Two weeks has gone very quigly and haven`t had time to write our blog before. After coming back from Malawi we vent to the cancer diseses hospital. It was very nice to notice that cancer diseases hospital was very modern, clean and the nurses there knew what they were doing. Tutoring there was much better than at UTH. Hospital was built in 2007 and it`s only cancer diseases hospital in Zambia. Before that Zambians had to go to South-Africa or somewhere else to get the radiation. Hospital is only for outpatients and the patients who are referred from other hopitals come to see the doctor who plans the treatment for the cancer and then the patients start to come to the hospital to get the treatment like chemotherapy, brachytherapy and radiation. If we had known that the hospital was so good we would have stayed there longer than week, but we had planned to go to Kafue next week.

We went toKafue, which is village near Lusaka, with group of locan nursings students. Pippa stayed in centre of Kafue with half of the group and she was working at Nangonwe klinic. They vaccinated babies, weight babies and they attented materity training classes and for one day they went to rural area to same things for those who are not able to come to the clinic. Paula went to Shanyaya with rest of the group to work at very small rural clinic. There was only one nurse and midwife working there and no doctors at all. Nurse screened all the patients and prescriped medicen. Most of the patients had malaria or diarrhea. On Friday nurse didn't show up so student were working there own their own.

We were staying with local student so all week we only eat sambian food for example nsima, potato and pumpkin leaves, kapentas which are small dried fishes, catepillars, fried chicken and beef and very salty boiled wegetables. There we a lot of huge cockroaches and lizards. And in the place Paula was staying there weren't running water in the house they had to carry the water from the well.The outdoor toilet was only hole in the ground and the ”shower” was a hay hut. Most the people in that village lived without electricity in the clave huts.

On Saturday Pippa and Anja came to Paula and rest of the croup up from Shanyanya and the children there went crazy when they saw three white girsl. They wanted us to take photos of them and touch our hair and skin. It's not very common to see whites in the very rural area. We think that they were really cute.

Somebody asked about the language proplems. I think that at the beginning we had more language proplems than we have now. The most difficult thing here is to speak professional english. Our medical vocabulary isn't that good but it's getting better and we have learned a lot. On the freetime it's much easier to speak English and also speaking with people who we know well is easier because the accent here is quite strong and sometimes when we meet new people it takes little while to get use to her/his accent.

We miss home but because we have bee very busy here so we have't had time to think home so much. Sometimes hits very bad but luckily we have phones and we go to the internet cafe couple times a week. At the beginning it was worse than it's now. We have already been here 7 weeks and it has gone quickly so know that we will be back home soon anyway.

Now we have finnished our practical placement in long term care. This week we started working at neonatal ICU more about that next week.

6.4.2009

Back home from Malawi now. Third Finnish student Anja (or Anna as we call her here, because her name means poo in Nyanja which is the most spoken tribe language in Lusaka area) from Helsinki came here two week ago and we went Malawi with her. Anna had to do research for her final project but for us it was just holiday!

We went there by bus which was meant to leave at 10 o’clock but finally it left 4 hours late, because busses here won’t leave until they are totally crowded with people and stuff. And that’s how our “lovely” bus trip to Lilongwe started. African music was playing very loud all of the way to Lilongwe and spaces were very tight so it wasn’t really possible to sleep. It took 14 hours to get there and we arrived in Lilongwe bus station at two in the morning. Once we got there we didn’t have any local money and our phones stopped working after crossing the border, but luckily one nice lady borrowed her phone and we could call the lift to student hostel where we were staying.

We stayed in Lilongwe for three nights. On Friday we went to zoo and shopping in town. Saturday morning we left for Lake Malawi. Bus trip took almost twice as long as we expected. Finally we arrived at Kande beach. It was ours paradise! The water was clear blue and place was very beautiful. We hired a pedal boat and a canoe and we went to the island to have an adventure. On Sunday we went horse riding with our new South-African friends and in the evening we got drunk with them. 

Everything comes to and end, so did our trip in Kande beach. On Tuesday afternoon we headed for MzooZooZoo, which is back packers hostel in the town Mzuzu. We stayed there night. Our new South-African friends were there too. We had a fun time and in the morning we had to go back to Lilongwe.

The student hostel where we were staying was quite different and we were staying in the same corridor with the local students. They played music starting at six a.m. in the morning and ending no earlier than at twelve.

Early in the morning on Friday we started our journey back to Lusaka. Surprisingly the bus left only 5 minutes late and we were back to Lusaka quite early in the evening. We had some problems at the border and we had to bribe the passport control officer to let us out of Malawi.

Back to reality. On Monday we started a practice in the cancer disease hospital which we write about more in our next blog.

If you want to read more about zambia, here is link to Anja's blog.

http://anjasmith.wordpress.com