During the first week of the internship, we spent some time breaking the ice and doing team building exercises. A large part of getting to know each other was discussing the different cultures that the Polytechnic group and Rice group were accustomed to, so that no one would be offended by any behavior they found foreign. The highlight of the week was the paper airplane building competition which Mphatso won though everyone agreed that I had the coolest design.

Different individuals presented on the projects they had worked on in the past and we all talked about what we hoped to achieve with this internship. The projects that we would be doing were presented to us on the second day and we were given a chance to list our preferences. On the last day we were assigned to a team and given a project. We also did a tour of the wards at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital that would be most affected by our projects. It was good to see the positive impact that other projects have had on the lives of people in southern Malawi.

The second week was spent visiting several district hospitals and Zomba Central Hospital. There was a highly apparent difference between the resources available at the district hospitals and the central hospital and so too the level of expertise between the technical personnel. All the same, all the personnel seem to do well with what they had available. There was a bit of an “accent” barrier between the visiting interns and some of the stakeholders at the district hospitals but we found ways of overcoming it. All and all the visits allowed us to start working relationships with the stakeholders that we would be working with on our projects.

We had short tourist stops along the routes to and from the hospitals, so warm greetings from the tea estates of Thyolo. Muli bwanji?