Right now, I am sitting on a bus traveling from Blantyre to Lilongwe with Tahir, Vincent, and Harvey. We are going to be spending this whole week working at KCH, a central hospital there, collecting data on a myriad of subjects, including oxygen concentrators, hypothermia in neonates, electrical supply, and general hospital function. I think it will be fascinating to have the opportunity to compare the way this hospital functions to that of QECH, a central hospital for the Blantyre area. While there, I also hope to have the opportunity to look at the neonatal ward for data on both hypothermia and my breast pump. I hope to collect information regarding need, storage, and various specifics of the design. This will help my partner, Mikaela, and I moving forward. Once again, I am venturing into the unknown – I know no one at the hospital, nothing about the setup, and very little about where I will be staying. However, I feel more prepared for this than I would have two weeks ago. I am (slowly) learning to embrace the unknown and uncertainty. I am learning to go with the flow.

In preparation for this site visit, all of the interns from the Poly visited QECH Friday as a dry-run of sorts for the interviews we will be performing this week. As part of this dry run, we visited the neonatal ward there – Chatinkha – for the first time. This was both a constrictive and an emotional experience for me. By running some of the interview questions, with mothers, we learned ways we could improve the questions to get more constrictive answers. Furthermore, by being there, we obtained a baseline for what to expect and got a better idea of how these wards function, what is allowed in them, and the sorts of notes that would be useful to take.

Seeing Chatinkha in person, however, was much more than a technical experience; it was an emotional one. As a student at Rice who is involved in the global health department, I have heard a lot about this specific neonatal ward, and neonatal wards in resource-limited settings in general. I had some expectations in my head, but I think that nothing can compare to seeing it in person. The ward had 13 radiation heaters and 9 incubators, which were wooden boxes with 4 switches, none of which were labeled, and no quantitative indications whatsoever. There were two or three UV light-generating machines, which are used to prevent jaundice in neonates, that were constantly being moved around to treat various infants. Under these radiators and generators and boxes lied the smallest babies I have ever seen. Some of them could not have weighed over 3 pounds, with heads smaller than my fist and hands the size of a quarter. The ward was filled with women hand-expressing milk into cups to feed their children, the only thing a mother in this situation can do to help her baby grow strong. One woman we spoke to, who was feeding the baby in her arms with a cup, was the grandmother of the baby – the mom was in the ICU.

Seeing all of this, I was filled with an interesting mix of emotions. First, I was immensely saddened. I know that some of these babies will not live to play hide-and-seek or get in trouble for being too loud or even play peek-a-boo, and this breaks my heart. Sill, seeing this facility with the hard-working nurses and loving mothers and group of people on the other side of the planet working tirelessly to give these children more birthdays, I was simultaneously filled with hope. This is why we work so hard. This is why we spend sleepless nights in the OEDK to improve our prototypes. This is why we put blood, sweat, and tears into the work we do. Here, our technologies have the power to make a profound difference. We, students, have the power to make a impact the lives of countless babies and their families, and I can think of no better way I would like to spend my summer or my undergraduate career.