Week 2

So surprise surprise the second week begins with the usual transport disaster!

My ‘truck’ picked me up nice and early, 8 am from the hotel in Lilongwe ready to embark on the 5 hour journey up to Rumphi. About an hour into the journey I questioned why they had sent a truck to collect me- it was then that we realised that it was to carry all my furniture for my empty house up from Liliongwe! So we had to turn all the way back to then spend another 2 hours loading up, from a dusty shed, old, used dining table and chairs, a bed and mattress and sofa onto the truck. We finally got on our way with my whole life plus a couple of Malawians, who wanted lifts, on the back of the truck. 2 hours into the journey what happens? A flat tyre. Joy. But when that was sorted, and I thought we were  finally on our way, oh no, it turns out that it is quite a useful time for the driver to run some errands such as – spend 1 hour in the bank, try and buy planks from the side of the road and collect a bed from another district. Along with travelling at no more than 70kph because the tyres were all bald we finally made it at 8pm by which time it was pitch black- no street lights of course! And I’d had no lunch so you can imagine how weak and irate I was by that point!

Marianne, the other VSO doctor, who’s brilliant, met me at my house and showed me around- it looks very cute from the outside and blue and white striped! But the inside looked like a barn with walls and no ceiling. And there are a lot of bugs!! Cockroach count 4 so far and I’ve killed them all with ‘DOOM’! So I guess I expected to live in impoverished conditions but when I was confronted with it it was a real shock that I really was going to be living in a small village in Malawi with only very basic amenities. Arghh! We moved in the furniture, well as much as we could, because the bed wouldn’t fit through the door! Kindly Marianne let me stay round her house that night and the next 2 nights in fact! Until I had a bed.

The next day Marianne showed me round Rumphi. It’s a pretty little village set between mountains which means it gets really windy (I  feel like my house is going to blow down!) and it’s very dusty and hot at the moment so my feet end up being ‘tanned’ after about 5 minutes of walking around.  It actually has more things than I expected: 2 banks, several little shops selling pots and pans and household wares and a place they call a ‘peoples trading centre’ or PTC which basically looks like a shop you would see during the war with products being sold with the labels on indicating exactly what was inside with big letters. It also sells bread but hasn’t since I’ve been here because the bread maker has broken and sometimes you can get cornflakes. Unfortunately there’s no where to get meat unless you want to off the street with flies all over it and no cheese so I’ll have to eat lots of nuts to keep my protein content up- saying that I haven’t seen any nuts on sale either.

There’s a nice market which little wooden shacks selling essentially the same thing but also some tomatoes, onions, bananas and dried fish.

It’s very poor; most people live in brick or wooden shacks without electricity particularly in the rural villages and cook on charcoal, the dust gets all over peoples clothes of which they have very few and they’re usually torn and have no shoes, most families live off less than £10 a month and there are many mouths to feed as families want to have many children, to work in the fields, and there’s very little family planning. There are soo many babies- so cute wrapped around on the back of the mum while she is also carrying wood/water/ washing on her head. It’s the dry season now and last years rainy season was not good so people are getting desperate for the rains to come so that they can grow their crops again to survive.

I’ve also met some of the other volunteers, Rina a lab tech who lives with Marianne, who’s really lovely, Stephen from Uganda and Wilson from Kenya who were my absolute saviours the next day!

I was really overwhelmed with everything and all the stuff I had to do- it’s like moving into a new house in England which is empty, buying stuff for it, letting elec, water companies know that you’ve moved in etc etc but instead in remote Africa where everything takes so long and it’s so hot!

It began with an attempt to treat my mossi net but then finding there was no tablet of insecticide, to then attempting to boil some water to sterilise my water filter and discovering I had the wrong plug on the electric hot plates. If it wasn’t for Stephen and Wilson finding me in my house looking bemused about what I was going to do next then god knows what I’d have done. They brought round my fridge, had some carpenters come and make me some shelves at local price not ‘mzungu’ price, changed my plug on my cooker and helped me open a bank account! It’s really nice that the volunteers  support each other out here and there seems to be a good network across the whole country and in fact a national conference in a few weeks time. I also managed to get a couple of beds from the hospital store room one of which didn’t fit in the car so a few locals carried it to my house for me! One woman had a baby on her back- I did feel slightly guilty about that!

Marianne has also shown me round the hospital! It’s actually bigger than I thought. There’s a female ward, male ward, TB, maternity and paediatric wards and they have an outpatients, antenatal care, orthopaedic/physio area and a place where they can make things for disabled people and an HIV clinic. There is a measles outbreak across the country at the moment and they have a tent for people to be in isolation which gets pretty hot at midday! But there is also a theatre with air conditioning! Although very basic like something you might see in a museum at home. They also have one XRay machine and an ultrasound too. Since I was assigned they’d also managed to get one Malawian doctor 3 weeks ago and a dutch doctor who works with the UN. So relieved that there is help at hand! I think I may be allocated to female ward which currently has 24 beds but there were 2-3 patients per bed and lying on the floor too. And there is no doctor for paediatrics so I may be doing that too, as well as some anaesthesia. Resources are pretty bad- there’s no paracetamol and they’ve run out of condoms, not great if you’re trying to promote prevention of HIV spread.

I’m getting there with cleaning and furnishing my house now, after a trip to Mzuzu, the nearest city- I use that word loosely as it’s actually just 2 roads of shops essentially selling the same sort of things! But very exciting I got to buy some chicken and some cheese and chocolate spread for a serious amount of money! Everything here is actually quite expensive as it all needs to be imported!

My next task is varnishing my kitchen bench, washing my used bed sheets from the market, which then need to be ironed because of the Tumbu fly which lays eggs in the material which then infest my skin!, finish mopping my house and making my curtains! Never thought I’d become this domesticated did you?! And also so resourceful- nothing is getting thrown away- my left over dinner goes to my guard! Feels really wrong but otherwise he doesn’t have anything!

I’ve also managed to be a bit of a tourist in amongst my home sorting! Went to the Vwaza marsh national park and saw loads of elephants and hippos! It’s the dry season so they all go down to the lake to drink and it was easy to spot them, so beautiful but did get attacked by tsetse flies, hopefully won’t get sleeping sickness!

Anyway I think that’s enough for this week! My next update will be about my first week in the hospital -arghh!!  I hope everyone is well at home. I’ve managed not to get the shits yet but you’ll be the first to know if I do!