Sweat and chitenges

Just as the penetrating odor of sweat is pervasive, chitenges* permeate all aspects of life in Malawi.

Twice a week we do sports in a walled-off garden in front of a Dutch teacher’s house; 5 white women sweating to aerobics videos. In the pressing humid afternoon heat we exercise as a group. As we leave, some of us wrap a chitenge around our waist out of respect for local custom to cover our knees.

Sweat and chitenges.

The young woman delivering lies, sweating, in the humidity of a small room on a bed covered by a large plastic sheet covered and a chitenge. The delivery is not progressing and time is ticking. Tensions are high as the two midwives, Noortje and I yell encouraging phrases: Tie! (let’s go) Chaumeni! (harder). The woman seems to have reached a point of exhaustion, droplets of sweat run down her pained face. Slap! We look up in shock as her friend gives her a hard smack in the face. Giving up is not a possibility. With this hard slap back to reality she regains energy and shortly afterwards the baby is born, immediately wrapped in a clean chitenge and taken for resuscitation.

Sweat and chitenges.

84% of Malawian’s live in rural areas and the economy revolves around agriculture. The most frequent occupation we see amongst patients is farming. Sometimes while examining a patient the smell of sweat is so penetrant that it almost interferes with the examination. The sweat is telling; a smell of very early mornings out in the maize fields, of hard manual labor tending to the tobacco plantation or carrying large bundles of timber overhead balanced on a chitenge headband.

Sweat and chitenges.

In the pediatric HDU (high dependency unit), the closest here to a pediatric ICU, are the most severely ill children. Most often, these children come in convulsing from severe cerebral malaria. The children lie with a high fever, sweating profusely on a bare mattress covered by a colorful chitenge. One matress is filled with the very ill child, bodily fluids, one or more caregivers, brothers and sisters, food supplies lying strewn over the chitenge.

Sweat and chitenges.

So as I go with Noortje for a jog along the red dirt weaving roads I look around me at the colorful chitenges. Is this really sweating or merely an elective jog?

*Chitenge: East African fabric similar to a sarong often worn by women and wrapped around the chest or waist, over the head as a headscarf or as a baby sling.