Malawi Blog 6

Just when we thought we understood how far out a remote village was we found out that there are villages even farther out that we thought possible.  The road to this village was challenging for a vehicle and yet we saw many people commuting on foot to the larger city of Dowa to trade and barter for agricultural products they had grown.

When we arrived at the James Village we were greeted by scores of children chanting a welcome.  They ran from their school while it was in session and their teachers had to round them up and escort them back to school.

On this day we were working with the local government clinicians who had a different process for seeing patients than we had previously experienced but within fifteen minutes we had found a rhythm and by days end we had seen 433 patients and filled some kind of prescription for every one of them.

We saw a lot less malaria today because this village was high up in the foothills and did not have as much habitat for mosquitoes to breed in.  The government brought a dentist who pulled infected teeth and prescribed antibiotics for the patient.

Once school let out kids were everywhere.  To keep them entertained while we finished up filling all the prescriptions we sang songs and took silly videos on our phones for them to watch back.  They laughed and laughed at every video we made of them.

At the very end of they day as we were closing up shop we saw several boys with bad cases of ring worm that had not been seen by the doctors.  Even though we were packing up our clinicians stopped and examined the kids and our pharmacy filled prescriptions and talked with the mothers about how to treat this infection to give the boys some relief.

The drive back to our hotel took us through a refugee camp with over 40,000 refugees who mostly came from the Democtmratic Republic of Congo.  The tents and shacks went on for miles. There were so many people packed into such a small area.  It caused a lot of reflection for all of us as we passed through this crowded area.

Tomorrow we are back with the government again.  Looking forward to hearing the laughs of all the children again.