As of today, we are completing our first (half) week here in Blantyre, Malawi. We landed on Wednesday and our travel felt endless, each of us having been in 3 different continents in the span of 3 days. During this travel I was in Europe for the first time and now it is my first time in Africa. Aside from losing a bag on our last flight and recovering it the next day, the flying was enjoyable. Travel aside, the city of Blantyre has been nothing but good to our group. The people are extremely kind anywhere you go, the food is cheap and fantastic (lunches are no more than $2!), the weather is comfortable during the day, and the views of the mountains are enjoyable at any time of day. We purchased cell phones to use locally and bought groceries to cook dinner, it was fun and complicated all at once since phones here are used on a credit basis where scratch cards are used to obtain data and minutes.

Thursday was all about introductions and locations. We visited the Rice 360 office and the NICU at Queen Elizabeth’s and we visited the “MOEDK,” which is the design studio at the Polytechnic University of Malawi. At Queen’s they have the largest NICU in the country, but they still only have about 20 beds total and the area of this ward was about the size of two small classrooms. It was humbling to see such dedicated and caring nurses watching over the infants in this unit as well as the standard of care here in Malawi. At the NICU they do not have typical incubators, they use a wooden box called a “Hot Cot” with heating bulbs underneath but this tool can sometimes overheat and harm the infant since there is no temperature control. The NICU also had no way of continuously monitoring the infants aside from the nurses making constant rounds of the ward. Being in this ward really showed the real and dire need of better tools to care for neonates, and thinking that this is in the largest NICU of Malawi. During the night shift only 3 nurses are on duty for as many infants that the NICU can hold, and at night 75% of infant deaths occur, mostly due to lack of monitoring of infants. At the Polytechnic we met Andrew and Francis, they run the design studio and we will be working with them extensively this summer.

Then, on Friday we worked all day at the Polytechnic preparing our technologies for presentations on Monday, we will be presenting to Rice 360 staff and joining them will be Dean Reginald DesRoches, our Dean of Engineering at Rice. I’m excited to show the staff the work we have been doing and the devices that have been developed by Rice students in engineering design teams. While working on these devices, one of them, Optoco, broke on us about an hour and a half before our day ended, which was very frustrating but we were able to construct a proof of concept design which will suffice for now. I’m excited to meet the other interns that study at the Poly that we will be working with in the coming weeks, I can’t wait to see the work they will be doing and what I will be able to learn from them.

The weekend was a bit more relaxed, we went to visit a tea plantation and were a part of some tea tasting, I bought myself a small bag of loose leaf tea cultivated in that plantation to bring back home. We also washed our clothes by hand for the first time, easier than I thought but quite time consuming. Drying our clothes is the hardest part because the majority of the day is cold and the sun goes down at 5 pm and it is dark by 6pm so the clothes must be out the entire day for it to dry.

For the following week we have planned to visit district hospitals on Tuesday and Thursday to perform some needs finding and to learn about the standards of care in smaller hospitals in Malawi.

One of our drivers, Edson, took us to a local restaurant where we had some of the best food I have had ever. At Njamba we had Nsima, a typical staple food here similar to grits made of Maize, some Okra, and Chambo, a typical fish that lives in Lake Malawi.

Tiwonana nthawi yina, see you later!

–franklin–