Sorry I haven’t posted all week! I lost my dongle and spent the weekend reading Game of Thrones instead. Last week, we visited Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital with Sam and Ariel. Even after the week spent visiting district hospitals, Queen’s felt strikingly big and astoundingly full.

Queens’ neonatal record storage unit has a ginormous task to manage. Ariel’s blog this week has more on record keeping, but  I was amused to see the ubiquitous Chiponde boxes repurposed.

They were cleaning the infamous diarrhea bay when we came by, so we didn’t really get to see it. Mixed feelings on that one.

I realized that I’ve never seen a pediatrics ward that wasn’t at least slightly decorated — QECH is no exception. This scene decorates one of the labyrinth windowed hallways that lead everywhere at Queen’s. This was the first hospital we’d seen with completely indoor halls; at St. Gabriel’s everything is open.

There was even a playground near Sam and Ariel’s office. We passed a few of these in the small courtyards created by the hallways, along with clotheslines and empty spots of grass where guardians slept and waited.

As a central hospital and the site of Malawi’s only medical school, Queen’s hosts much more research than St. Gabriel’s. At the sight of the sticker on this stethoscope, I remembered how Dr. Dube mentioned this when she spoke with our GLHT 360 class last spring. QECH is occasionally able to expand their diagnostic capacities by participating in international research. In order to participate in the BTB CPAP study, for example, they needed to be able to reliably, accurately, and precisely measure infants’ birth weights. To make that feasible and ensure good data, BTB provides participating hospitals with a locally-compatible and accurate scale.

I took this picture quickly as we were leaving, but it’s the image I think will stick with me most from our day touring Queen’s. We walked in through the front entrance you see from the top photo, and the first thought that popped into my mind was, “Wow, this looks like the emergency waiting room at Ben Taub.” Queen Elizabeth seems unarguably to be the vanguard of public medical care in this country. We, donors and governments and taxpayer dollars from wealthier countries, remake these hospitals in our own gleaming image. But what happens next, when we’ve transferred the same shortcomings onto a system that already comes up so short?