During the first week that we spent focusing on our assigned project (repairing medical devices), that Monday was Eid ul-Fitr so we had a holiday. Happy Eid Mubarak my brothers and sisters.

During that week we began by focusing on the Oxygen Concentrator. We read about replacing/fixing the compressor, sieve beds, solenoid valves and circuit board in the service manual, with a plan to read about the other components at a later stage. What I took away from the whole process is that the repairing procedure involves identifying which component or components on the concentrator are malfunctioning and replacing that or those components. This is because basically, the Oxygen concentrator is built modularly.

Working on the Oxygen ConcentratorOur supervisor walked us through the troubleshooting process he uses and we were able to identify the obvious problems that might occur with the device but are left out of the troubleshooting section in the service manual. These are the things that we wrote about in the guidelines for novices.

We learnt how to do the standard diagnostic tests on the oxygen concentrator during the week. There are precautions to be taken with some of the test that we did not adhere to very well some there were some mishaps but the problems caused were rectified.

For my personal project during the Friday afternoon period I decided to refresh my Arduino programming skills. I started reading through the notes I had written from my last internship on Arduinos and build up my knowledge there. What I took away from reading back is that practice is very important. Having to go through all the steps in programming that I have forgotten is annoying and with practice I could have avoided it.

During the first week of the internship, we spent some time breaking the ice and doing team building exercises. A large part of getting to know each other was discussing the different cultures that the Polytechnic group and Rice group were accustomed to, so that no one would be offended by any behavior they found foreign. The highlight of the week was the paper airplane building competition which Mphatso won though everyone agreed that I had the coolest design.

Different individuals presented on the projects they had worked on in the past and we all talked about what we hoped to achieve with this internship. The projects that we would be doing were presented to us on the second day and we were given a chance to list our preferences. On the last day we were assigned to a team and given a project. We also did a tour of the wards at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital that would be most affected by our projects. It was good to see the positive impact that other projects have had on the lives of people in southern Malawi.

The second week was spent visiting several district hospitals and Zomba Central Hospital. There was a highly apparent difference between the resources available at the district hospitals and the central hospital and so too the level of expertise between the technical personnel. All the same, all the personnel seem to do well with what they had available. There was a bit of an “accent” barrier between the visiting interns and some of the stakeholders at the district hospitals but we found ways of overcoming it. All and all the visits allowed us to start working relationships with the stakeholders that we would be working with on our projects.

We had short tourist stops along the routes to and from the hospitals, so warm greetings from the tea estates of Thyolo. Muli bwanji?