This Africa trip is made up of four parts. The first was seeing my friends (the Millers) who live in Malawi with my friend Steph and then traveling with Steph to Victoria Falls. the second is spending five weeks volunteering at the clinic my friend works at, the third is traveling around Malawi for about a month with my sister, and the fourth is stopping in England on my way back to the States to see a friend I worked with at summer camp years ago. The second part of my trip started about two weeks ago when I started volunteering.
ABC (aka African Bible Colleges) is an organization that has three colleges throughout Africa (they are also in Liberia and Uganda also), and at their campus in Lilongwe, Malawi, there is a medical clinic. Prior to coming to Malawi, I contacted them to see the feasibility and possibility of volunteering as a nurse, and they were more than happy to have me. The clinic consists of three parts, the community side, the private side, and the ward. The community side is a clinic that is run for the poorer Malawians and a place for the government and NGOs to do community vaccinations and clinics. Because I have not been there, I can’t really say much more than that. The private side is for people who have medical insurance or can self-pay for their care. The ward is the in-patient part of the clinic for patients who need more care than a doctor’s appointment or one time treatment.
I have been helping in the private side of the clinic and it has been an experience. What happens is patients will be seen by the doctors and go to the “treatment room.” This is a cross between an ER and an urgent care because patients who are acutely sick, say with a high fever, active vomiting, or another medical issue where treatment should not be delayed, will be brought there immediately. Patients also got there after doctor appointments to receive their prescribed treatment. This means this area is busy, has a lot of people moving through it throughout the day, and has challenging needs. I have been helping in the treatment room and triaging patients. The work is not glamorous and sometime slow but it is challenging because of the language issues that present (a good subsection of Malawians speak only Chichewa, the other national language, and not English), cultural issues, and not knowing exactly how the clinic works.
Outside of ABC, I have had four opportunities to spend time in the villages, and these days were more exciting and what I like to do. One afternoon was an epilepsy clinic in Lilongwe. An organization runs bimonthly clinics for patients to receive continual treatment and also for new patients to be diagnosed and receive treatment. It was heartbreaking because many of the patients also had developmental issues or severe complications from malaria. My other opportunities were to help with clinics done an American ER doctor, Dr. Ivey, who spends 2-3 months in Malawi doing clinics in the villages, or bush, every year.
Three times this last week I went outside of Lilongwe with Dr. Ivey. We went to two villages and a the youth prison. The first day was to Mlombwa which is at least an hour and a half away with half of that time on deeply rutted roads. The second day was to Chinsapo which is only about 30 minutes away but you have to cross a makeshift bridge to get there. The third day was at the juvenile prison about an hour away. Each of these days we saw between 100-150 patients, and I helped triage, take vital signs, and do rapid malaria tests. I really enjoyed these three days because it was something different than the clinic. It also allowed me to get out into the countryside to see how Malawians who don’t leave near a tarmac road live, and realize how isolated they can be when the dirt roads turn to mud and become inaccessible in the wet season.
I don’t have any pictures for this post because I haven’t been taking any. I will take some and hopefully post some during the week.
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