The little engine that could...

Remember that story? "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." That was how today felt. Read on...

A quick note to bring everyone up to speed on the new visitors: this past Wednesday a girl named Johanna arrived from Australia. She has just finished her final exams from 4th year medical school and will be working with me in Malawi for the next 2 months. She's a really interesting person with lots of very cool life experiences- she was born in Austria, lived for a few years in Germany, then moved to Columbia where she spent most of her childhood, currently lives in Australia while her family lives back in Germany and South Africa. She also lived in Peru for a bit of time as well. She is an avid rock climber in Australia, and just started to do some gymnastics in order to increase her strength and endurance for climbing. She's been great, and quite a trooper. The past few days have been far from easy.

So, this morning we left the house at 5:15 and headed out to round up the troops. With a few small glitches (passed a nurse waiting for us at one place and waited for her for 20 minutes at another place, almost had engine failure in the Hilux, etc) we headed out for Chamba health center. Chamba is a bit far away, about 2 hours driving or so from Blantyre. We turned down the dirt road and proceeded a short distance before meeting our first baracade - a 2 ton truck stuck in the mud going nowhere. Okay, turn around - back down the dirt road, back to the paved road, and down another dirt road. About 15 minutes into that, we find the road is literally broken. Completely unpassable, strike 2. We have strike 3, and 4, and finally we are directed down a very shady looking road. LOTS of water, mud everywhere and to top it off, a maize field. We were literally driving with maize plants pouring into our car window as we passed. Clearly not a place of a vehicle, but we made it and it opened out to the middle of a soccer field. Off we went to the clinic, 5 hours after we left the house.

What next? Every woman from 9 villages with all of her children. And enormous, ominous rain clouds. Somehow, the stars must have aligned in our favor. Even though we didn't finish seeing all the moms until late in the afternoon (we finally got home after 8pm - talk about a long day), the health workers really kept the moms organized and calm while we screened and evaluated each and every child. Johanna taught me to palpate the spleen and we saw tons of kids with splenomegaly, something you apparently hardly every see in the West.

On the drive home, we dropped a patient at the hospital who was suffering from severe anemia and clearly needed a blood transfusion. After that, we passed a large crowd of people who all looked very distressed, their bikes strewn across the paved road. We ended up reversing up the road to find out that an ESCOM (Malawi's electricity company) truck had hit a cyclist and didn't stop. So we drove this man to the police station and hospital (he had a broken wrist only), before finally heading back towards Blantyre.

Phew...what a day!

-dkm