Today marks the half way point in my 6 month stay in Malawi. I can hardly believe that I’ve been here for 3 months--it‘s gone by so fast! I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to have running water (we’ve been without it for almost 2 months now!) or processed foods or what it‘s like to drive on the right side of the road. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like to go back to “regular” life in the U.S after experiencing life here.
Soko, one of the widowers in our widows ministry, was admitted into the hospital on Wednesday. He had been very sick for a few days, and the hospital put him IV fluids. On Thursday Cindy and I went to visit him and see if he needed anything. Cindy has been there on several occasions with our widows and orphans, but it was my first experience with the Malawian hospital. It was slightly horrible, to say the least. The stench of sickness hit me like a wall the moment we stepped into the hospital, and it only got worse when we got to the actual ward holding patients. The ward is one large open-air room with separate segments that hold 4 patients each. There wasn’t a fan, A/C, or even much of a breeze going through the ward, so the air was uncomfortably hot and smelled of…just sickness. They don’t have any of the machines you would typically see in a hospital that tracks their vitals. They don’t even provide the patient with soap or water to wash themselves with. The apathetic nurses just sit in their break room doing nothing. Cindy went into their break room and asked the nurse about the condition of Soko, and it took her awhile to just figure out who Soko was. The nurse decided to get Soko’s clinician so that we could talk to him instead, where we found out that the attending clinician wasn’t aware of some serious developments in Soko’s condition.
When we visted Soko on Thursday, there was a man on the bed next to him that literally looked like he could die at any moment--his entire family was gathered around his bed just watching him. Cindy guessed that by the looks of him he was dying from HIV/AIDS. He couldn’t have been older than 35. When Cindy and I went to visit Soko during lunch today, we entered the hallway to the ward and I could hear people wailing. Some of them were chanting, crying, or praying, but the wailing was the most disturbing. Cindy told me that someone had just died, and the family was accompanying the body to the morgue. We immediately thought of the man who was next to Soko, and when we entered the ward and saw the now empty bed our suspicions were proved correct.
Soko will probably get the help that he needs at the hospital if only because Cindy is so persistent in making sure that the clinicians are doing their jobs as far as our patient is concerned, but it really hurts to know that the apathy of these health care works are basically killing people that don’t have to die. I really pray that all of the patients in that hospital will get the help and care that they need.
(Picture of Malawian ambulance! ^^^)
The rainy season is starting to set in, which means that I’ll have spent half of my time here in the dry season, and half in the rainy. It’s still pretty brown and dry, but once it starts raining regularly the Malawians say it’ll get green very fast! I’m not really sure what to expect in the means of how much rain we‘ll experience or how the conditions of the dirt village roads that we travel so frequently will be. We’ve been having rainstorms more frequently, and almost every time our power and/or internet goes out. But if it means that we’ll have running water in our house, I think it might be worth it!
The repair on the roof over the girl’s dormitory is slowly progressing. With the weather being the way it is, I think it’ll be finished just in time. We’ve received the materials from the German orphanage and we hired a carpenter who has a reputation of doing good quality work. We’re hoping that the work will be completed within the next week!
The kids are all doing so well! I had a mini project last week of taking new pictures of all the kids for their profiles on PureMission.org. I have to say that Enelesi’s picture is the cutest! I love that little girl so much =)
We found a package of marshmallows in our pantry the other day, and we thought it would be fun to do a marshmallow roast with the kids!
No one at Esther’s House had ever seen or heard of marshmallows!! I’m a really horrible marshmallow cooker--I never have the patience to brown the marshmallows, so I usually just set them on fire and then blow it out. Apparently no one liked my marshmallows so I let Bruce take over for me, and it turns out he’s a natural! They were so perfectly roasted, it’s incredible.
Cindy and I were invited by our friend Patrick, who works at the hospital, to what he called a “dance party” and dinner. It turns out that what we thought of as a dance party is very different from what Malawians call a dance party! We met at a small soccer ground in our Madzanje village, and walked over to Patrick’s hut where we ate a traditional Malawian dinner, in the dark, on bamboo mats outside. We had boiled sweet potatoes, pumpkin greens, beans, and nsima.
For the dance party, it turns out that Patrick arranged for the traditional Angoni tribal dancers to perform. It was the same group of dancers that performed at Esther’s House in August, but it was a very different experience to see them at night with the whole village joining in on the dance. It seems that children are trained at a young age how to do the Angoni dance, and for the life of me I could not figure out the rhythm (to the amusement of all the Malawians that watched me attempt to join in). There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to the steps, and I finally stopped because my horrible dancing was drawing too much attention!
