WAWA

Hello from Malawi!

My flight here was pretty uneventful, I made it so that was my first achievement! 11 hours to South Africa, 2 and a half to Malawi and then a four hour drive.

There is nothing here except hut after hut after hut after hut and the sheer number of people you see everywhere you go is just mind blowing, there is definitely no shortage of people in Africa. I am staying in a large and somewhat luxury volunteers house - at the moment there is about 12 of us, two just left and three more coming next Monday. There is a mixture of medical, teaching and sports coaching volunteers. Everyone is really nice, the age range is pretty wide, 17-60 I think,

I have so far worked at 3 orphanages, they are all very different but only one I would say are the kids taught well. They know English but only to chant numbers or letters, if you ask them a number outside of the chant they have no clue what we mean. It is almost an impossible task to single handedly educate and entertain 60+ children who don't speak English and can be aged 2 or 5. But it is better than nothing.

We have started work on the malaria prevention scheme which involves surveying whole villages, spraying their houses with Fendona and providing mosquito nets - in the first year of this prior to me being here they had a village with over 300 cases of Malaria and 18 or so deaths. After the treatments and six months, there were only 5 cases of Malaria and NO deaths - its pretty simple work, the spraying is exhausting in this heat, but that is such a huge impact! We have a long long long list of villages to get through, the last village had 206 houses in it and it took a whole day just to treat 11 houses this week and that was a good day!

We have HIV groups which I am yet to teach. It is hard to get people from the villages to these groups and therefore educated on prevention or treatment they mostly desperately need. There is such a huge stigma here surrounding HIV that no one will admit they have it.

The hospital face similar problems, we have no doctors and no equipment. People will not come to the hospital because they see it as a place to die. It is just horrible. Some of these people have easily treatable upsets but when left untreated for so long they have little to no chance of survival. Last week we managed to convince a man to let us take his wife to hospital, she had malaria and dysentery  she was so weak she could barely crawl out the door, yet he still insisted she was better off at home. He will not visit her there and the hospital cannot provide food so she will very likely die and then the fear will be instilled in his family forever more. We have however managed to buy 8 bicycle ambulances so we can at least make getting to hospital a bit easier if at all.

Getting around here is a nightmare, there is usually a good eight of us in a minibus heading off to different projects each morning. We quite often have to work for a good 30 minutes which through hot sand is not the most fun!

We also have a wound clinic that we hold in two different locations and we see some pretty hideous things! Mostly they are superficial injuries that have been left untreated and so end up engulfing an entire limb. This is run completely by volunteers so this is really helpful to the locals, it means they can get treatment without fear of having to go to hospital. We are so lacking in equipment that quite often we will have no choice but to dress something in an unsuitable type of dressing as it is better than leaving it gaping open...

It is not all doom and gloom though! The Malawian people are amazingly friendly. You can work past 100 people in two minutes and every single one will say hello, how are you, I'm fine, what is your name etc etc - it makes getting around a very slow process! The kids love us, they shout mazungu mazungu and ask for jambule jambule - which means ghost and take our pictuuuure! They have all their secondary school lessons in English so we HAVE to get them speaking it someway or another. It is so so hard.

Last weekend I went on a three day safari - we saw elephants and hippos and sable, lots of antelope type things and a buffallo. We stayed in an amazing lodge, it was like nothing I've ever seen and some of the views here just literally take your breath away. There are baboons everywhere here so you kind of get used to them! We have two dogs at the house, Simba and Benji and they are excellent guards!

We also went on a sunset cruise as one of the staff at the house has a boat. The sunsets here are just incredible - I am yet to see a sunrise although I am up at 6am everyday. We are all usually in bed by 9/10pm at the VERY latest, it is not quite like home!

The house staff are really great, they look after us so well and the food is so good. We have a driver called Gibson who is absolutely hilarious and he cracks me up as soon as he opens his mouth, his wife had a baby last night and named him after our project co-ordinator Mark which is pretty special for him!

So that is pretty much it for now really, I can't really remember what else I've done so far, there is so much, it feels like I have been here for so long! I will appreciate my ridiculously easy life back home so much now. I have hundreds of photos and will put them up when I get back home. Only three weeks left now.

I am most looking forward to having a HOT shower, wow, can't even imagine what that will be like, it is impossible to remain clean out here, my feet are a nice shade of black and will probably remain so until my third or fourth shower on UK soil!

Tionana!