Daily Blog
March 6th,
Hello everyone, on this site I will be keeping a series of daily updates explaining my LINK internship in Malawi, Africa. I arrived in Malawi on the 6th of March, and was picked up from the Malawi airport by my host family; the Spencers. Within 2 minutes of entering the house on the campus if African Bible College I was whisked away to the clinic to see the youngest Spencer child getting stitches! It was a very eventful first day and an interesting introduction to the clinic I will be working at for the next 3 weeks.
March 10th,
Today was my first day in the ABC Clinic, a short devotional and debrief starts at 7:30am and by 8:30 the clinic is open and taking patients. I shadowed Dr. Young around the clinic for the first half of the day where I saw things from patients recovering from severe strokes, to broken bones and malaria. I was able to sit in on all the appointments Dr. Young had, and met and all the staff at the clinic. I met a doctor who has had special training in obstetrics and delivered 5 babies this past weekend, hopefully I will be able to work with him some during deliveries! In the afternoon, Dr. Young had left for the day, so I went into the pharmacy and worked sorting, counting, and packing pills. During time off from the clinic, I was able to go with an audiologist to a youth group with HIV patients who are in a research program to see the correlation between HIV and hearing loss. It has been around 80 degrees at the hottest part of every day and is humid, everything is green, and I am woken up by crazy birds every morning! I am loving it so far, and can't wait to learn more at the clinic.
March 11th,
Today I worked in the clinic again, shadowing Dr. Young. We saw Patients who had malaria, fungal infections in their toes, and someone who has been fighting ulcers in his esophagus and stomach. We visited a physical therapy session and were going to go to KCH (the big hospital about an hour away) to see a patient of Dr. Young's but it ended up not working out.
March 13th,
Today I started out the morning at the clinic doing appointments with Dr. Young. During this time I was able to see the ultrasound of a woman who was 22 weeks pregnant and didn't know it. It was really cool to see how all the machines worked and the baby inside of her! That afternoon I went with Dr. Young to an epilepsy clinic out in a village and worked there the rest of the day. We saw patients who have seizures/disabilities and prescribed medication to them to stop the seizures. I helped with counting and packing prescriptions for patients, sat in on a lot of appointments, and held a 3 week old adorable bab
March 16th,
On Friday I worked more at the clinic shadowing doctor young during her appointments. I saw more cases of malaria, and various infections in patients. I only worked a half day this day. Today (Sunday) after going to church with the Spencer's; Charlotte (a spencer child), christine(a friend) and I went to the crisis nursery center, an orphanage for babies. We held and played with the babies all afternoon! There were Babies from 2 weeks old to around 2 or 3 years old in the house; babies were put into certain rooms where a woman was in charge of looking after them, she would act as a kind of mom to them tending to heir needs. The kids don't get very much love and affection living where they are so groups often go in and love on them like we did today. As soon as I walked in we were greeted by the staff there. Walking into the first room I met a child named Toko who, as soon as he saw me ran over and reached his arms up to me to be held, so I picked him up and spent the afternoon playing with him. We went around from room to room holding a playing with the kids there for a few hours. There was a little girl named violet who was only 2 weeks old and had just been given to the center, I was able to hold her for a little while once she woke up. It was a great experience and I am trying to schedule another time to go back.
March 17th,
Today I started the morning working at the clinic again and saw patients with Dr. Young. We went up to the ward (the in-patient part of the clinic) to visit a child with malaria and ran into the OB/Gyn who said he was about to do a c-section and I could watch! So I ran back to house to get scrubs and food, then headed back up and was able to sit in on a c-section. The baby was an adorable little boy and things seemed to go smoothly. After that I went home with another family to a town called Nkoma about an hour drive away to spend a couple nights, and I will be working with the dad(a doctor) watching surgeries all of Tuesday!
March 18th,
Today I woke up at 4:30 am with a stomach flu and have been in bed ever since. Not getting much done, just trying to regain strength and get better.
March 19th,
Today I am still sick, I was given a shot in bed but that was about all the medical themed things for the day. Going to head back to Lilongwe and the ABC campus this afternoon.
March 20th,
Today I slept more to get over being sick, then went to the crisis nursery with Charlotte and Christine, where we held babies for a couple of hours. Still taking it easy for the day.
March 21st,
Today I started off the day working in the clinic and saw patients with doctor Young. A man came in who had hurt his elbow a few days back and as a result, a pool of puss had formed inside the skin and made a bump on the side of his elbow. We saw malaria cases, a young boy came in with 4+ malaria, he got better but ended up testing positive for HIV. We saw pregnant women coming in for checkups, all were doing fine and we got to listen to babies heartbeats inside the moms. Another man had come in on Tuesday complaining of stomach pain, a CT scan was done on his abdomen that day, and he went home to wait for the results. Today, the results came through and it turns out he has appendicitis! It was a scramble to find him but he ended up being ok. It was a pretty eventful day, ended by a night going to Children of the Nations orphanage, hanging out with the kids and showing them movies!
March 22nd,
Today I went with the Spencer's and others to a basketball game, and watched the ABCCA guys and girls teams play.
March 23rd,
Today I went to church with the Spencers, and then went to pick up a team coming to do missions work here. We drove to the airport and spent a whole gathering everyone and their luggage, then drove them to the place they would be staying. After giving them about 30 minutes to get situated we picked them up again and took them to the crisis nursery to spend the afternoon holding babies. Then we had pancake and waffle night in the campus!
March 24th,
Today I shadowed Dr. Young in the clinic and saw patients with her. We saw many viral infections, like stomach flue and colds. We saw a man who was being given HIV treatment and saw he was doing well. A family came in with 3 children they had adopted for checkups, one of the little boys was HIV positive, but was being treated and doing well.
March 19th,
Today I am still sick, I was given a shot in bed but that was about all the medical themed things for the day. Going to head back to Lilongwe and the ABC campus this afternoon.
March 20th,
Today I slept more to get over being sick, then went to the crisis nursery with Charlotte and Christine, where we held babies for a couple of hours. Still taking it easy for the day.
March 21st,
Today I started off the day working in the clinic and saw patients with doctor Young. A man came in who had hurt his elbow a few days back and as a result, a pool of puss had formed inside the skin and made a bump on the side of his elbow. We saw malaria cases, a young boy came in with 4+ malaria, he got better but ended up testing positive for HIV. We saw pregnant women coming in for checkups, all were doing fine and we got to listen to babies heartbeats inside the moms. Another man had come in on Tuesday complaining of stomach pain, a CT scan was done on his abdomen that day, and he went home to wait for the results. Today, the results came through and it turns out he has appendicitis! It was a scramble to find him but he ended up being ok. It was a pretty eventful day, ended by a night going to Children of the Nations orphanage, hanging out with the kids and showing them movies!
March 22nd,
Today I went with the Spencer's and others to a basketball game, and watched the ABCCA guys and girls teams play.
March 23rd,
Today I went to church with the Spencers, and then went to pick up a team coming to do missions work here. We drove to the airport and spent a whole gathering everyone and their luggage, then drove them to the place they would be staying. After giving them about 30 minutes to get situated we picked them up again and took them to the crisis nursery to spend the afternoon holding babies. Then we had pancake and waffle night in the campus!
March 24th,
Today I shadowed Dr. Young in the clinic and saw patients with her. We saw many viral infections, like stomach flue and colds. We saw a man who was being given HIV treatment and saw he was doing well. A family came in with 3 children they had adopted for checkups, one of the little boys was HIV positive, but was being treated and doing well.
March 19th,
Today I am still sick, I was given a shot in bed but that was about all the medical themed things for the day. Going to head back to Lilongwe and the ABC campus this afternoon.
March 20th,
Today I slept more to get over being sick, then went to the crisis nursery with Charlotte and Christine, where we held babies for a couple of hours. Still taking it easy for the day.
March 21st,
Today I started off the day working in the clinic and saw patients with doctor Young. A man came in who had hurt his elbow a few days back and as a result, a pool of puss had formed inside the skin and made a bump on the side of his elbow. We saw malaria cases, a young boy came in with 4+ malaria, he got better but ended up testing positive for HIV. We saw pregnant women coming in for checkups, all were doing fine and we got to listen to babies heartbeats inside the moms. Another man had come in on Tuesday complaining of stomach pain, a CT scan was done on his abdomen that day, and he went home to wait for the results. Today, the results came through and it turns out he has appendicitis! It was a scramble to find him but he ended up being ok. It was a pretty eventful day, ended by a night going to Children of the Nations orphanage, hanging out with the kids and showing them movies!
March 22nd,
Today I went with the Spencer's and others to a basketball game, and watched the ABCCA guys and girls teams play. It was a weekend so I didn't do any super interesting things. The place we went to was surrounded by a high brick wall with broken glass on the top of the wall to keep out unwanted people. Driving around has been an interesting part of being here, you drive on the left side if the road rather than the right and people walk along the roads so driving is a game of dodging people carrying huge loads on bikes and their heads. There is corn everywhere you go, literally people will plant like 3 stalks of corn in a patch of dirt if there is room, it is everywhere! I love all this about Malawi.
Sorry about the pictures I am doing this site from my iPod so it is really hard to format things correctly.
March 23rd,
Today I went to church with the Spencers, and then went to pick up a team coming to do missions work here. We drove to the airport and spent a whole gathering everyone and their luggage, then drove them to the place they would be staying. After giving them about 30 minutes to get situated we picked them up again and took them to the crisis nursery to spend the afternoon holding babies. Then we had pancake and waffle night in the campus!
March 24th,
Today I shadowed Dr. Young in the clinic and saw patients with her. We saw many viral infections, like stomach flue and colds. We saw a man who was being given HIV treatment and saw he was doing well. A family came in with 3 children they had adopted for checkups, one of the little boys was HIV positive, but was being treated and doing well.
March 25th,
Today I started the morning working in the clinic with doctor Young, there are three doctors from the mission team we picked up the other day so they were also in the clinic. One of the doctors was going to shadow doctor Young for the day so I sat in he pharmacy and counted and packed children's vitamins for the day. The team needed them To hand out to kids they were seeing in the village clinics, I counted out over 8,000 pills! That took the whole morning so I didn't get a lot of clinic time but I was able to help the team and get things done so the clinic the next day would go more smoothly. That afternoon I went with the team out to a village about 45 minutes away. A few of the team worked with the kids for the rest of the day, some went out to widows homes and gave them things for living like blankets, clothes, food, etc, the third team ran a clinic for the day and saw over 250 patients. I was a part of this team and spent the day testing people for malaria. We would sterilize and poke their finger with a lancet to draw blood, then collect the blood and put it into the test with two drops of a liquid that made the test work. If a test had two lines in it, it showed that the person was positive for malaria and we sent them to get malaria medicine. If there was only one line they didn't have malaria and we sent them to a doctor to be further checked out. At least 80% of the 250 people were positive for malaria. I also spent a while taking and recording temperatures of people before they were tested, then sending them to the right place depending on how they were doing. One time while poking someone a big squirt of blood came out and squirted all over me, I cleaned myself really well but that was an interesting event! I learned after the clinic that close to 1,000 people came from the village we were in and surrounding villages, but we were only able to see 250 of them. Right now I am listening to a group of kids singing outside the wall surrounding the campus! I am going to the women's prison tomorrow to do more medical work.
March 26th,
Today I went to the prison in Lilongwe and helped run a clinic there to care for sick prisoners. There are around 2,500 men in the prison and about 50 women. The women's side is pretty nice as far as prisons go, the men's side however is rough. There is not enough room for all the prisoners to lay down at night so they take shifts sleeping, they are all so tightly packed that if one gets sick they all do. I spent the day poking people and doing malaria tests for the male prisoners, and helping to bandage wounds. We ran a 4ish hour clinic and saw 130 patients out of the 2,500 prisoners. It seemed like we saw a lot the very sick ones and were able to give them medicine and medical attention. After the prison we went out to a market and bartered for things with the people selling on the corner. I bought bags, earrings, and other things and spent probably an hour bartering for some of the things. Here there is no set price, you give a price and then they counter and try to get a ton of money out of you. I talked someone down from 30,000 kwacha to 9,000 kwacha!,not the best for what I got but I am proud of myself for getting things there, it's an experience, and now I know what to do next time I want I buy something from a market.
March 27th,
Today we went out to a small village called chamendenga And ran a medical clinic for the people living there. It was about an hour drive from ABC campus and we set up in two brick buildings at the center of the village. There were cows, donkeys, dogs, and people everywhere! Everyone crowed around the building waiting to get medical attention from all the doctors so we set up a system to keep the flow of people from getting too crazy. I taught people how to take blood pressures and did malaria tests all day with Meagan, a girl part of the missions team from California. About 60% of the people tested positive for malaria, not nearly as high as the other village we went to, but still a pretty high rate of malaria. Many of the people we tested were babies under 2 years old. There were a lot of children at the village, when we drove up they ran along the bus yelling 'azungu! Azungu!' Which means white person in Chichewa. We made funny faces with them and held their hands and talked to them as much as we could. We stayed at the clinic until it got dark at around 6pm, then I drove back to the campus in an audiogy bus/ambulance with a group of Malawian college students who spoke very fast Chichewa the whole time and laughed at inside jokes that I didn't know! It was really fun listening to them and how excited and loud they would get, eventually the guy sitting next to me let me in on the inside jokes and explained that they were making fun of the azungus trying to speak Chichewa! The team from California stayed the night in the village.
March 28th,
Today I woke up and went with mrs. Spencer and Charlotte to the markets to buy things for my family, and do shopping they needed to get done. We crossed the tiniest most sketchy bridge ever, it was made up of very thin pieces of wood nailed or piled into a from of 1ish inch in diameter sticks about 20 feet over a brown river! We then wove through the tiny gaps in tents in the big market, imagine every square inch of rough, trash covered ground filled up with vendors selling used clothing in big piles, various foods (with the smells), and other souvenir items, and then small pathway ditches cutting through the market where you can walk from one place to another. I loved it, it was super crazy with people constantly saying 'sister! Sister! Come look at what I have! You only need to look not buy! Looking is for free!' We went to a mans shop who the Spencer's go to a lot and I bough a pair of earrings, it was so cool to walk through the market and see what it was like, then we headed back over the little bridge and out of the market place. On the way to another market Esther (the youngest Spencer child of 5 and a half years old) told us some of her jokes! Here are a few:"Why didn't the skeleton cross the road? Because he was dead? No! Because because he had no life! Ahaha! Why didn't the bones cross the road? Because they had no feet? No! Because they, because of they were dead!" We then got to the market and I bartered for things to buy for people back home! After our morning of shopping I got on a bus with the team from California and drove 3 and a half hours to lake Malawi where we will be for the next few days. It is so beautiful here! The lake is gorgeous and the kids are adorable, we talked to them a bit when the bus got stuck in a big mud hole trying to get to the clinic we will be in tomorrow. We each are sharing little rooms to stay in for the next few days, and have a beach front view of the lake and can hear wakes crashing on the shore all night long! It is like I am on vacation!
March 29th,
Today I am at the lake, it is absolutely beautiful and time is flying by! We ran another medical clinic today in a village, I spent the morning in the pharmacy counting meds and doing other odd jobs. After lunch I began poking people again with the help of Danny, a 4th grade teacher at ABC. I also was able to help with pushing puss out of a mans swollen finger. We poked it with a big needle and then squeezed out greenish yellow milky puss out of his finger like a zit. It was great. There was not as high of a percentage if people with malaria. It seemed to show up the most in toddlers. We ended up having to turn people away at the end of the day. People began getting pretty aggressive towards the middle of the day, they all wanted to be treated, so we had to set up a system if closing the door and only letting a few people in at a time. This slowed down the process a but but we still saw a lot of people. At the the end of the day we told everyone we were leaving hoping that those who were very sick would stay behind and those who were not as sick would go home. We ended up treating a few more people this way and ended the day well. During this time other team embers went down to the lake and played with the kids there and got them on paddle boards an had a blast! We then ate dinner (I ordered a whole fish eyeballs and all) and headed to another village about a kilometer away and set up the Jesus film (a film about Jesus) to show the people in the area. We brought along glow sticks so when everyone was sitting down all we could see were glow sticks floating and clustered around a screen showing the film! It was a really cool thing to see. We got a lot accomplished today and will head back to ABC tomorrow.
March 30th,
Today we woke up and watched the sun rise over the lake, and then ate a breakfast of roasted mice....just kidding! We ate near the beach again and then headed to go to church with the people of the village we did a clinic in the day before. They had a choir singing and dancing for a lot of it, then their pastor and the team from California's got up and spoke about God. It was so cool hear everyone singing! They asked us to come up and sing for them towards the end of the service so our group came up and sang for the church! After the service we all went outside and talked with each other as much as we could, and played games with the kids. They then served us lunch of nsima, a white relish, and goat! It was very good and we all had a fun time. We then headed back to the huts near the lake to pack up and get ready to leave. Before we left one of the team members wanted to be baptized in the lake so we all got to be a part of that, we had the village kids all clustered around us holding our hands the whole time. we then got back on the bus and headed back to ABC just in time for pancake night where the power cut out in the middle of making pancakes! I love Malawi.
March 31st,
Today I spent the day doing everything I haven't done yet, and went gift shopping at the markets. we spent a good part of the day bartering for wooden carvings, cloth 'happy pants', and crazy paintings. while walking through the market I always heard people yelling to me, "sister! sister! Come and see what I have! looking is for free!" We headed back to the house and went swimming then went to the house for my last night there. I had a bag of gummy worms to give the Spencer kids, and Esther (the youngest child, five years old) decided she wanted some and no matter how high up I put them she found a way to pull them down and eat them! We had people over for dinner (like the Spencers do every night) and had a great night, and I said goodbye to everyone.
April 1st,
Today is my last day here. This morning I went to the grocery store with Mrs. Spencer and thought I had a stomach flu... it wasn't good. But then ended up getting better by the time I got on the flight. I packed all my things today and got ready to say goodbye and leave. Mrs. Spencer drove me to the airport where I got on South African airways flight and went to South Africa and then on to Atlanta, Albuquerque, and then Durango. it was a lot shorter of a flight than the one coming. I got off the plane and had really bad joint pain (a symptom of malaria) and thought I had malaria, so far though no malaria. I miss Malawi and cant wait to go back there as soon as I can and keep doing medical work over there.