Training is now finished for starting cervical cancer screening and prevention at Kindle’s Katawa Community Clinic. This is a photo of the team from Kindle along with the first woman to benefit from the new instrument.
Penny being trained to use the new cold coagulator for prevention of cervical cancer. She will help to train people at Kindle later this month.
After months–actually years–of planning, preparation, and application, we can finally begin distributing anti-retroviral drugs for HIV care at Kindle. Up until now we’ve only been able to provide HIV testing and counseling on-site. Then we have been loading people into a truck and driving them to town to pick up their monthly allotments of medicine.
I’m getting ready to leave Kindle in the hands of a new director, Joseph Kandiyesa, so I’m starting to get nostalgic about my time at Kindle. About half the staff works at Katawa Community Clinic, where over 150 patients are seen every day. Here you can see the patients filling the porch and sitting in the shade outside, waiting their turns.
I woke up late this morning, almost 6:00, to hear one of my neighbors calling “Odi” outside of my house. That’s how you call attention to the fact that you’ve arrived. No doorbells. And knocking would be rude, used only as a last resort. You stand in the yard outside the house calling “Odi…..Odi-odi…..Odi!…..ODI!” until somebody answers. Continue reading “A Day in the Life”
Joyce Banda, the President of Malawi, spoke to the UN General Assembly earlier this year. Reading what she has to say is an encouraging reminder of why we do what we are doing in Malawi. Two of the things that Kindle focuses on are affordable health care for everyone in our area and making it possible for orphans and vulnerable children to attend secondary school. President Banda mentions these two things as key needs in Malawi.
Read what she has to say here on CNN.com.
Yesterday we bade farewell to three women who were here working us for the last six weeks. One of the things that they did for us was to put together this video about Kindle Orphan Outreach:
Thank you, Callie, Kelsey, and Megan!
In the span of one week, I saw two malnourished babies who exemplified the horrible results of untreated mastitis in rural Malawi. This is a condition that can easily be treated, but due to cultural mores and lack of education, the women did not access care immediately. These women will probably lose their breasts, and their babies have lost important early nutrition. Continue reading “An Ounce of Prevention”
A woman came to the clinic for cervical cancer screening, but when we did the screening we found that she didn’t have a cervix, or a uterus. She was visibly surprised at the news we gave her. She said that she had given birth by Caesarean five years ago and hadn’t had a period since. She knew that something must be wrong. Either the doctors didn’t tell her that they had given her a hysterectomy or else she didn’t understand it when they did. Since that day we’ve had at least two other women with this same story.
The Stockers' Stories 