So I’ve been delinquent about posting recently – sorry! It’s been a busy few days and the internet connection has been spottier than usual – a blackout yesterday meant that the “fast” internet café wasn’t available, and I don’t want to tie up the internet at the office, which is dial up and shared by three people already – not fair of me to just surf around. Hence, the few days without any news.

The weekend passed well and Monday was a bit of a catch up day. I met with two HSAs, then compiled all the interview responses I had for CBDAs and HSAs and began to pull out some initial key results. I’ll be making a presentation to District Health Officers on Thursday here in Karonga and to the Ministry of Health in Lilongwe next week, so I’m glad I had a chance to start on that before too late in the week.

Yesterday I went to an under 5 clinic day (where all the children under 5 get immunizations, growth tracking, etc) with the project driver. He even got up and talked about the benefits of family planning and demonstrated how to use a female condom (it was pretty funny). Even though he’s not a technical person on staff, he still knows his stuff and wants to spread the knowledge. Pretty cool. Then we met with two CBDAs and two HSAs, and I spent some more time working on compilation in the afternoon.

Today is going to be a busy day, so I don’t know when I’ll post this… I’m going to a clinic day in the morning, then observing Norplant injections, then meeting with HSAs and 4-5 CBDAs, all before 3pm, when we’ll meet people from PSI (one of our partners on this project) to hold a focus group to pre-test a TV miniseries they are working on that deals with family planning and HIV/AIDS. Whew.

This week is a little lighter on running, which is nice. I ran 6 miles on Monday and yesterday was a day off of running in my schedule. During my run on Monday, I passed a man and two women, who all cheered when I passed by, yelling “Excellent, excellent!” It was my greatest running moment here thus far!

The water pressure here is very bad, and especially bad in the mornings and evenings (I usually want to take a shower one of these two times) so it’s been a lot of bucket bathing for me lately. I actually don’t mind it, but I never feel like I’ve gotten all the soap/shampoo/etc off when I’m bucketing. I had forgotten that I tried to turn on the water in the shower last night and forgot to turn it off, because at 3am I woke up to the water running in the shower. It was the best water pressure I’d seen in Karonga! It will be nice to get back to a better shower in Lilongwe on Friday.