Ups and Downs

Well, this week had some ups and downs. I spent most days in the lab learning how to do the molecular biology procedures we will need for our research. I have done some of these techniques before, but it has been a long time, and my pipetting skills are seriously rusty. Godfrey and another member of the lab, Thokozani (Thoko for short) helped me all week mixing reagents, programming the thermal cycler, and setting up agarose gels for gel electrophoresis. I have been learning a lot but still have a lot to learn. Luckily, it looks like our reagents are working so far!

On Monday (which was a holiday in Malawi as well as the US), I ran into Nicole on the Pediatric Research Ward and found out that the mother of the kittens had been missing for over 24 hours. The kittens had been crying and crying for food but refused to drink out of a bowl or eat anything solid. Nicole was in search of syringes to see if that would be a viable feeding option. I went back to the house with her, and we spent a couple hours syringe-feeding the kittens to varying degrees of success. Luckily, their mother came back that evening and was able to feed them. She’s stuck around since, so we are hopeful that they will survive. It was looking pretty precarious there for a bit—they weren’t feeding well from us and given their age, they were likely to die at the local animal shelter.

Nicole’s family rescued Stubs, the mother, during cyclone Freddy last year when she was only three months old. Her mother had been swept away by the water, leaving her alone and starving. Since then, she has not been a healthy cat, despite the O’Brien family’s best efforts. We aren’t sure why she ran away but Nicole suspects she is mentally ill.

On Thursday, I attended a mini conference with researchers and employees of the Blantyre Malaria Project (BMP). The meeting reviewed all the research studies happening on the Pediatric Research Ward at the hospital. It was exciting to hear about all the work everyone has planned over the next six months and about the history of BMP which has been running since the 1980s.

On Friday, we found out that our protocol missed being submitted to the ethical review board here, so we do not yet have approval to begin our research work. This was definitely disappointing, because our project will be at least a month delayed in starting. And, in the process of going back through the documents needed for the submission, we realized a lot of revisions were necessary. I have been working on these updates to our consent forms, database, and analysis protocol and we hope to submit everything tomorrow. Ironically, the delay has been helping us get “sorted” as the British researchers here say. While we wait for the results of the ethics review, I’m going to focus on streamlining our molecular biology tests and finishing the data analysis for another related project I have been working on with researchers here.

At happy hour at Nicole’s house, she told me the story of her ‘failed Fulbright.’ In the Congo, intending to study traumatic brain injury in Congolese children, she realized that, given the lack of roads and motor vehicles in the extremely remote part of the country where she was doing her project, there actually was no traumatic brain injury to study. A keenly intelligent and observant person, she noticed that there was on the contrary lots of cerebral malaria. So, instead of TBI, she studied cerebral malaria, and it led her to the Blantyre Malaria Project and expanding research collaborations across four different countries (not exactly a failure). Moral of the story: there is lots of work to be done, just pay attention to what needs doing. I’m hopeful that our project will still get off the ground soon, but hearing this from Nicole definitely helped me feel better.

Over the weekend, I went to Zomba, about 1.5 hours outside of Blantyre with Fran, a Scottish psychiatrist, Sara, a UK student researcher, and Anna, a Malawian business student who grew up in South Africa. It is a beautiful area of Malawi, extremely green and lush with large hills and valleys. It was previously the capital of Malawi and has some beautiful buildings remaining. We went to a delicious Greek restaurant and then walked around in the Zomba botanical gardens. Interestingly, we were the only group there not on a date! For our research project, we are going to do some of our data collection at health centers in Zomba and I am excited to go back.

PS–one of our articles from last time I was in Blantyre was published last week! For anyone interested, you can read it here.