Chichewe (I apologize in advance for any spelling errors)

English is the official language and is widely spoken in Lilongwe, but not far out of town you need to be able to get by in some of the other languages of the Malawian people. Chichewe is one of the languages of Malawi, and is spoken in the region around Lilongwe and some of Zambia. It is an ancient but interesting language with lots of humorous twists. The words for tea - chombe (more specifically a particular kind of tea grown in Malawi), fish – chambo (more specifically a fish found in Lake Malawi) and marijuana – chamba are beautiful examples. Imagine the surprise on your waiter’s face when you think you are ordering fish or tea but in reality are ordering marijuana!!

A similarly humorous event occurred yesterday in one of the villages where we were seeing patients. I still haven’t figured out all of the linguistic particulars but I was in my “office” (which was really a classroom for the local school) seeing patients when I needed to take break to go to the men’s room. I asked my interpreter where the chibuzi (outhouse) was but apparently mutilated the pronunciation and asked him for the chibanzi (the name of the village) instead. Imagine my confusion when he told me I was already standing in it!

Finally, in Malawi when one is riding in a lorry with 25 other people to go to a clinic in a small village and you need to go to the bathroom, the proper way to make your needs known is to say (in English or Chichewe) “I need to wash my feet”. I leave it to your imagination to figure out where this phrase came from!

We continue to enjoy our trip to Malawi and the people are truly wonderful and extraordinarily grateful to have us here to help. Carolyn and I are both enjoying practicing medicine again and are grateful to the Malawian people for reminding us what a great privilege it is to be a physician. To work in Malawi we had to get a license which cost $250 each – a price arrived at after a few days of negotiations! We are now free to practice throughout Malawi. We continue to see extremely interesting patients. We are seeing a lot of malaria (including a case of cerebral malaria that needed to be rushed to hospital – on the back of a motor bike), tuberculosis, starvation in all its horrible but varied presentations and of course all of the various parasites. We also see diabetes, heart disease and hypertension although in much lower frequency than in the US.
We hope all is well with you and we think of all of you frequently.