My parents really liked my last blog post (thanks for reading, Mom + Dad!), so I figured I would follow up. Here are some pictures of the things that you probably wouldn’t see done very often in a lab in the United States: the things that made me do a ‘double take’. On a personal note, happy July 4! We had an American-style feast, and I have to say that mashed potatoes + garlic nali sauce must be the best possible combination of Malawian and American ideals. 

I thought this was smart — they were out of room on the bench, so they dried stain slides on the windowsill. They said there’s minimal risk of contamination because they’ve already stained the slides.

Probably a little less smart. They’d tried to bandage and continue using a pipette when the barrel broke. They must have had a shipment of pipettes after this because they had quite a few extras, and this one had been retired to a half-empty cabinet.

Donated equipment comes to St. Gabe’s from all over the world, so power converters are very important for the hospital. We’ve seen countless blown-out outlets and power strips and a worrying overall disinterest in plug type when people jam things into the wall, but the lab seems to be pretty careful. I’m glad bCPAP comes with the locally-appropriate G type plug and can be modified to use other plug types.

Doom is the name of the most common bug spray here — a name we learned quickly. The bugs are incorrigibly EVERYWHERE here, and I imagine it’s worse in the rainy season. This was the biggest supply cabinet in the main lab.

One of the problems with rotating through donated lab systems is that when one part of one system breaks, the rest can become unusable. This leaves the lab with boxes of system-specific reagents to throw out. There was a box containing CD4 waste tablets in the “Out of Order Machine” cabinet while I was asking them questions about the machines and they immediately started barehandedly tossing the skull-labelled bottles into the trash.

Interestingly, most of the machines in the “Out of Order Machine” closet weren’t actually broken. One needed a part replaced, but a majority of the instruments were operational. They weren’t being used either because (like in the case of the dust-covered ELISA reader) the lab had moved to a different diagnostic method and can’t use two at the same time, or because (like the lab results printers) they were part of a system that had been rendered useless by a single broken part.

“Well-resourced” here is a far cry from “well-resourced” at home. In labs in the States, we’re so thoughtful about so many things — where our waste goes, keeping the bench sterile, preventing workplace risk — here, they have to be thoughtful about different things — not being able to afford much waste, trying to improve throughput, keeping the ants out of the control, how to keep going when the power goes off.