Working and Dining

While the six of us were away last weekend, three other folks arrived at the guesthouse: Eileen, a general practitioner from Toronto, her husband Mark, and Isaac. I had mentioned Isaac in an earlier post -- he is the field director for the Frontline SMS program here at St. Gabriel's which enables community health volunteers to communicate more efficiently with the hospital via text messaging. I had emailed with him before our trip about helping out with this program. Mark is also an IT guy. Not sure exactly what he does, but it seems he has rather broad experience working mostly on software development, but also some hardware, networking, and he also knows a lot more about cell phones than I do. So he is also going to be working with Isaac. And since he and Eileen are going to be at St. Gabriel's for six months, Isaac is quite excited about having Mark around to work on various projects.

As for me, we've been having conversations about what I can accomplish just this week (since Marideth, Tracy, and I are leaving for our Zambia safari on Monday). Isaac had been wanting to do an audit of sorts to see where their system and work flow may not be working smoothly so he can effectively address any problem areas. We decided it would be feasible for me to look at the messaging history and look for any patterns of less-than-ideal communication and/or processessing. Not the most exciting stuff, but I'm very glad to be able to help out in this way. Also, I think this task will not keep me busy all day this whole week, so I expect to stop by and help Sister Honesta count pills. I had done this once last week before I got sick, and I'd like to do it again since it is a fairly arduous task to keep up with the demand, and she deserves the help.

Yesterday, we had three visitors from Columbia University who had come to interview Isaac. They are Masters students doing research for a UNICEF pilot project regarding usage of SMS technology in healthcare in developing countries. So the program here is a natural one for them to be taking a look at. They were an interesting bunch as one was from Oregon, one from Holland, and one from Israel.

Also yesterday arrived one more doctor staying here at the guesthouse: Dr. Jacob from the Netherlands. He is a friendly man who first worked at St. Gabriel's in 1971.

Shifting gears, I also need to tell the story of how I played chef for 9 people when we got back on Sunday. When you are responsible to provide meals for yourself in Malawi, you learn to get creative with mostly pretty basic ingredients. We had stopped at Shoprite in Lilongwe on our way back from the lake - not a very impressive store by western standards but a hugely impressive supermaket by Malawi standards. It had occurred to me that since potatoes, flour, and eggs are all readily available here, one dish we could make to get some variety is...gnocchi! And since we both love it, I decided to go for it. I had looked up a recipe online, we picked up the ingredients at the store, and that evening seemed the perfect time to make an attempt at it.

As you probably have guessed, I have never tried to make gnocchi before. What I discovered is that having experience with kneading bread dough is rather helpful. I think the last time I had done any kneading was in a 7th grade Home-Ec class. To make the gnocchi dough, you simply blend together softened potatoes, flour and eggs, and then knead the dough adding just enough flour as you knead to make the dough not feel tacky. I seemed to get better at the kneading as I went along, but no matter how much flour I kept adding, the dough remained very sticky. Being so new at this it's hard to say, but my guess is that my main problem was probably greatly underestimating how many pounds of potatoes I had and not blending in nearly enough flour from the beginning. Anyway, I decided I just couldn't knead the dough any longer though it obviously needed quite a bit more flour. So I just went ahead and rolled the dough into thin logs, coating 'em with a bunch of flour on the outside, and cutting 'em up into bite-sized dumplings. Then, as I started boiling them in batches, Marideth and Tracy had started working on the sauce which included tomatoes, onions, some tomato paste and some kind of tomato basil mix another person had found at the store. As I got down to the bottom of my pile of gnocchi to throw into the pot, they had pretty much ceased to be individual dumplings and become a sticky blob. Still, I just cut out formless small blobs with a fork and put 'em in to boil. They all came out very misshapen but otherwise still quite gnocchi-like. Tracy tried one and said it was good, which I didn't quite believe. Then I tried one. I decided the best description of the result was "perfectly adequate," which shocked me greatly.

So that night we all ate gnocchi (with some spaghetti as well to make sure all 9 people had enough to eat). Everyone seemed to enjoy it and was most appreciative. Despite everything, I must call my first gnocchi making adventure a success!