Due to the novel Coronavirus pandemic, we were evacuated from Malawi on March 19 and, after 50 hours of traveling, I arrived back in Roseville, California late March 20.
I’m still trying to process my feelings about evacuating and leaving my teaching and the students and colleagues that I loved. Until I can better express those feelings, I wanted to share some of my photos from the last few months of living in Malawi:

A large moth.

A large spider.

A lesson about postpartum hemorrhage. The med students were practicing suturing B-lynch sutures with styrofoam block “uteruses.”

A selfie with Dr. Luis Gadama, the Department Head of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department of of the College of Medicine of the University of Malawi.

Piles of hard candies for sale, gleaming in the sun.

The man and woman who were selling the candies insisted that I take their photo, too, when I asked to photograph their candies.

Housewares and loofahs for sale, piled high on a bicycle. I like to think of this as the Malawian equivalent of a Fuller Brush salesman.

During a video conference call on the evening of March 13, I was told to start packing for our eventual evacuation. Early the next morning, we took off for an already-planned day trip with our Peace Corps friends to Huntingdon House, which is a tea and coffee plantation about 1.5 hours south of Blantyre. Our trip was a bittersweet reminder of the beauty of the Malawian countryside that we were preparing to leave.





