A Weekend in Limbe and Blantyre

     
          Last weekend I was in Limbe and ventured into BCA village again.  This time I met Ruthie who took me deep into the village through winding narrow dirt paths with haphazardly scattered houses, stagnant pools and stream filled with plastic bags and some garbage, probably ideal homes for mosquitoes.  We were soon tailed by a group of children.  She passed by her mother’s home and finally her own house which consisted of two dark, dingy rooms with only a very small window for the backroom, her bedroom. There was no back door.  The front room was filled with her kitchen utensils, the bedroom had a twin bed with no mattress, and along the wall was stashed piles of clothes.  She lived there with her three children ages three to eight, her husband passed away three months ago at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital of malaria.  The house had no latrine and she shared her mother’s.  There was no electricity or running water, she had to get her water in a communal pipe.  She pointed to BCA Hill where she cleaned house for a man who paid her 2500 kwacha a week, about $6 US. She took me out of the village via a back route and I shook her rough hand as we parted.

BCA Village

The Children and Me at Ruthie's House

          

Ruthie at Her Bedroom

          Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre has both the paying and non-paying sections, cleanliness, crowding and privacy mark the difference between the two.  Overall it is one of the cleaner hospitals I have seen in Africa.  In the non-paying section, the nursery was packed, mothers sat besides the bassinets where their babies slept. The wards had beds placed close to one another reminiscent of the old Boston City Hospital where I did my Infectious Disease Fellowship.  I chanced upon a neurology ward with six hydrocephalus children; heads so huge that some of them were weighted down by them.  My first hydrocephalus baby I saw was in Cook County Hospital in Chicago when I was a medical student.  The teenage mother did not realize that her baby’s growing big head was abnormal, presuming that it indicated the degree of intelligence of her child.

Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital

Male Ward

Hydrocephalus Child

Me and a Hydrocephalus Child

          I walked across a street to the campus of the University of Malawi, College of Medicine; it looked very clean and new.  Makarere University in Kampala cannot compare with this campus. This is probably all built with donation money.  One wonders when Malawi will get out of the need for donor’s aid.

College of Medicine

That same weekend Erin invited me to spend a long afternoon and evening with a group of fifteen Americans for a Thanksgiving dinner.  I went to Blantyre Market to buy fixings for a salad.  We were from all over the place but at least three of us came from Massachusetts.  There were Peace Corps/Medical people, logisticians, teachers, counselors from different organizations and had stayed in Malawi from a few months to several years.  It was good to feel like being home away from home and among friends.