Wow, it’s hard to believe that in two weeks Caleb, Jacinta and I will be on a plane back home! It’s been an amazing summer and I can’t wait to see what the next two weeks have in store. 🙂
The rest of this past week was definitely busy. Not only was the week full of national holidays (Canada Day, the Fourth of July, and Malawian Independence, all in one week), but several of our housemates returned to England, and Emily, Jacinta and I have been running around trying to complete souvenir shopping! And on top of all of that, our work to do in the office has really picked up as well!
With MK and Shannon returning from traveling the past two weeks, Caleb, Jacinta and I have suddenly found ourselves with a plethora of new CPAPs to fix (though we are still waiting on zip ties to come from the states so that the repaired CPAPs can be bound and sent back to their homes in the hospitals). Additionally, now that our technologies are finally in Blantyre, tech surveys have been taking up a large amount of time. Finally, Caleb and I have made friends with Doctor Pam, an oncologist who is from the UK and working at Queens for 2 years; she has found lots of medical supplies for us to sort through and fix! For the rest of this post, I will talk a little more about tech surveys and supply repair.
Tech Surveys:
On Thursday and Friday, I had the opportunity to do some tech surveys with Emily. Since Emily spends most of her internship in Queens, she has provided all of us with valuable connections to nurses! We spent basically the entire morning Thursday and Friday walking around the various pediatric wards with our basket of technologies. It was definitely a valuable whirlwind experience! The feedback by the nurses was very helpful, and I think it will definitely help guide my work in my senior design project next year. Additionally, I appreciated the eagerness of the nurses to help us with our projects, as they were willing to take time away from breaks in their shifts to look at our devices. Next week, Emily, Caleb and I are going to get some feedback from attending physicians on the wards, and I cant wait to see what they have to say.
Doctor Pam:
Since our arrival at Queens, we have been able to make friends with several of the physicians here. One of our favorite doctors to work with is Pam, a pediatric oncologist that is always willing to give us tips about Queens, Malawi, and travel! Additionally, halfway through the summer Becky found out that Pam was sorting through a huge storage closet of medical supplies, but as a physician she was frequently too busy to see what devices were working or to make steps to repair them. That’s where we come in! For the past two weeks, Caleb and I have been systematically going through medical devices from the storage closet, figuring out what they are, making sure they work, and creating plug adapters to allow them to be used in Malawian outlets. I’m proud to say that, although there are plenty of devices left to go through, after two weeks we can definitely see a difference in the supply closet – I think we are on the home stretch! It has also been fun to work through all the different medical devices and learn about what they do and how they work, something that I definitely hope to be able to use later on as an engineer and physician.
Tea:
In other news, this weekend our team took a Sunday afternoon trip to Satemwa tea plantations in Thyolo, Malawi. It was a beautiful drive and a good way to relax after a long week! Once at Satemwa, we drove to Huntingdon House, where the owner of Satemwa tea plantation used to live. The house has since been converted into a beautiful hotel and restaurant. Our team got a chance to bond over afternoon English tea and a game of croquet (which I’m sure would have been more productive if we had used any rules). Overall, it was a lovely day and a part of Malawi I am glad I got to see before we left!
