A WHO report warning that AMR could take 10 million lives annually by 2050 struck her heart intensely. It felt like her life was already part of the global crisis. She responded and became an AMR Club representative in her school, inspired over four hundred colleagues through her AMR Notes and took AMR awareness to the public on a radio station in Ogbomoso, Nigeria. In 2025, not a single antibiotic touched her tongue from January to December. She didn’t allow ignorance to be another form of resistance, as she had discovered that 1 in 3 antibiotics is not necessary.
As she continues to advocate on broader platforms, Peniel believes that if she had understood AMR as a Child, her decade-long battle might have taken a different course. Therefore, she passionately advocates for AMR sensitization from early childhood. Research established that when children learn through interactive media, their comprehension improves by nearly 30% compared with text-only teaching. Just like radiating their learning environment with charts, games, visuals, and songs, AMR learning can follow the same path.
AMR should be included as a topic in subjects related to health, animals, and the environment in elementary and secondary schools. Educational movies, documentaries, and songs can be produced to reach more individuals through media efforts, while local awareness, AMR murals, and poster installations are reinforced to reach the local communities. As of July 2025, over 68% of the world uses the internet, and 65% are on social media. This validates that most people can be reached through media, and the rest via local interventions.
Peniel’s story reflects more than survival; it reflects a preventable journey shaped by gaps in awareness and policy. Protecting the next generation requires embedding antimicrobial education early, strengthening diagnostic culture, and prioritizing prevention before resistance becomes a child’s normal experience.
