Annelies' last days in Malawi!!!

1/20/10
Well our time here is winding down and the computer work is ratcheting up! So, Monday our UNICEF contact was out of the office, so we worked out of the hotel and made arrangements to visit St. Gabriel’s Hospital where they are using frontline SMS to do patient tracing. We god some of the process models done, so that was cool and worked on taking notes on the interviews that we did. The goal is to get as much as possible done here so we can avoid getting overwhelmed when we get back to the NYC. Yesterday we visited the hospital and met up with Isaac Holeman who was one of the CHAI team, we interviewed him on what is I think the longest running SMS program for health care in Malawi, and then headed back to Lilongwe for lunch. We ate really good pizza at Mamma Mia’s and I found a postcard for my sister in law’s kindergarten class which I should mail tomorrow. I also found a really cool book of East African folk tales I wanted to get for Claire, but as it was in the Old Town Mall I think it was priced for tourists at $15, a little above my price range, so I’ll see if I can find it on Amazon, but we’ll see. I think she’ll be fine without it though  So, let’s see, we hung out with Isaac and Marc Abbyad who works at the hospital, we made a playlist of our favorite songs and just hung out and talked about life and work and whatever came up, it was a lot of fun.
Today we went out for our follow up interviews and in detail process mapping at the Baylor project out in area 25 at a satellite health center, it’s a normal MOH health center, but each Wednesday the Baylor team comes out to do HIV/AIDs related care for antenatal care, PMTCT and Under 5 exposed children. So that was great, we got some great info and I got to play with a little baby who was waiting for a DBS test who made me miss Claire, but that’s okay, I’ll get to see my family soon. We went over the process model we built with Isaac (which I’m taking a break from revising to write this) Now we are just working on more paperwork and will go to dinner soon. It’s Annelies’ last night, so we have to go try a new place for dinner. I think we are headed out to Food Center, or something like that. So, That’s what we have been up to in a nutshell, I wish I could remember some of the funny things that have come up that I wanted to share, but of course as soon as I open up the blog, I have totally forgotten them.