July 20-25:  A 35-minute airplane ride brought us to Blantyre and our first look at the city where we plan to spend the next year.  Upon arrival, I was told that the house that I will be living at is not yet ready, so I would be staying at the College of Medicine’s  guest house for about a week while my house is prepared.

The guest house is attached to the College of Medicine campus and the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, so it turned out to be about a 15 minute walk from my new office in the Ob/Gyn department there.  We were greeted by the friendly caretaker, Kingsley Afilu, who made sure that we were fed filling meals at least three times a day.  When I told him that I would like more vegetables and explained that I tried to not eat meat, he seemed truly perplexed but later treated me to a delicious meal of rice and beans.  He was delighted to pose for a photo for “all my friends back home” and told me “welcome to Malawi” as I was taking the photo, even though I had been staying there for five days.  He is a gracious host and an unselfconscious expert at hospitality.

Shelley Brandstetter and I were settled into the guesthouse and Kathy and Chris Beach were taken to an apartment nearby.  On Sunday afternoon, Dr. Luis Gadama, Dr. Gladys Gadama, and Dr. Priscilla Mvula drove us around for a highlight tour of Blantyre, focusing on the hospital departments, grocery stores, and businesses that we might need while we found our way around.   The usual transport for us and many people here is walking.   Many local people use minibuses (which are packed and very speedy!) for longer distances, but we were warned off the minibuses by our advisors, so we use the local taxi drivers after dark and for longer or large shopping trips.

Sunday night, Shelley and I met the other guesthouse guests: two medical students from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, doing a six-week rotation here in Malawi.  They were coming back from an enjoyable weekend at Lake Malawi and enthusiastically encouraged us to visit it.  One of the med students, Cathy Keegan, is doing research on the surgical outcomes of different groups of health care workers here.  (Later on, I learned that she had spent a year in Sacramento, California a few years ago, but had no memory of a place called Granite Bay.)

Kathy Beach is a Seed midwife, working to help organize and set up a midwife delivery unit here at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital and teach the midwifery students.  Her husband Chris likes to refer to himself as a “trailing dependent,” since that is how Seed refers to him, but he has been a Peace Corps volunteer and schoolmaster in Kenya, a perpetual student, a lawyer, and most recently, a psychotherapist and ethics professor.  While Chris is here in Malawi, he hopes to finish his book of poems and hinted that a poem may be written about any of us on the Seed team.  He celebrated his 70th birthday on July 24, during our first week on site, and we all went out to dinner to celebrate him and his adventurous life, our new home, and our friendship.

• Uncategorized