Riverside Hotel Lilongwe

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I have been at the Riverside Hotel in Lilongwe for a couple of days completing the in country training with VSO.
Margie from the programme office met us all at the airport and saw us through immigration and took us to the Massamba Catholic Centre where we had our first two days of in country training. VSO has brought 18 volunteers to Malawi in this round and everything has been organised down to the last detail. My experience of the Placement co-ordination from London was fortunately, as I had hoped, just one man. It seems that the Lilongwe programme office didn’t know if we were arriving until last week when we finally knew as well and this has meant that a few of the essential documents have not been completed. But VSO here have made every effort to catch us up.
All the volunteers and programme office staff are lovely. There are a number of teachers who are here to support continuing professional development of teachers here in Malawi, a biomedical scientist here to support lab services, an doctor of Indian origin, who has given us all some laughs along the way, a nurse here to train nurses and various other people.
I met up with Steph, the other psychologist, at the airport in Johannesburg and we located Gareth the psychiatrist and form that moment on I think the three of us began to relax. We each had the same experience of the process in getting to Malawi but were hugely relieved to finally be on our way and to arrive in Lilongwe to find we were being picked up at the airport and everything has been organised down to the last detail since we arrived. We have been given sessions on security, been given water filters and mosquito nets amongst other items for our house, had some language training, a health briefing and been taken to the doctor. A representative from Zomba Mental Hospital, Zenaida, came up for the employers workshop yesterday and we have had a chance to talk with her about the programme.
I am hugely excited to get down to Zomba. Steph, Gareth and myself get on very well and share a sense of humour, and a desire to try and offer anything useful that we can to the psychiatric system here in Malawi. There is currently one psychiatrist here and no psychologists and the hospital is mainly staffed by psychiatric nurses; who it seems have had a long training. Everyone who I have mentioned Zomba to have told me that it is a lovely place. Zenaida will drive us there this afternoon and we will see our house and spend the weekend settling in and hopefully buying the necessities of life.
A couple of days ago we were taken to the Medical Council of Malawi to register with them. It was an interesting exercise in which we were very clearly given a message about colonialism. The assistant registrar made it clear that he had carefully studied our documentation and our CV’s to see if they meet an adequate standard for work in Malawi and that he was prepared to put us on the register on a provisional basis, until he heard reports back from our employers about the standard of our work at which point he would put us on the full register. He told us we needed to have an orientation (but since the three of us had already chosen to work with the mentally deranged we should go straight to Zomba) and would need to submit evidence of our CPD.
There have been some very funny moments, during the in country training and all in all it has been a great week. When we first arrived it felt a little bit like going on school camp, but it has been useful to be given the orientation and information about various aspects of our connections with VSO programme office and employers.

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Comments

[Emma Russell]

Hi Penny
Hi Penny, sounds like you are going to have an amazing time. My mum and dad lived in Malawi for 2 years and loved it there. I will be really interested to see what the psychiatric services are like out there. No chance of anything so exciting happening to me right now with 2 little ones to take care of! Lots of love, Emma x