Malawi: What Do You Do?

It's the most common question I get asked. And one I ask myself sometimes too. Particularly at the end of a long day.

The comedy line, according to friends in the sector, is: I'm a sex worker. I don't use this much, although I do find myself talking about sex a lot more than I ever used to.

The official line though is: I manage ten functions: family planning and general medicine clinics (31); outreach activities (300+ sites where we have mobile clinics every month); clinical quality; clinical training; procurement; warehouse; fleet; property; repair and maintenance; and security.

What this actually entails on a day to day basis is:

• Signing things
• Not signing things, usually allowance requests and ridiculously over-priced purchase orders
• Listening to my boss let off steam
• Fabricating my timesheet which says I can only work 8 hours a day
• Feeling out of my depth
• Wondering whether anyone has realised this
• Adding to my To Do List
• Writing new policies
• Discovering yet more rooms piled high with a decade of rubbish and documents
• Searching for fuel
• ‘Coordinating’
• Eating comfort food
• Telling myself I need to stop eating comfort food
• Providing a sounding board for my boss
• Wondering what will be next
• Trying to remember what I did last
• Reminding myself what amazing work the organisation does
• Pondering what the organisation could achieve if only we improved that, addressed this...
• Anticipating how change could be misinterpreted
• Sweating
• ‘Multi-tasking’
• Cursing the falling tree fruit which kept me awake half the night as they clattered onto the metal roof
• Speculating whether or not the latest clinic burglary was an inside job
• Reading the riot act to private security companies when their guards don't turn up, their alarms don't go off...
• Wondering how concerned you should be about allegations in a newspaper that only has 20,000 circulation
• Trying to second-guess the conspirators
• Watching the next episode of whatever American TV series I'm watching that month
• Telling myself I won’t resort to alcohol and cigarettes like much of the expat community
• Sitting in traffic
• Sitting in a cafe watching the huge red sun set over Blantyre’s hills whilst trying to catch up on work
• Wandering around the warehouse trying to create a culture of attention to detail
• Poking around the latest grounded vehicle of our delapidated fleet in our service bay
• Trying to make sense of the forced ordering system
• Reminding myself not to use the word ‘abortion’ in public
• Fire-fighting
• Asking questions and receiving responses which only lead to more questions
• Reminding myself of the progress we’re making
• Wondering what it’ll take to persuade my boss in London to let me stay a little longer so I can make more progress

And occasionally I get to stay somewhere like this whilst I'm visiting clinics: