Muli bwanji? (‘How are you?’)

not to be confused with Mulanje, where we went hiking last week Monday! Mount Mulanje is a massif not too far away from Blantyre containing a peak called Sapitwa, which is the highest peak in Malawi. MUBAS organized the trip for the day 🙂 We did not climb that high of course (as it takes a few days), but we hiked for a bit and got to the Likhubula Falls with its ‘Dziwe La Nkhalamba’ (‘Old man’s pool’). The hike as well as the waterfalls were so beautiful. See it for yourself!

Wall painting saying “Welcome to Mount Mulanje” seen before starting the hike

Stop on the way to the waterfalls. Peak Sapitwa is behind me in the background.

Likhubula Falls and ‘Dziwe La Nkhalamba’

After the hike, a big part of the remaining of last week was working on the group projects. Having tested different fabrics and done work on the gathering of materials the previous week, last week Ranken and I focused our work majorly on the electric circuitry of the compression therapy device project that we are working on (see my last post for more information on the project). We are still making changes and improving the circuits up to this day, but we made good progress last week! Overall, this has been a very iterative process so far with quite a bit of debugging as well as some reconsiderations and changes. We have also had to figure out some materials along the way and to work around what is available. With the help of the TA, we now have a pretty functional simplified system and are currently modifying the Arduino code to make sure that all the components work together as we want them to. Below is a picture of me from last week at the MUBAS design studio working on the electronics of the device.

Working on the electronic circuits for the compression therapy device project

We also continued gathering information pertaining to needs-finding last week, in particular through conversations with medical professionals of different departments from QECH. It is incredible to see and hear the amount of things that engineering could do to make a positive impact here in Malawi within the medical field!

On Friday, we also had presentations with Hillary both about our group as well as our individual site projects (if I have not introduced him so far, Hillary is the Design Studio Manager). This was a good way to compile what we have done so far as well as to get feedback for the remaining two weeks.

Lastly, this weekend, besides doing some work, I went to visit The Mandala House which has an art gallery called La Caverna Art Gallery inside as well as a very nice outside area. I really enjoyed the visit! I added a couple of pictures below: