Time seriously just seems to fly out here in Blantyre! I am having the best time living at the CURE house and working on our various projects with all the Rice interns, and we have made a great group of new friends from the UK and Australia, who make the downtime/adventure time all the more exciting.
For the past week and a half, Caleb and I have had wonderfully packed days, splitting our time between teaching a class at the Poly and working with PAM at Queens. Being in front of the classroom, trying to keep the class energy up, prepping for the following day’s lessons plans, etc. makes teaching absolutely, but wonderfully, exhausting! The oldest students that I have ever taught before in a classroom setting have been at the high school level, but at the Poly we have 4th year electrical engineering students and three faculty members to top it off. I get extremely nervous before going up for our mini “’lectures” that we start each class off with, and we do our best to make these parts seem more like a conversation/discussion than us lecturing at the class. Even though I’ve taken the troubleshooting class before and Caleb and I put a lot of prep time into learning the materials and organizing our class materials before coming out here, I still feel like I should be the one learning from the students and teachers in Malawi and not vice versa! But, in the end, the teaching and learning has undoubtedly turned into this wonderful two-way street that has led to friendship along the way.
Students fixing a suction pump! Our class and their workshop certificates
For the past two weeks, we have spent our afternoons at PAM working with Nelli, Timothy, Wiseman, and Jiwowa, fixing the broken medical equipment that have been brought over from Queens and sometimes other hospitals as well. I learn so much about the difficulties with fixing their broken equipment each time I go, and will write a bit more about some of my thoughts on medical device donations in my next blog. We have fixed a suction machine, a few oxygen concentrators, and one of the big hospital autoclaves so far. This week, we will be spending some more time with PAM, which I am very excited about! PAM has been very generous with letting us take some of their medical equipment to the Poly with us in the mornings when we would teach. For the first few days, Caleb and I attempted to draggggg the equipment to and from Queens, but quickly found that it was really quite difficult to keep this up! Thankfully, Dr. Gamula and Jiwowa were super generous is helping us transport some of the heavier equipment in their cars, which definitely saved us a lot of time and muscle soreness!
Caleb and O2 concentrators in JiWowas car Caleb and JiWowa working at PAM
Work has been so jam packed (Caleb and I usually leave the house by 7: 30 ish and get back around 5 pm). Sometimes I get home after having spent almost 7 hours on my feet, just wanted to sit down with a nice cup of tea and relax. BUTTTTT thankfully we’ve got some serious (positive!!) peer pressure going on within our family that forces me to do an Insanity workout at the end of every day! My new friend Gaby is a physio student and triathlete at the University of Nottingham in England, and she and I have even taken to waking up early in the morning to run and workout at the track just 5 minutes down the road from our house. I guess after all the mendazi and samooooosas that I eat here, I’m quite lucky to have been placed with some ridiculously fit housemates.
I love my job, my friends, and every little thing about Malawi, and am so grateful every day for the wonderful life and home I’ve found here.