Pamene Zimaswa- “When it breaks”

When things break in Malawi they are hard to fix. Sadly, though, I learned this lesson with my laptop. After dropping it, my laptop would turn off a few minutes after it turned on. The hospital secretary, Kathy, recommended that I give it to Everest, the guy who comes from Lilongwe to fix Saint Gabriel’s computers. He was extremely qualified, she said, and was certain that he could fix it.

 

This weekend, after three weeks of my laptop being in Lilongwe, I finally got it back. Everest tried his best, swamped with so many other computers to fix, but be it either due to lack of knowledge or lack of the proper tools, I received a phone call saying that he had “failed to fix my computer.” In fact, the problem was worse: I couldn’t turn on my computer at all.

 

When I went into town to pick up my laptop, we saw Richard, the hospital lab technician on his way to get the machine that counts hemoglobin fixed. When we saw him again in lab the next week, he said that the engineer couldn’t fix it, and that hopefully the hospital would buy a new one.

 

 

The thing about technologies is they break. Regardless of how durable you attempt to make it, sooner or later nature will take its course and your technologies will break. So either someone’s there to fix it, or it gets stored indefinitely. For example, looking at Hannah Abrams blog about the lab from two years ago, most of these centrifuges are now broken and are sitting in the lab collecting dust.

 

Or they go to the maintenance office. Here you will find Duncan and Flora, the two hospital technicians. Duncan deals with mechanical issues and Flora with the electrical. In the maintenance office, there are broken technologies piled high.

 

Duncan told us that things that should take them a few minutes or hours to fix takes them days and weeks, just because they don’t have the right tools. Flora agreed with this, and said that, a lot of times, they simply don’t have the parts or the proper tools to fix them. These are simple things like solder and proper sized screwdrivers that would be commonplace at the OEDK. The two of them together just don’t have enough time to fix everything that goes wrong in Saint Gabriel’s: a lot of times, the hospital will have technicians and engineers come in from Europe or surrounding countries in Africa to fix technologies.

 

Malawi and Saint Gabe’s just needs more: More doctors, more engineers, more tools, more parts, more machines, and more resources.