My first post!

Dear family and friends,

Muli bwanje! I’m settling into life in Lilongwe after about three days of being here. The community that I’m surrounded by is fantastic. People are very helpful and friendly…..from the local people who are eager to teach me Chichewa to the doctors that are excited to help me expand my clinical knowledge to my roommates who make good gin and tonics for malaria prophylaxis …… I’m ready and eager to embrace the experiences that I’ll have in the next few weeks!

Getting here was a little complicated and involved a lot of waiting, sitting around and Dramamine. I had a sixteen hour layover in Frankfurt so I decided to venture out amidst the cobblestone streets. I had plans to check out some art museums but as my luck would have it, they were all closed! Too tired to do any shopping, I settled into a little cafeteria to try to make do with horrendous German cuisine. Aside from the raw hamburger patties atop buns of bread, I managed to find some fruit, rice, vegetables and beer which cost me a whopping $20 US dollars. After my costly feast, I headed back to the confines of the airport, eager to just sit around and work on my master’s paper and fiddle around in STATA! The next 12 hours at the airport were pretty uneventful aside from a friendly young gal and guy from Algiers who amused me with their stories from their 6 month hiatus in the Ukraine.

The next leg of my journey from Frankfurt to Joberg was bearable with the help of some Dramamine. As soon as I sat down in my seat, I was out. I didn’t realize it but our plane had taken off 45 minutes late which would be a problem for me in Joberg. Once we landed in Joberg, I had 30 minutes to make my next flight to Lilongwe. This was a practically impossible feat, one that I was willing to admit that I couldn’t tackle. Alas, I missed my flight to Lilongwe. To my dismay, I realized that I wasn’t in fact, superwoman. I spent the next 8 hours at the Joberg International airport trying to figure out how I would get to Lilongwe as flights only run every couple of days from Joberg to Lilongwe. Then there was the hassle of trying to track down my bags, one of which is still missing! It was only the perfect combination of my disheveled appearance, my apparent distress and my nervous smiles of desperation that guided my 8 hour course at Joberg International Airport.

After numerous phone calls, waiting and hounding various people, things were starting to look up. The high point of my time at the airport in Joberg was when I found myself waiting at the Swissport station, the station where baggage is tracked. There was a team of about 10 South African guys running around the airport trying to track my bags. They weren’t too thrilled to be running around the airport looking for my bags but they were excited to talk to me. It must have been my apparent distress and my nervous smiles. They were especially eager to learn that I was a med student and used the opportunity to ask me questions about HIV. They had good questions like how do ARTs work, what’s the difference between HIV-1 and HIV-2, etc. I was seriously very happy to be answering these kinds of questions and was have fun giving this mini lecture series! Who would have known that my first prevention counseling session would be at the airport! As if talking about HIV to this group that was genuinely interested in getting information wasn’t good enough, things got even better. Lufthansa was going to put me up in a nice hotel and I was finally booked on a flight from Joberg to Blantyre to Lilongwe the next day!

When I finally arrived in Lilongwe, I was ecstatic! The hot sun and the humidity were enough to make me smile from ear to ear. But once I got off of the plane there was someone waiting for me, holding up a sign that said Ms. Sima Pendharkar. A driver there to pick me up with no waiting time involved! Although the drive to UNC Project was beautiful with rolling fields and farms the lack of greenery was a little surprising. In 1993, a major drought in Malawi had destroyed nearly half of the corn crops. Even today, malnutrition among children is a major problem that has devastating consequences like delayed growth, mental retardation and infection due to weakened immunity.

As we headed to the guest house where I would be staying, I tried to make mental snapshots of what I saw. Women walking alongside the road carrying loads of grain on their heads with children hanging off their back in cloth gurneys, other children trailing behind them in scant clothing, men bicycling down roads with no shoes on.

I was eager to learn more about the country and its people yet nervous about the challenges that lay ahead in the coming weeks. Would I be able to relate to these people? Would they trust me? Even though I’d spent the last few years studying hard and learning as much as I could, I would still have vast amounts of new information to tackle as the cases I would be seeing here are unique to the setting.

Armed with the firm belief that individuals can provide the impetus to move things and to transform dreams into reality, enthusiasm for opening my mind to this new culture and a passion for the knowledge that I would acquire over the next few weeks, I welcomed this journey with open arms.