The time is flying by so fast here! This week was a bit lonely since Ariel was not feeling well and stayed home to recover. Luckily I now have lots of friends and familiar faces to keep me company over at Queens now. My average day includes a chat with the nurses at the High Dependency Unit at Pediatrics, the nurses at the neonatal center in Chatinka, a brief Chichewa lesson and life chat at Medical Records, as well as (a laughed at) attempt to talk in Chichewa with the mothers at the Pediatrics nursery. I get to work on technologies and my social skills at the same time! It really is easier to get things done once you’ve established a relationship with the hospital staff, and it also makes the job more enjoyable.

Data collection was very successful this week. Even with just one person working on it, I think we have been able to reduce the amount of time it takes to get data from the 3 main areas of CPAP patients: Chatinka nursery, Peds nursery, and Peds High Dependency Unit (HDU). In fact, the nurses over at Chatinka are definitely able to do the data collection there without our help at all, but we still have to stay on top of everything going on there for when the crucial CPAP nurses are gone for the training sessions coming up in July. Many of the doctors here are volunteers, so the staff is somewhat fluid, but the permanent doctors have been very friendly and helpful.

This last week I had a successful technology meeting/presentation with Dr. Queen Dube which was encouraging. I was particularly happy that she liked our bCPAP sleeve prototype! Although the price for the one we brought (a little under  50 USD) is a little on the higher side, she thinks it would be a worthwhile investment for the hospital. The key component that increases the cost for the newest prototype we brought is the heating pad. The inside wiring from the heating pad is cut out and re-sewed into our sleeve, but we had a hard time finding a cheap heating pad that used  220V. We have students in Houston working on the sleeve this summer, so hopefully we can do a lot of testing on the designs from last semester and reduce the cost. When we were originally assigned the project, we worked under the assumption that the heating device would be necessary to prevent hypothermia in regions with colder climates (like Pakistan) where the ambient air is too cold to be delivered directly to the baby. However, Dr. Dube was confident that it would make a significant difference even here in Malawi where it is usually warm. They don’t have functioning incubators and the windows are usually open for ventilation, so the neonates are much more exposed than they would be in a developed hospital setting. And it also gets quite cold during Malawi’s winter! Even now when it is still pretty warm it is so difficult for such tiny babies to maintain a normal body temperature. On a related note, Jocelyn brought to Malawi with her the button batteries we ordered, so Chatinka nursery now has functioning thermometers!  We took all of their broken thermometers and told them we would try to fix them/put batteries in them. After a couple of days of us failing to find the proper batteries in Blantyre, they asked for them back. We were slightly worried that they were going to lose faith in us. No worries though, the batteries solved the problem, so we are in the clear.

Mt. Mulanje 

Our hike at Mt. Mulanje was absolutely incredible. Never a dull weekend in Malawi! We attempted to climb the most difficult peak at Mt. Mulanje (we were ill informed) and made it to a halfway point. I can’t wait to go back again already.

          

 

The Flames 

In other news, the Malawi Flames (the national football /soccer team) beat Namibia 1-0 in a very important World Cup qualifying match! As I was walking home from Queens the other day, I noticed a lot of people crowded around radios listening to something. Even the guy I bought produce from at the market had his radio pressed to his ear the entire time, which was very unusual. By the time I got to Cure, I realized it must be a football match and the guards at the gate filled me in on it. I also knew immediately when they won because we could hear people chanting celebrations all around the neighborhood!