Work. (!)

Most of you know that I never talk about work on the blog. First, work is depressing. There are a hundred things every day that make me shake my head, cry, think about buying a ticket out of here. Zach becomes irate at many of the stories he hears from my colleagues (not super helpful but at least he's in solidarity). Second, putting stories about people at work on the internet is SKETCHY. That crap gets you fired!

But how much can I write about flowers and dogs? Well surprisingly a lot. But today I'm going to write about work! Sort of.

I work with an incredibly dedicated group of people. Both in the Malawi government and at CHAI, I am impressed by the extra hours put into work and the thought that goes into efficiency and effectiveness. I focus on early infant diagnosis of HIV (what is that? Maybe the topic of another blog post). This week I've been out in the field with some of those incredibly dedicated people, visiting health facilities that have a high volume of patients but a low volume of submitted EID tests. We go there to have a conversation and find out how we can make things easier for that facility and urge them to improve. Usually it comes down to some inspiring speeches and, when that fails, some veiled threats about accountability and the Ministry's computer that is omniscient and "knows when you guys are failing!" And a promise of some Fanta next time we come if they've improved never hurts.

There's a million steps in this mentoring process and for me, most of them began two weeks ago. It's a short time to deal with the logistics for visiting 52 health facilities but we just have one more day to go and then I'll declare success! Up there is my fabulous group of mentors who we sent out across the country last Sunday. Send us your good juju from America cause we're trying to save babies here and we can use all the good juju we can get.