Last week Dr. Queen Dube met with me and Ariel to talk about the technologies we brought from Rice. We also brought a manual breast pump  as a donation to the hospital in order to help the process of designing an improved manual breast pump that would be suitable for a site like Queens. We are hoping to find out what qualities the mothers want in a manual breast pump to incorporate into the design criteria. While chatting with Dr. Dube, we learned about a future breast milk bank that is in the works at Queens.

Breast feeding is encouraged all across Malawi, but can pose a major problem when babies are too small or too unhealthy to breastfeed. Mothers have to manually produce the breast milk, and then it is fed to the baby through a small tube. This is very difficult and frustrating for a lot of mothers, and some simply can’t produce the breast milk, leaving the baby unfortunately, “out of luck”. Dr. Dube said the only time baby formula is really used is for orphans. Ariel have seen the Chatinka nursery during feeding times, and it is really discouraging to see mothers, in some cases, struggling for only a few milliliters of breast milk.  However, Dr. Dube told us about this future breast milk bank which will allow the hospital to store breast milk from women who can express and provide breast milk to babies whose mothers are unable to express. It is in the early stages, but has already been approved. This is the first I’ve heard of it, but I think it will be a wonderful undertaking for both babies and mothers at Chatinka nursery. I’m also excited for the mothers to try out the manual breast pump we brought from the US, since a manual breast pump will be a necessary element of the breast milk bank project. I think it will make things a lot easier on the mothers who have already gone through so much. Hopefully we can design something at Rice that will be suitable for something like this!