It is hot! The door is open and I can see a corner of the palm tree on the front green, very gently moving in the very welcome breeze. The fan is purring above me and Iain is in the kitchen making marmalade.

This paints a picture of one life, a very different one to the many lives I have experienced over this week, and every week I have been in Malawi. This world is one of contradictions. One minute you can be sitting in a beautiful garden having eaten a lovely meal, a few minutes down the road there are many hundreds of people suffering from illness and malnutrition. These very poor people make up the majority of Africa compared to our country where fortunately the opposite occurs.

I have had the company this week of a very dear friend, Barbara who is also a member of our Charitable Trust. It was extremely advantageous to have her here to share the experience and to talk about where we are going with the charity and how best to spend the money being made.

First hand it is important to see how your money is being spent and who is benefitting. We are not a big organisation, which from living here is a huge advantage.
By writing this weekly update and sharing some of the many stories, I can show you how MUMs is helping and whose lives we are touching. As I have learnt in the last 3 months, it is immeasurable.

First stop with Barbara was the hospital. She was able to see first hand the unacceptable conditions and why I was so motivated from the beginning to make a positive change. This is happening. The new hospitals will be completed in the next two months.

We visited baby David in the village Msundwe on Wednesday. I had ointment and drops for the grandmother, whose eyes had been discharging the week before. I showed her daughter how to clean the eyes, first, washing her hands then applying the treatment. David was weighed and after advising last week to increase his food from twice a day to three times a day, he had put on weight.

The women in the village moved the mat we were sitting on further away from the huts and into the shade, so there was more room for them to gather. This was going to be our first antenatal class. We waited for a while and eventually, when the word got around the women came. There was about 35-45 in total some with babies attached to the breast, sitting on the grass. The chief and his right hand man sat on chairs at a distance.

One of the women started with a prayer, as is the norm in Malawi. Beatrix interpreted and so our class began. The first lesson was ‘How you became pregnant?’ It went extremely well and the women reacted with exclamations, wonderment and laughs. When I finished I asked if there were any questions. Well! I had to stop them eventually as there were so many and all very sensible but sad as well, as they knew so little.

It was great success and they were so grateful. The chief’s right hand man stood up from his chair and made us very welcome. There was a real feeling of kinship and womanhood that I find hard to describe on paper. The women sang a short song and they danced moving their hips like we could never do in Scotland. I of course joined in with only a little encouragement and this went down a treat. It was all amazing and as I told the women it was a great privilege for us to be with them.

I will be back in two weeks when I will take lesson number two. I will also have a doctor with me from Edinburgh who will take a clinic, they were all delighted.

After this visit we went to Kauma which is an area of Lilongwe where the Traditional Birthing Attendant Mrs Musumba lived. We learnt from Beatrix and could see for ourselves that many of the children had malnutrition. We spoke about how we could set up a feeding station in this area of Lilongwe. This could be done in the same way as the one we had visited previously. Mrs Musumba’s daughter Janet was a teacher and was happy to help. Beatrix is now on the case.
After the initial outlay of a big cooking pot, plastic spoons, bowls and porridge and of course some local volunteers, 90- 100 children could be fed nutritious food three times a week for about £80 a month.

Barbara’s office had very kindly sent a pallet of very useful cleaning equipment for the hospital, bags, cloths and many bars of soaps for the mothers. Also lots of baby clothes which I also had, which people from Scotland had made or bought and donated. We delivered lots of clothes to the orphanage and Mother Superior was delighted.

Mother Superior told me about a baby she was concerned about and asked if I could help. The mother was in a TB ward beside Bwaila with a 3 month old baby. She was ill, on treatment and had no breast milk for the baby.

I visited yesterday, Saturday .The grandmother was there looking on and with a nurse acting as interpreter we talked through the problem. The mother had active TB and looked dreadful and the baby was hungry. It was in fact one year but looked younger. I walked across the path to Bwaila with the grandmother and had formula milk made up. It was all explained to the grandmother to cup feed the baby 4 hourly and how and where to come. We then went back to the ward and with apron and gloves on I proceeded to cup feed the baby. Slowly at first, then with a smile and a mesmerised expression at my white face, baby Ivy began to lap up the milk. We had an audience of women watching and Ivy took all she was given easily.
I passed the baby to the grandmother so I could encourage and watch her feed. I reported to matron what I had done and I will pass over to Beatrix on Monday morning so we can weigh and keep an eye on the baby over the next two months. This is the length of time the TB treatment takes and how long the mother will be an inpatient.

What is difficult to understand is how could a grandmother, mother or nurse understand that the baby was hungry and yet not do anything about it or ask for help.

In brief, Oscar is still in the nursery but I have an appointment with social services on Monday afternoon with Beatrix as this cannot go on. Oscar is 4 months old and lying in a cot without love, stimulation and very little human contact. I did bring in a chitenge for Rose the nursery auxiliary to carry him around on her back as she worked which she has started to do.

I will have to visit the triplets this week as we have been trying to contact the local nurse at the clinic with out any luck. Mobile phones in many places have poor contact. It has been two weeks now and I have to know they are thieving.

Barbara bought over a second hand laptop for Dr Njewa from the MUMs fund. He is the only clinician at Chiedzi Clinic which is a referral clinic for Bwaila. I was introduced to him by my friend Jean when I first arrived and she had great respect for this dedicated doctor whom she had worked with for 4 years. He was extremely grateful and quite delighted with the lap top. He sees over 100 patients a day, including many women and children so this will make his job a lot easier.
We saw around the Wellness Centre which will be finished soon and had long discussions with various people about how we can get more clinical teaching, more midwives and better care.