As I write this post on my flight from Cleveland to Houston (the first leg of a 3 day journey that will take me to London, South Africa, and then Blantyre, Malawi), I am finally able to appreciate the privilege I have to work with Rice 360 and Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre. As Jacinta, Caleb, and Carissa have mentioned, these past few weeks have been extremely busy with preparations – I have been doing everything I can to learn about the various health technologies developed by Rice undergrads so that I may help put them to use at QECH and at other clinics nearby.

Later today I will meet up with Emily, and together, we will bring the rest of the equipment and supplies (and Oreos, lots and lots of Oreos) to the international CURE house, where we will join our other awesome interns Caleb, Carissa, and Jacinta who will already be working on developing BIOE lab courses that they will teach at the Polytechnic.

I am so excited to have the opportunity to learn from the amazing people I will get to know in Malawi, from the doctors at the clinics to the people I will meet at the market, from BTB associates working full time in Malawi to my fellow interns. My main projects will be to help administer the clinical survey for the Bubble Continuous Positive Airway Pressure device (bCPAP) and to work on getting feedback for a tablet program that records vital signs for neonates and for DataPall, a palliative care records database. Caleb and Carissa did a great job explaining these specific tasks in detail in their first blog posts, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but the broad goal is to obtain information that will tell us how effective our devices are and to use this data to improve the devices. We hope that if we can show that our devices are successful, we can encourage other area hospitals and public officials to adopt the technologies as well.

Vital Tracker (a link to a poster that describes the features for a tablet program that takes vital signs for neonates at point-of-care)

However, despite all the preparation we have been doing, we fully expect things to change and for some projects to fall through. Design constraints we might not have realized existed could cripple a project, and unaddressed needs we did not know of before could spur new ones. Such problems are inevitable, as we spend most of our time working 9168 miles away. But we ready and willing to adapt.

Although I’m a little weary thinking about spending 23 more hours in a plane, I cannot wait to arrive and get to work (and to finally learn the proper pronunciation of the few words I’ve learned in Chewa)! Tionana!