Namitete is a fairly small and remote town in Central Western Malawi (look below @ the Google Maps for a more exact location.  There are a lot of house structures in Namitete connected by dusty, roads of brown/reddish dirt. The market of Namitete is a modest collection of stands where vendors sell their foodstuffs that they have grown (including dried fish from Lake Malawi over an hour away, freshly baked bread for about 6 cents a piece, and delicious small potato french fries steeped in oil for about 30 cents).  At night, there is no power at the market, but it is quite eerie to see the townspeople and children walking around and conversing in normal in near darkness interspersed with LED flashlights and lanterns in the stands.  I’m amazed at how much they are able to do without power, and how much for granted those of us in the developed world take electricity for granted.

St Gabriel’s is one of the main complexes that makes up Namitete, and relative to the rest of Namitete, is quite modern.  The St Gabriel’s campus is quite beautiful with its lush courtyard gardens and spotless red tile floors (which are cleaned hourly to keep from getting dirty from the brown dirt from the rest of Namitete).

These past two days, June 8-9th were our first days working in the hospital, and we went to work in the ART (Anti-Retroviral Treatment for HIV) clinic counting ART pills (Co-trimoxazole) to facilitate dispensing of this ART medication for HIV patients at Namitete. RT treatment is completely subsidized by the Malawian government, and I think that this is a great start at combating the HIV/AIDS problem that is epidemic to the country.  We needed to count 60 pills per bag, and had over 12,000 pills to get through.  We used this time to use test a BTB “pill-counting device” and compare it to a basic, digital scale also available.

This was a perfect opportunity to test out one of our technologies, a “pill-counting device” that is essentially adapted from a Deering 10 gram scale for measuring diamonds.  Right after mentioning this to Sister Annie, she promptly brought us a small, tare-able, portable digital scale (about the size of a deck of cards) with a receptacle, with a concept very similar to that used in standard scientific labs.

We ran into two main problems:

1) 10 grams is way too small for measuring the 60 pills all at once.  The weight of one pill was approximately 7 grams, and 60 pills was about 420 grams.  Therefore, our pill-counting device had a practical capacity of only 10 pills.  When going through tens of thousands of pills, counting in sets of 10 to achieve the required 60 per bag was just not fast enough when compared to a 6-fold increase in speed from using the digital scale for counting.

2) The Deering 10 gram scale sometimes seemed a bit TOO accurate.  There was a variance of 0.4 grams per pill, and this difference was enough to tip the scales.  Therefore, it would seem like we didn’t have the desired 10 pills even though we actually did.

However, our digital scale ALSO ran out of power (2 AAA batteries) during our pill-counting experience.  Hence, the no-power nature of the manual pill-counting device was superior.  Therefore, perhaps the best way to combine the best of both worlds would be to have a small, digital, portable scale with solar cells for power with a capacity for at least 500 grams.