Well, after 41 long hours of travel, we have arrived in Malawi! Our trip began with nine suitcases (filled with hundreds of suction catheters for the bCPAP) and a shuttle ride to IAH. After an eleven-hour layover in DC, we flew thirteen hours to Ethiopia, and six hours to Blantyre. Finally we had arrived!
Starting off with a full super shuttle!
Sleeping in the Airport
Traveling with so much luggage!
Shannon, a BTB program associate, picked us up from the Blantyre airport and took us to where we will be staying for the next 9 weeks – Cure guesthouse. Cure is an orthopedic hospital here in Blantyre, and though we won’t be working here this summer, many of our housemates will be. Our current roommates are from all around the world – Denmark, Iceland, Nepal, and Wisconsin! Many of them leave within the week, but it is exciting to get to meet people from around the world who are working towards the same goal.
Home sweet home
After having some time to get oriented and unpacked, Shannon picked us up again to show us around Blantyre. We drove to PAM at QECH to meet Godfrey, one of only four certified bioengineers in the country. PAM itself was almost exactly what I had imagined, and luckily we saw a lot of the equipment that we were taught to repair from medical troubleshooting lab; we are looking forward to getting to know Godfrey and learning more about how we can best help out at PAM in the upcoming weeks.
Once we were done touring PAM, Shannon took us to the shopping center where we went to a grocery store called Shoprite. We bought some food staples (bread, rice, chicken, and jam), and we also bought new sim cards for our cell phones. We then drove past the open market where we can buy fresh fruits and vegetables; hopefully we will be able to visit sometime this week! Needless to say, we were pretty worn out from so much traveling, so after touring Blantyre we went back to Cure for some much needed food and rest.
First dinner: PB&J, oreos, and nutella!
Today, our first full day in Malawi, we continued our orientation. Shannon took us to QECH and gave us a tour of the BTB offices as well as the pediatric wards. The BTB office is full of CPAPs for us to repair, and it is also very well organized and the staff we met who work there all were inviting and happy to see us. QECH itself seems like a huge maze right now. We only visited each ward for a couple of seconds, but I can already tell that things are going to be different than the hospitals I have volunteered at in the states. Shannon also told us a little bit more about the hospitals in Malawi. QECH is one of four tertiary hospitals; local clinics are primary hospitals, regional hospitals are secondary hospitals, and district hospitals, like QECH, are tertiary hospitals. This means that most people at QECH have been referred there by physicians from regional hospitals and that QECH is one of the gold standards for hospitals in the country. Working with the CPAP project, I will be traveling to several regional hospitals, and I am sure it will be interesting to see the differences between the levels of care.
After our tour of QECH, we returned home and cooked our first non-pb&j meal! Thinking the stove was broken, we cooked everything using a microwave before realizing that that it simply wasn’t turned on. Nevertheless, it was a huge success. We plan on spending the rest of the evening and weekend blogging, learning about CPAP and studying curriculum to teach at Poly. Next week I hit the ground running, shadowing a doctor at QECH and figuring out the scope of our project here. It’s certainly good that we have this time to rest and prepare, but we can’t wait to get started!
Jacinta working on a blog post