Last weekend Daniel and I ventured out to Lake Malawi and met up with the Queen’s interns for a few days in Senga Bay. Lake Malawi is a big attraction here and everyone had been telling us that we had to make time to go see it. The part of the lake we went to looked more like an ocean than a lake. We stayed in tents at a place called Cool Runnings which was packed deep in the villages around Senga Bay and right on the water. Since it’s wintertime here the place was pretty vacant, except we ran into three of the visiting doctors at St. Gabe’s who were staying at Cool Runnings as well. The first day we enjoyed the beach and the sun and did a little exploring in the town of Salima. On Saturday we took a boat out to a smaller island in the middle of the lake to do some snorkeling. We saw some cool brightly colored fish and basked on the rocks there until we were ready to head back to the mainland. Overall the weekend at the lake was beautiful and very relaxing but we were excited to head back to Namitete.
Sam and Daniel frolicking in the lake.
The boat we took to Lizard Island.
The shore of Senga Bay.
Sunrise on the lake.
Since being back in Namitete, it’s really started to set in for us that we don’t have very much more time here. We have two weeks after this one and then we will unfornutately have to say goodbye to Malawi. On the other hand this means that we only have three more weeks to finish everything we want to do for St. Gabe’s. We are almost done with working on DataPall now and we’ve started writing a user’s manual that we will leave behind with it. As well as leaving the manual we are setting up small training sessions for us to have with each of the workers in the FCCU (Family Centered Care Unit) to go over some of the new features that DataPall has as well as going over how they should be using the program. Other than DataPall, we have a few other small projects that we need to finish up in the rest of our time here so the last few weeks are going to be extremely busy for us.
This weekend we are getting a tour of the nearby school by some students that Daniel met a couple weeks ago. We were also invited to dinner with the Gray’s (the farmers we were staying with our first month here) and we are bringing some of the other hospital workers who live with us at the hospital guesthouse so that should be a fun time. The Malawian sisters also invited us to a big celebration at the church this Sunday. They are celebrating their patron saint, and the Archbishop is coming. The sisters keep telling us how much food there’s going to be so we’re pretty excited about that. We also are going to be going out on another village tour with our friend Gift. We haven’t gone in a while because we were traveling the last few weekends, but he told us that the kids keep asking him when we’re coming back so he’ll be taking us exploring again.
Overall things are going great, and it’s going to be really busy from here on out but we’re very excited for the adventures still to come.