While thinking about what to write for this blog post, I am surprised at how many mosquitos I have swatted at and how many times I have slapped my self in the face doing so. Arriving in Blantyre for a week now I have finally gotten my bearings in this unfamiliar place. It feels weird to wake up as my friends and family back home are going to bed and going to work everyday in such a bustling city. Work may have the wrong connotation; what I am doing at the polytechnic, learning how to use different design software and tools and improving my foundation in electronics, prototyping, and basic device knowledge and repairs feels too fun to be called work. Currently I am brushing up on my Autodesk Inventor skills while trying to learn how to use a laser cutter while messing around with Inkscape, a software for rendering digital graphics. This crash course of sorts is all in preparation for our team projects that we will be focusing on over the next month. My project will be geared towards protecting the compressor of an oxygen concentrator from dust and other debris, which can cause wear and tear in the machine over time. Hopefully the skills and knowledge I have picked up on during my time working on my Rice GLHT 360 project will be of some use with this real world problem.

In addition to the work done at the Polytechnic we have also had time to get to know the Malawi Interns better outside of the classroom. Last Saturday was one of the intern’s birthdays so we all got together in order to throw an impromptu party for him. Having a cookout (or braii as it is called here) and dancing to a combination of South African, Malawi, and American music, it is interesting how easy it is to get accustom to a new place when only a week before I did not know what to expect. Apparently it is a tradition here to dump water on the person whose birthday we were celebrating, very similar to celebrating birthdays at Duncan College at Rice (we usually toss people into a tank of water we have by the commons). If not for the mosquitos and the constant reapplications of bug spray, I feel almost at home here.

This week we will be visiting the hospitals across Southern Malawi in order to better understand to the problems we were tasked with and to gain hands on experience on how the hospital system here operates and what role we as students and engineers can provide. It will be interesting to see if the rest of the hospitals are like Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital here in Blantyre and what nurses and technicians do in order to solve some of the problems they face here. Hopefully this can give us more insight to what needs to be done and what we can do to address it.