Working

With all of the talk of visits from my parents, birthdays for my kids and a imminent trip home, I'm sure you are wondering what's happening at work. Yes, we are still working at Partners in Hope. In fact, Perry Jansen (the founder of PIH) and his family, just returned in June from a one-year furlough. It's been great to have Perry back in the directors seat. Although the clinic has continued serving patients well over the last year, Perry brings vision of the future of PIH, which gets us excited.
One of the current and future projects is a growing relationship with UCLA. Our clinic director, John Hamilton, is actually employed by UCLA and helps maintain a relationship with the school. Currently that means opening PIH to rotating UCLA residents to experience medicine in a developing country. In return, they bring their medical expertise and teaching to our staff, and to a local clinical officer student who joins them in the rotation as well. We had our first two resident doctors come in May--and it was a great experience. Here is a picture of all of us meeting for a journal club--a meeting where we review a few articles of study that might impact our practice of medicine here in Malawi. Mike was there too, but he was taking the picture.

I have a few more pictures of our clinic staff as well. This is some of our lab staff. The lab has been busy expanding, thanks to UCLA. There are plans to use PIH as a center for UCLA's research and because of that we are blessed to receive more equipment in our lab--including a CD4 machine. This is a test we use in HIV patients to see how suppressed their immune system is, and we use it monitor their response to medicine. Currently we are able to do the test by sending samples to another lab in Malawi at some cost to us, so it will be nice to keep the tests "in-house" for convenience and financial reasons.

From L to R: Irene, Maxwell and Steven

Our pharmacy has expanded as the clinic has grown as well. We currently employ two pharmacists--one for the Dalitso pharmacy and one for the Moyo (the free clinic) pharmacy. Howard (shown below) has the task of keeping our stocks supplied--which can sometimes be difficult as we order our ARV's (antiretrovirals--the medicines to treat HIV) through the government in 3 month intervals. So Howard has to figure out, about 6 months in advance, how much of each drug we will need, based on our current population and rate of growth. He does a good job and we are happy to have him. We are also blessed with a well-stocked pharmacy as compared to the government clinics and hospitals. That translates into better overall care for our patients.

Sam's 5!

We celebrated Sam's birthday last month. It's hard to believe my baby is 5 years old already! We had a low-key party with my Bible study friends and their kids. Of course we had to play a few games--thus the picture of the spoons in the mouth. Last year was a dinosaur cake, but this year Sam saw a picture in a Good Housekeeping magazine of a 2 layer cake that he wanted. So we tried it, and thankfully it was edible. I always make our back-up, no-fail chocolate cake just in case. =)

Sam will get another birthday celebration later this month in MN! We are looking forward to celebrating all of our birthdays with our family this year. Mine will be first, the day we arrive in the US. My birthday gift will be a cafe mocha at Starbucks--mmmm good.