We’re back!  After two months in Namitete we are back home and I’ll be the first to say that it was the fastest 8 weeks I’ve ever had.  Although it’s been nice to come back and see my family I’m already missing life back in Malawi.  Our last few days in Namitete ended up being both sad and exciting.  Saying goodbye to all the friends we made during our time there was a hard process.  Saying goodbye was especially hard since we didn’t know when we would see them again, and that was a hard idea to swallow both for us and for our friends in Malawi.  It wasn’t all sad though, in between the goodbyes there were a lot of happy times.  During our last few days we we tried to pack in as much as we could.  Some of our best friends at the hospital made dinner for us and taught us how to make nsima.  We went out to see Gift and his family for one more visit, when his mom insisted we stay for lunch.

Hannah and I making nsima with Sister Justa.

During our last week we also presented Sphygmo to the Matron and some of the other nurses at the hospital.  They were all so excited about the possibility of having Sphygmo at St. Gabriel’s and they wanted to start using it as soon as possible.  It was really cool to see how excited they were about a device that we brought from Rice and we started to think about the impact that the technologies we bring could have on the people at St. Gabriel’s.

Just me and some kids.

My time in Namitete was an unbelievable experience and I am so thankful that I was given the opportunity to see a part of the world so different from what I know.  The friendships we made and the experiences were had are things that I will remember forever.  I will miss Malawi very much but now I can’t wait to use what I’ve learned in the work that I will do at Rice.  Thank you all so much for reading and keeping up with my adventure and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me!

Zikomo Kwambiri! (Thank you very much)

This week we wrote and printed user manuals for DataPall that we will be leaving here.  We’ve also been doing training sessions for everyone in Palliative Care and the HIV clinic next door.  We’ve been doing some last minute data cleanups as well to make sure that we leave the people here with the most accurate numbers and data possible.  Tomorrow is our last training session and then we are officially done working with DataPall!  Another piece of exciting news is that today the bCPAP was used at St. Gabriel’s Hospital for the first time!

With only a short time left here everyone at the hospital has been eager to show us what goes on in the other wards.  Hannah and I shadowed one of the nurses we are friends with, Comfort, on her night shift and we got to see what the hospital is like after dark.  One interesting thing is that every single patient who comes in at night gets admitted, even if they would normally only be sent to outpatient.  This actually causes some problems at the hospital because patients who should come as outpatient during the day but instead are admitted over night don’t actually end up seeing treatment until the following afternoon.  Also, somehow patients have learned that if they come at night they will be admitted no matter what so even if they’ve been told before that they don’t need to be admitted they will just come at night.  Over the last few days we’ve gotten to really experience how the hospital runs and the kinds of problems they face not only in Palliative Care but also in rest of the wards.

Hannah, Daniel and I are starting to get really sad about leaving, and we are trying to squeeze in everything we possibly can before we head back to the states next week.  We’ve been going out into the villages with our friend Gift a lot and this weekend we’ll be going with him a few more times.  We are having dinner with two of our good friends here in a couple days, Nurse Comfort and Sister Justa, and they are going to teach us how to make nsima and some other traditional Malawian food.

Not much else is going on right now, so I’ll put up some extra pictures to make up for it!

Labor ward at a (rare) quiet moment.

Gift’s mom making nsima.

We had lunch with Gift today at his house.

Whenever we go out to the villages with Gift we end up with an entourage of children.

Giraffeeee

This weekend was packed with Namitete adventure.

On Friday afternoon we had some fun with the kids who like to hang out outside our house.  There’s a group of about 10 kids who come to our porch every afternoon and laugh with/at us.  On Friday they took us to Namitete Technical College, which is down the road from the hospital.  The kids like to play with our cameras and take tons of pictures and videos of each other.  After the tour we came back to the porch and a dance party broke out.  The kids were playing music on Daniel’s phone and they were video taping each other dance.  Their favorite songs are by Maroon 5, B.o.b., and T.I.  all of which we conveniently had on our phones and computers.  They stayed on our porch singing and dancing until the sun went down.  That night we took some of our new friends who are also staying in the hospital guesthouse to dinner with the Gray’s (the farmer’s we stayed with the first month).  We’ve gotten pretty close the kids who come to our porch and we see them pretty much every day.

Some of the kids hanging out on our porch.

Saturday morning bright and early Daniel’s friends Hosea and Myamiko took us to see their school in Namitete.  They are both in secondary school and they’re in the middle of exams right now.  Some of their classes are English, Chichewa, bible knowledge, biology, and agriculture.  Their school had a few classrooms, one for each grade, that had some benches and maybe a couple desks.

 

That afternoon Daniel and I met up with our friend Gift to get another village tour.  We walked through some villages to get to Gift’s house, and on our way there we kept accumulating children who somehow knew that we were friends of Gift.  By the time we were at his house we had our very own entourage of children.  The best part was when we leaned over Gift’s gate to see if he was there, and his mother recognized us immediately and was so excited to see us there.  When we met with Gift he told us that we were in luck, there was a chief induction ceremony going on in a nearby village that he would take us to.  When we got to the village, tons and tons of people surrounded a small fort where the chiefs were seated.  One of the main chiefs saw us in the crowd (we’re not very hard to miss because we cause a lot of excitement) and invited us to come and sit under the fort with them where we could see the tribal dancers.  The people there were so excited to have us and were so welcoming as they tried to make sure we had the best view possible.  Then the dancing started.  The costumes alone are worth noting.  Each dancer wears a mask over his face; they are not supposed to be seen as human.  Aside from the dancers, there are people who also come out dressed as animals.  We saw two huge oxen that must’ve had at least three people in them each.  There was also a man who came out dressed as a monkey, this one was trying to scare me and I must say it worked a little bit.  Seeing the tribal dances and experiencing this piece of Chewa culture first hand was definitely one of the coolest experiences I’ve had here so far.

The crowd at the chief induction ceremony.

Some of the traditional dancers.

Monkey!

On Sunday the Malawian sisters invited us to come to the Feast of St. Peter at the church.  It was all outdoors and the archbishop came from Lilongwe to run the service.  The first two hours were pretty interesting, lots of singing and dancing, and everybody brought offerings to give to the Archbishop.  By hour six even the nuns we were sitting with were getting antsy.  After the service there was a sort of potluck at the church where lots of different groups of women brought tubs and tubs of nsima, cabbage, chips, pumpkin leaves, and other typical Malawian foods.  We got to go around and try food from different groups, everyone was very eager to have us eat with them.

One group of women with the food they brought for the “potluck.”

After the exciting weekend, we were ready to get back to work and yesterday we finished DataPall!  We have just sent the user manuals to a printer, and we are now setting up training sessions.  Now that we’re mostly done, some of the other parts of the hospital have been asking if we want to see what they do.  We’re getting to see a lot of different things happening in the hospital and it’s been very exciting!

Last weekend Daniel and I ventured out to Lake Malawi and met up with the Queen’s interns for a few days in Senga Bay.  Lake Malawi is a big attraction here and everyone had been telling us that we had to make time to go see it.  The part of the lake we went to looked more like an ocean than a lake.  We stayed in tents at a place called Cool Runnings which was packed deep in the villages around Senga Bay and right on the water.  Since it’s wintertime here the place was pretty vacant, except we ran into three of the visiting doctors at St. Gabe’s who were staying at Cool Runnings as well.  The first day we enjoyed the beach and the sun and did a little exploring in the town of Salima.  On Saturday we took a boat out to a smaller island in the middle of the lake to do some snorkeling.  We saw some cool brightly colored fish and basked on the rocks there until we were ready to head back to the mainland.  Overall the weekend at the lake was beautiful and very relaxing but we were excited to head back to Namitete.

Sam and Daniel frolicking in the lake.

The boat we took to Lizard Island.

The shore of Senga Bay.

Sunrise on the lake.

Since being back in Namitete, it’s really started to set in for us that we don’t have very much more time here.  We have two weeks after this one and then we will unfornutately have to say goodbye to Malawi.  On the other hand this means that we only have three more weeks to finish everything we want to do for St. Gabe’s.  We are almost done with working on DataPall now and we’ve started writing a user’s manual that we will leave behind with it.  As well as leaving the manual we are setting up small training sessions for us to have with each of the workers in the FCCU (Family Centered Care Unit) to go over some of the new features that DataPall has as well as going over how they should be using the program.  Other than DataPall, we have a few other small projects that we need to finish up in the rest of our time here so the last few weeks are going to be extremely busy for us.

This weekend we are getting a tour of the nearby school by some students that Daniel met a couple weeks ago.  We were also invited to dinner with the Gray’s (the farmers we were staying with our first month here) and we are bringing some of the other hospital workers who live with us at the hospital guesthouse so that should be a fun time.  The Malawian sisters also invited us to a big celebration at the church this Sunday.  They are celebrating their patron saint, and the Archbishop is coming.  The sisters keep telling us how much food there’s going to be so we’re pretty excited about that.  We also are going to be going out on another village tour with our friend Gift.  We haven’t gone in a while because we were traveling the last few weekends, but he told us that the kids keep asking him when we’re coming back so he’ll be taking us exploring again.

Overall things are going great, and it’s going to be really busy from here on out but we’re very excited for the adventures still to come.

Home sweet home!  We came back to Namitete this week after lots of hectic travel.  We also moved into some new housing back here in Namitete.  We are now living in the hospital’s guesthouse with lots of other German visitors and we are definitely wishing we knew how to speak some German.

It was a big week here in Namitete because the president of Malawi, Dr. Joyce Banda, came to visit St. Gabriel’s to open the new Outpatient Department.  The celebration started at the hospital where Banda was greeted both with the church choir from the hospital as well as her party supporters who follow everywhere she goes.  Her supporters are all decked out in bright orange and they sing and dance for hours before the president even arrives.  Giant orange busses rolled through Namitete with “People’s Party” written on the side.  After the president arrived and toured the hospital there was a huge rally and celebration at the primary school across from St. Gabriel’s.  This celebration was HUGE.  I think every person from here to Zambia came out to the rally.  There was tons of dancing and chanting and yelling and general mayhem.  Many people gave short speeches, very few of which were in English and then the president spoke which once again was mostly in Chichewa.  We didn’t really know what she was saying but people were laughing a lot so we assume it was good.  Once she was done speaking, the real celebration broke out.  There were some traditional dances that involved some wild costumes and a lot of yelling and singing.  It was a really cool experience to be in Namitete when the president visited, I think people will be talking about this for quite a while.

The next day, it was back to work as usual doing DataPall and working on some things for the Community Health Volunteers.  This weekend we are going to Lake Malawi and we will be meeting up with the Blantyre interns once again.  We’ve heard the lake is gorgeous and I can’t wait to see it in person!

Also sorry for how late this post is, my blog has been fighting with me lately.

 

So I was supposed to upload this video a while ago, but we just recently got enough internet to make that possible.  This is a song that the community health workers sang to us in the village Mkoko.  We’re not sure what the direct translation is but we were told it generally means thank you.  Enjoy!

Malawi Singing

Hello everyone!   Sorry about the sparse posts recently but we were traveling this week.  On Monday we met up with Sam and M.K. in Lilongwe to help out with the ongoing CPAP project.  Over the last few days we’ve been to Kasungu, Machinga, Mwanza, and Blantyre!  It’s been really hectic but I really enjoyed getting to see other hospitals and other parts of the country.  After spending so much time in Namitete, where it is very rural, it’s been fun being in larger cities where they have things like restaurants!  We had forgotten what it was like to go out to eat and have 3G Internet.  It’s been a refreshing trip these last few days.

Getting to see other hospitals in the country was a really awesome experience.  It made me realize how small St. Gabriel’s is!  The hospitals we went to all seemed way bigger than St. Gab’s and even more shocking was the number of patients at the hospitals.  The district hospitals have so many more patients to take care of because they cover such a larger and more densely packed area.

Driving around the country we got to see what it was like in the southern region.  It’s so much colder!  It’s much more mountainous and rugged with some pretty serious terrain compared to the central region.  It’s also really green and looks very jungle-y.  The interesting thing about Malawi is that there are people everywhere.  In the many hours driving around the country I don’t think we saw a single stretch of land that didn’t have people living there.

Doesn’t it look like a jungle?!

We are staying in Blantyre for the weekend and will exploring the big city as much as we can while were here.  We will also be taking advantage of the resources in Blantyre and work on some projects that we still have in Namitete.  As fun as it has been getting to do some traveling, I will be excited to get back to home sweet Namitete this week and see our friends at St. Gab’s again!

This week some of the health problems we learn about in our classes back at Rice hit a little too close to home for me.  I got to experience some of the healthcare here firsthand when I got a little stomach bug.  I saw one of the doctors at St. Gabriel’s who helped me get the medicines I needed.  Healthcare in Malawi is free, and since I was the patient for the day that meant all the medication was free for me as well.  The most exciting part is that now I have my very own Malawian Health Passport!

I was feeling better today, just in time because we got to go out into the villages with Alex from the hospital to see the HSA Backpacks.  We went to four different villages and saw how the backpacks were being used, and asked the volunteers lots of questions about how we could improve them and how they liked them.  Interestingly enough, one of the things the volunteers like the most about the backpacks is that they give them an identity.  The volunteers like that when they are carrying the backpacks they feel empowered.  Going off of the same idea, they asked if we could make them badges or nametags that said they were Community Health Volunteers from St. Gabriel’s Hospital.  That way people would know who the volunteers were and what they were doing.  I think we are going to try to make up a few of these badges while we are here so that we can leave the volunteers with at least some immediate action so they know their concerns are being heard.

With the Community volunteers

We don’t have anything in store for the weekend yet but I’m sure we will venture into Namitete, likely via bike taxi (wish me luck).  Then next week we begin our travels around Malawi with the CPAP team.

This past week has been both really exciting and really busy!  We got to spend some time this week working in the HIV clinic to see how their database system works in comparison to DataPall.  St. Gabriel’s hospital has HIV clinic three days a week and on Saturdays for kids who are in school.  It seems like the HIV clinic sees about 150 patients in one day and we personally probably saw between 80-100 patients the day we worked there.  In order for us to see the database system as well as just help out for a while we were weighing patients and then checking them in, asking if there were any problems with the medications, and sending their information to the pharmacy to renew their prescription.  Getting to do some hands on work interacting with patients was an awesome experience, even with the language barrier, although we did pick up some unusual phrases that go beyond casual conversation while working there.  Working in the HIV clinic was definitely a wild experience, I couldn’t help but compare it to how things run in the states.  A fair amount of patients when they come to clinic don’t even see a clinician while they are there.  There is very little patient privacy, and simply because of the lack of resources each patient is counseled for less than a minute before the next person is called in.

The database system that they use was entirely donated by the CDC and is based around barcode stickers that each patient has on their health passports.  After watching how it works, we are definitely going to encourage the nurses to use something similar in Palliative Care that will make DataPall run smoother.  One of the main problems with using the database is that we end up having multiple patient ID numbers that correspond to the same person because the name is constantly being spelled differently.  Sometimes that patient will report their name in Chichewa when they come, and other times they will report their name in English.  If the nurses put stickers with the patient’s ID number on the health passports, it may help to eliminate this problem.

Two of our professors from Rice came this week to check up on the work at St. Gabriel’s as well as talk to us about joining the project going on in Blantyre, about four hours away from Namitete.  The project consists of doing research in pediatrics in multiple hospitals around Malawi for a past BTB project, the CPAP.  It was definitely nice to see some familiar faces and we are excited to help out with that project while also getting the opportunity to do some in-country traveling to other hospitals!

Other than that we have just been focusing on cleaning up the data that is going into DataPall to ensure the doctors and nurses are getting correct patient statistics.  It has been a lot of tracking down paper records and filling data gaps in the system.

 

In other news, Hannah and I have joined the hospital’s Netball team!  Netball is basically basketball but no backboard, with the rules of ultimate Frisbee, played with a soccer ball.  Thankfully the nurses have been very patient in teaching us how to play!

Tomorrow Sister Justa from the hospital is going to show us around Namitete, more to come after that.

Future owls!

The last couple of days have consisted mostly of working with DataPall, trying to work out some of the simple kinks, and exploring Namitando.   We’ve been trying to get as much feedback as we can from workers on DataPall and the HSA Backpacks to see what changes we can make.  This means we’ve been doing a lot of pseudo-interviews having individuals fill out the technology surveys we have prepared.  One morning we got to help out in the clinic, we were just counting pills for them, but we got to interact with patients which was exciting!

 

Other than work we’ve been spending a lot of time in Namitando, looking around, meeting people, and getting a lot of stares.  We did finally get to try nsima, which is the staple food here in Malawi.  It’s corn flower mixed with water that ends up making a thick dough/porridge/mashed potato looking food.  The people here pretty much eat it at every meal, and some of the nurses at the hospital have agreed to teach us how to make it.

 

On our way through Namitando today, we ran into a man who works at the hospital, Gift.  Without even asking Gift escorted us out to his village and into his home so that we could get a better sense for village life.  He showed us where they get their water, how they make bricks, what the homes look like, how to make corn flower and lots of other things.  It was unbelievable to us how welcoming all the people at his home were.  His mother and siblings and the whole village basically were so happy to see us there and were so hospitable towards us.  The kids LOVE taking pictures and seeing themselves in the image on the camera, they would follow us everywhere waiting for pictures to be taken. We asked Gift if the kids follow all the “azungus” around like this and he said to us “They are proud of you.”  Everyone was so happy to have us come out to see their village, and we were taken aback by how eager the people were to welcome us and talk to us.  Gift had a lot to say about the way of life in Malawi and he talked to us about the education, extreme poverty, and politics in Malawi.  He even talked to us about his view of President Obama.  Gift also offered to escort us through all the villages in the area during the next two months so that we can get an authentic view of Namitete, Malawi.  Our next adventure with Gift is Sunday after mass, so I’m sure I will have more stories then!

buying bananas in the street

making maize flour

Malawian children are the cutest

 

Over the next few days we will be working with DataPall more as well as scheduling a time when we can go out to the community with the volunteers and see the backpacks in action!