I’m in Malawi! I have been here for a week, and we have been busy getting settled into the Poly and a house, meeting the interns from the Poly, and learning about oxygen concentrators in preparation for site visits next week. There are some differences that are taking some getting used to. For example, lunch here is 1.5 hours, while lunch at school is 30 minutes to an hour. We are having trouble filling this extra time, but we have found that drinking Cokes from glass bottles is a pleasant way to do that.

The interns from the Poly are all rising 5^th year engineering students. Kate and Brighton and studying electrical engineering, while Vincent and Harvey are studying mechanical engineering. We are also living with them. We all moved in together on Sunday, and we are enjoying getting to know each other by cooking together, eating together, and sharing awkward moments together. I have enjoyed speaking with Harvey about differences in school systems (if they fail between 3 and 6 courses/year, they must repeat the year) and learning about how to cook rice from Kate (you toast it first!). I think that living together will not always be easy (but is it ever easy moving in with strangers?), but I think it will be a great learning experience and bring all of us closer together.

Today, we split into two preliminary teams to focus on our two main projects. One team, containing Christine, Tahir, Vincent, and Kate, is focusing on learning as much as possible on oxygen concentrator repair. This team will try to improve repair methods upon returning from site visits. I am on a team with Theresa, Harvey, and Brighton. We are working on reducing instances of hypothermia in neonates. While we are at site visits to district hospitals, we will be collecting information on care for infants with hypothermia and how they prevent hypothermia. We will then use this information to develop something, be it a system, educational campaign, or device, to reduce cases of hypothermia. Later this week, we will form pairs of people (one from each team) and learn who will be going to which hospital. Two teams will be visiting district hospitals outside Blantyre, and two will be spending the week in Lilongwe to repair oxygen concentrators and collect information.

We began research on hypothermia today, and I have already learned a significant amount about its prevalence in neonates. I did not initially realize how well it would compliment the information I already know about breastfeeding from my mechanical breast pump. I did not realize that breastfeeding helps combat hypothermia, but this makes sense. Not only is skin-to-skin contact occurring, but a warm liquid is also entering the body of the infant. This does not occur when breast milk is fed to an infant after pumping. There is little skin-to-skin contact and the milk cools between the time it leaves the breast and the time it is consumed by the infant. I also learned that hypothermia is a common side-effect of sepsis, the risk of which is reduced by breastfeeding! Everything is related! I am definitely looking forward to continuing to work on this project and make more connections.