Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - It rained cats and dogs! Oh, and by the way, we got a cat!

Today was a good day.  Kelsey and I brought two suitcases full of donated school supplies to the Montessori School this morning.  The teachers were so excited and so were the kids.  We showed the teachers everything first, then they brought the kids in from outside and prayed with them, thanking God for the new things.  It was really neat.

Kelsey and I then had a meeting with the ABC Project Team.  They shared who was in charged of what and what the goals were for this year to make everything successful.  There are six members on the team and each person is responsible for some aspect of the project they are working on.  Kelsey and I will be working closely with this team, especially Abigail, who volunteers at Queens.

After the meeting we went to Queens and met with Fred, the director of Pediatric palliative care. He explained how the hospital works and answered some of our questions.  Queens hospital is a big, regional hospital where all the difficult cases to diagnose come, as well as those who have been diagnosed with an incurable disease.  It is a lot like U.C. Davis hospital back home because it is a learning/teaching hospital.  The nurses are more qualified than we had originally thought; however, they are still severely short handed.  Fred was not able to tell us how we could help medically, like we had hoped, because he is not sure how our medical certifications translate here.  He referred us to another lady, the director of nursing, and she will be able to tell us how medically qualified we are.  At this point, we have to wait to hear back from her before we can take action.  However, Kelsey and I have begun brainstorming how we can help.  We are thinking about maybe starting a volunteer training program, but we’ll see where God leads us. 

When we got back to the school, I got to play with Jessica, one of the teacher's babies, while Kelsey and I waited for Maribeth.  She is five months old and too cute!



Before we left the school to head into town, it began to rain but we went anyway.  Thankfully, we had our umbrellas with us.  We took a minibus into town and from there we had to walk to the immigration center because Kelsey had to turn in some paperwork.  It is funny because Malawians do NOT like to get wet, almost everything in town had stopped and everyone was lined up against the buildings, under the overhang to keep dry.  But here we were, three “crazy” American women walking in the middle of the rain with our umbrellas!  What a sight we were!  By the time we got to the Immigration Center our feet were soaked and our skirts were wet up to our knee caps.  Once we finished there we set out to a store, but halfway there we changed our plans.  The weather had worsened and we got caught in the nasty storm.  It was raining HARD and we could not use our umbrellas because the wind was too strong.  It nearly broke Kelsey’s umbrella but some Malawian gentlemen fixed it while, we too, huddled under the overhang of a building trying to get warm.  We soaked from head to toe! We ended up being picked up by Natalie, the lady with the cat, and she took us back to her house to get the cat and then took us home.  We got Silvester settled; he hid in the broom closet for a couple hours because it was dark.  However, he explored the house before Kelsey and I head to bed.  I hope he sleeps with me tonight! J