Official Visits

Hello everyone,
I am writing this once again in the dark. It seems that we are going to have to get used to a nightly ritual of losing power for a couple of hours. We are growing quite used to the candle light - in fact we are more familiar with its soft glow than the sharp brightness of a light bulb. I wanted to take the time, however, (since I have so much of it) to write up a little bit of what we have been doing in the past day or so.
I did not write this earlier, but yesterday we were taken on an extensive visitation tour of Ntcheu. We began the day going to Ntcheu Hospital. Let me just say this, pray for us that we will not have to go there over the next couple of weeks. The hospital is split into wards - the pediatric, labor and delivery, female, male, contagious diseases, and HIV/AIDS. We had the unique opportunity of walking through all of the areas of the hospital. Each ward is simply one big room with rows of hospital beds. The first two rows are the critical patients, the second two rows are the upgraded patients, and the last rows are the chronically ill patients (diarrhea for example). The only thing separately the critically ill patients and the rest was a half wall.
The hospital was packed, and the nurse said that they did roughly 20 deliveries a day. They tried walking us through the contagious diseases area, but I tried my best to not enter the room. The nurse who showed us around said that most of the cases were TB cases, which is a big problem in Africa. Children now are getting the vaccination shots, but parents never had them. Our last stop in the hospital was the HIV/AIDS clinic. We walked into a packed room of probably 20 people sitting around waiting. Little did we know was that all 20 were waiting for their immunity boosting drugs. We spoke with the head nurse in the hospital who told us that the hospital is only given enough medicine to for 50 cases a month. She said that they had stopped putting people on the waiting list in June because they had already fillled the list for August with over 200 people. She said that they do hundreds of tests every month throughout the district. Many people are getting tested now to find out their status because they are finding out the test is free.
The hospital also provides counseling to those that test positive, trying to get them to make the right decisions so as to not spread the disease any further.
This leads us into our second stop - SOM's HIV/AIDS Therapy Clinic about ten minutes outside of Ntcheu. This clinic is the first of its kind in the district because it will be distinctly for children. It will be a boarding house for children who have tested positive for HIV/AIDS.
Lonely, the HIV/AIDS coordinator, will live on sight in houses built for staff. They will also do testing and counseling there as well, and they hope after Lonely has gone through the government training to be able to provide some immunity boosting drugs at the clinic as well. The clinic will be an amazing service to the communities/villages in the area. They will come from many km's away to reach this clinic.
For the rest of the day on Monday and the beginning of Tuesday we spent our time being introduced to important people in the district government. We met the commissioner of the hospital, the district commissioner (like the Mayor of Holland but covering a much larger area), the district education commissioner, the district social services commissioner, and the chief of police. Naomi was our guide for all of these appointments, and we appreciated the opportunity to meet with so many officials. We wish we would have had more time to plan ahead on what questions we would ask, but it was nice to have them know who we are and why were are here. The education commissioner was especially interesting to speak with as he provided a lot of insight into the education system in Malawi. The education situation is not good right now, and the commissioner is the first to admit that children who graduate from secondary school now and those that graduated 15 years ago did not receive equal educations. He says that those are that graduate today are in a much worse situation than those from years ago. Perhaps one of the interesting points that he mentioned was the fact that they are losing large numbers of teachers every year. He said that part of it is because the last president stopped the teacher colleges (for some unknown reason), part of it is because teachers are switching occupations to a position that will pay better (government teachers start out making about 1,000 kwacha per month or $7.50), and part of it is because they are losing on average 3 teachers per month to death (most often because of complications with HIV/AIDS). To give you a brief idea, though, as to how the education system works in Malawi, let me describe the structure. All students can receive a free education through Standard 8 (8th grade). Then at the end of 8th grade they take a test to see where they will place into Secondary School. If they test really well, they will be sent to a National Secondary School somewhere in the country where they will be boarders. If they test at the second tier, they will go to a District Secondary School where they will also be boarders. If they test at the lowest tier, they are sent to an area Secondary School where they will commute to school. The average cost for those that board is 7,000 kwacha a term. But only 500 kwacha goes to the government to pay for tuition costs. So with that amount of money, one can imagine how good the textbooks, technology, and teaching quality is for most schools.
We are learning to adjust to life here in Ntcheu. We are told that we should get used to not having power every other night for about two hours. We moved to a bigger room in our Chando Hostel, and we bought a two burner electric hot plate. We can now make popcorn for a nightly snack, which makes us both excited. We also boiled water for coffee this morning, so we are trying to make the best of our living situation. Once you see pictures, you will understand why we say "make the best of it". We will not have hot water for every shower we realized. We will just have to enjoy the warmth when we get it. We are also realizing that sometimes winter in Malawi really is winter.
Yesterday was very cold (50s), and last night the wind howled through our porous windows. If we come back to Malawi again, we will make sure that we bring warmer clothing!
We hope that you are all doing well and pray for you constantly. We are so thankful for all of your love, support, and encouragement. Thanks for taking the time to read my long emails. I know that they are probably a bit too long, but there is so much to describe that it would take pages upon pages to fully paint the true picture.
(We tried sending this message yesterday, but it did not work. SO you are all getting this a day later than we wanted. We will write more
later.)
Blessings,
Nate and Bekah