…Free at last!

We are all finished!!!! Last Friday was our final day of orientation at Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe.  It has been an exhausting 6 weeks and we thank you so much for all your prayers and encouragement.   We will have to go back next week and finish some paperwork, but we hope to officially have our Malawi medical license very soon.  While the orientation was exhausting, overall it was an experience that will make us better clinicians.

It was helpful to observe the Malawi medical system, learn the processes and understand how it functions.  It was good to see what the standard of care is in Malawi and what services can and cannot be offered at one of their tertiary (huge central) hospitals.  With this knowledge we can better serve our community and continue to raise the standard of care so that our patients will have better outcomes in the future.

In the last blog post, we discussed a little bit about the first 3 weeks of our experience and orientation (CLICK HERE) and the last 3 weeks were just as interesting. For two of the weeks, I took care of patients in the Newborn Nursery/Neonatal ICU (NICU) while Jenny cared for patients in the General Medicine and Surgery wards.

One of the first things that I noticed was different about the NICU here is that it is literally 2 large rooms that are huge saunas.  Instead of using individual incubators for the preterm infants like we do in the States, they place multiple heaters in the room so that the whole room is kind of one giant incubator.  So for 2 weeks I spent everyday in a giant sauna in the middle of Africa, and I am pretty sure I just sweated all day and drank more water in those two weeks than I have ever drank before.

All of the infants in the Nursery/NICU are either preterm or term infants who are sick.  Most of the well infants go home without ever seeing a clinician, which is one of the many reasons the neonatal mortality is so high.  Many of the congenital abnormalities and sick infants are missed so when they are readmitted during the first week of life they are usually very ill.

In medicine, we often say things happen in 3’s.  Over 1 week in the nursery, 3 different babies were admitted for a rare and complicated anatomic anomaly, an imperforate anus. This means they do not have any way for poop to leave the body.  This can be corrected and complications can be avoided if it is diagnosed soon after birth.

One of the mothers was waiting with her baby before surgery and was very upset and worried about the upcoming procedure.  She said she had been praying that her baby would survive the surgery and be all right.  I explained through a translator that I couldn’t speak Chichewa but that I often pray over the babies in the nursery and offered to pray with her and for her child. She agreed, and we went to the Father in prayer.

The next day, the grandmother of the patient brought me a piece of cake to say thank you for praying for her grandchild.  Then later that week, another mother approached me in the nursery and asked me to pray for her baby, since I had prayed for all the other babies already. Of course I agreed and again went to the Father in prayer.

One of the hardest parts of my time in the nursery/NICU was the fact that unlike in the States where hospital stays for preterm and ill newborns often end in recovery and eventual discharge home, so many of our babies here are instead called home to the heavenly Father.  There is only so much that we can offer in the way of surgical intervention and medical support, even to the smallest and most precious of patients.

Now that we are back at Child Legacy full time, we have the chance to be apart of the clinic staff’s preparations for the addition of in-patient hospital care. There are so many forms to be created and protocols to establish and it is awesome to watch all the passion they are putting into creating a safe and healthy hospital for our community.  It is a privilege to be apart of the process and we are more than proud of our coworkers.  Their dedication and hearts for bringing glory to God in all they do were two major factors that lead us to serve here at Child Legacy.

As for the more personal things in our life, things are going well with Jenny’s pregnancy but we still do not know the sex of the baby and should find out in the next couple of weeks.  We did go to an OB-GYN in Lilongwe and were happy with the visit and the doctor.  We still do not know if we will have the baby in Malawi or back in the States, but we are praying about it and taking our time to decide.  Jenny is finally feeling the baby move around inside, but it will still be a few weeks until I can feels those “oh it’s gonna be a soccer player” kicks.  I cannot wait.

Please continue to pray for all 3 of us and our ministry of service here in Malawi.

Take Care,

Baptism in parking lot baptismal after church.

Edge of busy market, need a hubcap?

Seriously, this is real!

Moveable storage at Kamuzu.

Our least favorite left turn in Lilongwe at evening rush hour.

Leaving Kamuzu gate on our last day.

Frequent grocery stop on our way home.

The balloons are to advertise Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies.

Football made from trash bags wrapped together with string. Somehow it can bounce.

The city ran out of Coke Zero for 3 weeks. This is the day it came back. We decided to load up!

Our spare tire actually exploded while we our car was parked at Kamuzu. We are just glad we were not driving at the time.

We had never seen anything like it. It was a really old tire. Our new spare is not!

Most common way to transport huge quantities of anything. The hardest part is passing them on the highway into Lilongwe.