Malawi never ceases to amaze me. I feel as though everywhere I turn I continue to see the intersection of what I have learned in class and what actually occurs.  This week everyone has returned home after the site visits. I am sad that we are no longer going to hospitals, but I am happy everyone is together again. We are all back to working in the design lab at the Polytechnic and have been focused on compiling all the notes we took from the different hospitals we visited. It is really interesting to share experiences with my fellow interns and see how the hospitals differ. Theresa and Kate were at Zomba District Hospital while Tahir, Harvey, Leah, and Vincent were at Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe. Both hospitals differed greatly from Malamulo and Mulanje (the two mission hospitals Brighton and I visited). The biggest difference was the absence of technicians at both Mulanje and Malamulo. For Zomba and Kamuzu, the Physical Assets Management (PAM) team is present to repair medical devices that break.

As I look over my notes and go through all the technology pictures from the week, I keep coming back to one device that really stuck with me. At Mulanje I saw a wheelchair that looked very different from the ones I have seen before:

The beginning of Junior year, I took a Needs Finding Class taught by Dr. Ghosn. In this class I learned a lot about how to interview patients and establish the difference between what is needed and what would not be helpful. At the beginning of the class, Dr. Ghosn had us use a wheelchair for a day to show us that there are challenges with the wheelchair we have not thought of before. Being in the wheelchair was definitely an experience; I have such a new found appreciation and respect for people that use wheelchairs. Spring semester of Junior year, I also made a CAD drawing of a wheelchair as practice in my AutoCAD class and we spent a lot of time thinking about ways to change the design. Thus, when I saw an engineered wheelchair I was immediately drawn to it.

Upon further inspection of the chair, I found it was from an organization: Free Wheelchair Mission. This organization provides free wheelchairs for developing nations. I love that they saw a need, like wheelchairs, came up with their own design, and were able to develop a platform for delivering the chairs. Knowing that an organization like this exists makes me even more motivated to continue developing filter designs for oxygen concentrators. I am so lucky to have the opportunity to come to Malawi and see what has been developed already. After all my experience with wheelchairs last year, I never knew about the wheelchair organization and would have never known how many other organizations there are trying to develop technologies for the hospital.