It’s only been a week since our arrival, but it feels like we’ve been here much longer. After layovers in London, Johannesburg, and Blantyre, we finally arrived in Namitete.

 Layover in London: The London Eye and Thames River

The hospital guesthouse is very nice, we all have our own rooms and bathrooms, and even a mini tv to watch the world cup on!

Here is our daily routine so far:

At 7:30 we go to morning report at the hospital, where the staff goes over the night’s admissions and special cases. Afterwards, Joao, Jesal, and I separate to shadow different doctors in their respective wards. We have already met quite a few of the hospital staff and are hoping to make more friends this way! St. Gabriel’s has many sectors, and on our first day it felt like a maze as Dr. Mbeya, the hospital director, took us around.

12:00 to 2:30 is the afternoon break. Since this is quite a bit of time, we usually are able to go into town or explore the village. Namitondo and the markets are only a five minutes away. At first, we would always try and bargain down the price about 50-100 kwacha, but then we realized that the 5 minutes of exhausting our (very limited) vocabulary of Chichewa was not worth the 25 cents.

Meat market

2:30-5 We work on the technologies that we brought by gaining feedback from the doctors who specialize in that area. I will provide another blog post explaining more on this feedback. The past few afternoons have been DataPall oriented. We are working on cleaning up the records by standardizing the treatments, diagnoses, and symptoms that are entered in with each patient. By doing so, the final reports will be concise and more accurate.

5:30 exercise as a team (yes, it’s true, I exercise)

6:30 cook, we’ve learned how to make nsima and vegetables (traditional Malawian food), but sometimes just resort to ramen and pbj sandwiches.

After dinner, I like to read or try to use the internet (however slow it may be). Sometimes we have little Chichewa lessons as well! Learning Chichewa has been a challenge. No matter how many times we practice the phrases at night, I usually seem to freeze up and forget them when talking to the locals.

It may be a little soon to say home sweet home in Namitete, but this first week has been an amazing start to this summer internship.

Note: I apologize for the lack of pictures and also delay between posts, the internet here is a lot slower than expected and requires a lot of patience.