Work News at SOS Medical Centre

Work continues to be crazy at the children’s rehab programme, with around 500 children coming through our doors each week, it’s a privilege to be part of a leading disability service in the country!! With only a month before the opening of the second village and therefore medical centre, it wont be long before our numbers will have doubled, reaching major regions that have previously not been able to access disability services! So it’s exciting (and busy) times ahead!!

A crazy first Term has just finished and we are now in the second week of workshops which run each term break. Over 100 children along with their carers have been invited.
They nearly didn’t happen this term, as funding was pulled just the day before, loosing any money for transport to collect mums and babies or feed them during the workshops. The promise from head office is that the funding “will be in soon” but by Malawian standards it could happen well after workshops have finished!! So that didn’t stop us. Scraping money from all sorts of places, and calling on favors around town, each day we have managed…just a day at a time!!

Across the two weeks all sorts of workshops are run, from introduction to disability, activities of daily living, communication, hearing impairment, eating disorders, making toys, play and socialization, food security and nutrition, puberty, HIV/Aids manifestation in children, and school readiness. So it’s been exciting times. The styles of workshops are awesome, they are relaxed and heaps of fun, and we do dramas and practical activities, play games and have lots of laughs! Next week home visits will start, and I love them!! It’s an awesome time to get out in the rural villages and spend time with the women out in their homes. Often an overwhelming experience, but great to be a part of!

I’m continuing to work with Victor and Morgan (two fantastic Malawian guys who I am training to do my work). When I leave here, they will be responsible for the speech therapy services in Malawi, so they need a massive amount of support. On May 1st there will be big changes… our project head Kathy Bowler, who founded the medical centre and has been there for 12 years, is leaving, so there will be shaky times of change ahead. And on the same day Victor will leave to start work in the brand new Blantyre SOS village and medical centre. So our communication team will be spread across the country! It’s a challenging few weeks finalizing everything that he will need to take and reassuring him that he will be fine!! The start of this adventure will also mean more trips down south so I can be supporting both victor in Blantyre and Morgan in Lilongwe. Cloning myself would be a much easier approach I feel… but alas! We’ll survive!! There are three of us now working with nearly 300 children in communication & audiology… so soon there will be double the case load and less people on the ground. Eek!! Needless to say the guys don’t ever want me to leave!

I love the type of development work that I’m a part of, of course I still have heaps to learn, but I really believe in a capacity building approach. I have also been doing blocks of lecturing at the rehabilitation assistant’s college in the hope to improve the understanding of Communication in disability so that more staff working within disability can at least start identifying problems. This has also involved some student supervision and support to other organizations. Word seems to be spreading as well, we are getting more and more referrals especially from the hospitals malnourishment ward in pediatric feeding, so i'm on a pretty steep learning curve in pretty much every area!! Let’s just say, i’m rarely bored!!

So there’s a lot to be done, and of course, I have no idea how i’m going to do it all. But remarkably “stressed” and “worried” are words that don’t really exist in my vocab over here, so that’s making this adventure far more fun and challenging than anything else! I’m loving it, I love the way it challenges me to think, challenges me to act and inspires me to problem solve in areas that have no recipe!!

In between all of this, the relationships at work are very important to me, my colleagues are my good friends, as are the women of the children I’m working with, and I love the relationships. Now that I have been here a while, doors have opened to great conversations and great friendships. Therapy involves playing and chatting and singing and laughing with the most beautiful of children. I love being a part of there lives, even though small, it’s precious to me. I think I have the coolest job in the world, I get to play with adorable children all day! And meet marvelous loving, struggling, but joyful women who have enriched my life! I would not have had nearly as many opportunities to become a part of my community without my working role here. I’m so very pleased that I have this skill to share that opens a door to great relationships and many opportunities to bless people even in little ways.