One for the Green Friday

Alright!

It is one Green Friday and despite being cloudy, the commercial happens to be hot like an oven. In other words, it is a very good day for writing and reading after having unsuccessfully tussled  with the crowds in an attempt to buy the TNM phones that were on the Green Friday promotion. The Green Friday did not start that well but throughout we have managed to stay green by being environment-friendly and we are hoping to continue with the green Friday by taking beverages suitable for a Green Friday. 

We are heading into an unpredictable time of the year which is also known as the festive season. I do not trust myself with the period so for some reason I will use this very article to wrap up the Richie Online year. Any article that may come in next week or any other day before the end of the year should otherwise be considered a bonus.

In the previous years, the blog used to be decorated with articles on analyzing the ending year and planning for the oncoming year. This year, however, I have decided to stay away from that tradition as I am now convinced that people who read this blog are smart enough to know what to do with their years. While I will be sharing with you on what I have learnt in the course of the year, I would like to alert you that there isn’t much worth learning from beyond this paragraph. However, you are encouraged to continue reading for your entertainment.

This year has seen me make one of the biggest transitions of my life. When I joined medical school barely 8 years ago, I was set for a good 8 years or so in which I was to follow a certain expected path of a medical student and newly graduated doctor.  When you are done being hammered as a medical student and a medical intern, the usual path is that one gets posted to one of the districts to work as a medical officer before proceeding into specialization. I came to the most mandatory part of this period by finishing my internships mid-year and having completed this stretch of the journey, I was excited to finally have the wings every young doctor needs to fly in the Malawi medical profession. I will be posted to the beautiful district of Mulanje, I thought. That, however was not to be as the person who eagerly wanted to repay the debt he owed the Malawian taxpayer was forced to pick a desk job with a research institution, thanks to a weird combination of fate and choice. While it doesn’t feel all that nice to leave the normal track of going to the district and being called “a DMO”, it does feel good to be at work synthesizing research stuff while wearing polo pants and trainers without feeling like the odd one out. Big win!

When we were starting the year, I had a lot of plans and expectations. I remember hanging a little cartoon of me on the walls of my living room. Surrounding what was representing my confused face were places I wanted to potentially work in and one US university I wanted to be in by December 31. While I am glad to report that I have ended up getting an internship in one of the three places and getting job offers from two others, one of the biggest lows from which I have learnt this year has been unemployment. Let me explain.

Having started the year with a clearly laid out plan, I was looking for a smooth transition from my internship into a seven figure salary job. Having not found one, I found myself volunteering at one organization for what was less than sub-optimal pay. The idea behind that was simple. I was doing a job I loved for almost no pay while waiting for a more suitable job. I persisted on it until circumstances no longer allowed me to volunteer there. The combination of the sudden termination of my volunteering coupled with my strict taste for jobs meant that I had to stay at home without any work to keep me sane and to bring things beyond water into the fridge. Having moved out more than a year and a half prior to this situation, I was far from willing to swallowing my pride and moving back in with the parents. Man had to survive the town and create his own miracles. This was one period that has given me a lot of clarity of thought about lots of things. I have learnt about the comforting and saving potential of family and friends and the role of faith, connections and discipline in life in general. One has to live within their means and there was never a better time to learn this in my life than in 2018. The few months I stayed home and threw a lot of blind applications to any organization that contained the word health in it or its vision have left me with many lessons and wisdom that I will carry to 2019 and beyond.

I did not just go into the year with career plans. I was planning on attaining new skills (driving, playing a musical instrument and swimming) and reading a lot of books in the course of the year. The turn of the tides meant that I was unable to accomplish all that. This was also the year I had opened shop for potential suitors (in line with my goal of getting married soon, lol). This whole bunch of plans (almost all of it) was dependent on the compliance of a whole lot of humans and that in itself meant I had a whole new field from which to reap a lot of bitter-sweet lessons. I have realized that while you need to ride on people’s shoulders on top of going through normal ladders and stairways, people will not always be available for you… And that it is not your place to question them for doing so. Perhaps it all goes to the fact that when someone is important to you, it does not necessarily follow that you are important to them. As of the issue of the potential suitor, we might have a whole article about that by the end of next month but the main point is just that these parents people are not making the girls like they used to in the 90s. Probably the same with boys, but that is an issue for another year.

In the course of the year, I picked up an obsession with communication and personal interaction. What I discovered (give me my PhD now) is that there are a lot of people who are either not aware of or deliberately disregard the existence of the basic rules of interpersonal interaction. Conversations are had to have and for career communicators like me life became less enjoyable over the fact there were very few people who I could confidently applaud as “okutha kucheza”. On the other hand, I realized that while I point out on people’s deficiencies in communication, I have my own issues in the area.

As a person who belongs to a family and societies, one thing I have realized is that I suck at being a member of society and family. Taking stock of my family life, I have realized that I have hardly been there for my parents, sisters, nieces and my very few good friends who are almost brothers. I am hoping that I will be a bit cooler than that moving on.

By this time last year, I had written an article calling 2017 a wasted year. This year has had its own highs and serious lows, but it has been offered invaluable lessons. I am going into 2019 with another road map and plans that may not be fulfilled but from what I have learnt this year, I will be more human with the way I respond to the successes and failures of the years to come. There will be expectations from people and I am hoping that those will align with mine because chances are that I will not bend towards fulfilling other people’s expectations. Those who feel like I am growing old have already hinted that they would like to see me find love and progress towards marriage. Those who have used their imagination to look at what my pay slip looks like are expecting me to be driving by a certain month and others are expecting me to be in the UK studying by October. Thanks for the flashy expectations and wishes. As of me, 2019 is just another year of doing the things I know how to do best; thriving, learning and networking.

8 Years down the Line; the Uncertainties of Life after College

Greetings, dear reader.

It feels good to write again. Having had difficulties putting up an article last Friday, I managed to throw in one on Sunday and it was available as text on request. That was just a quick note for those who were about to stone me for not writing last week.

I felt motivated to write this article as it directly relates to the highs and lows of my life after college as today is the day after the 8th anniversary of the beginning of my journey into the medical profession. It was on that 6th day of the month of December in the year 2010 that I and 193 others walked into the gates of the College of Medicine and registered as a medical student with dreams of a rosy life after college. 8 years down the line, I am sure I am not speaking for myself only when I say that we are all lost in the technicalities and politics of the medical field.

Most find it shocking when I tell them that being a doctor was never my initial dream. Having seen the exploits of Edmond Kachale, one of the best computer programmers in the land, I was geared to get into the same field of computer programming and to be an excellent programmer. You might be wondering as to what sort of accident might have happened for a coder to switch lanes and end up performing caesarian sections at the Gogo Chatinkha Maternity Wing. Well. MSCE happened and upon realizing that my grades were that good and they could easily get me into medical school, family and friends mounted lots of pressure for me to join. I succumbed to the pressure partly because it came from all angles of my inner circle and partly because I had seen some pictures of the College of Medicine that were projected by a team of then COM students (Dr Stephen Macheso, Dr Kondwani Katundu, Dr Arnold Kapachika, Dr Clifford Banda and Dr Emmanuel Banda) who came to give us a motivational talk. I aced the university entrance examinations and the 6th was the day.

We were welcomed to the college on the first day of orientation by Dr Chiwoza Bandawe, who welcomed us to what he called the “rest of our lives”. This was one statement I took lightly but lately it has come back to me as I realized that in as much as the first day of joining college marks a new beginning, most intellectuals do not give a serious thought to life after college. This is particularly worse for those who get into medical programs as there is an almost set career path which under normal circumstances people hardly deviate from.

When you do medical school for 6 academic years, you go for your in-service training for 18 months. After successfully completing the training for the said months, one is ready for deployment to the districts before coming back to the central hospitals for specialization or doing other postgraduate trainings. “And they lived happily ever after..” This is pretty much the same for the other core undergraduate programs, where people think that jobs are almost guaranteed for everyone who passes through the hands of mother COM.8 years after starting my foundation year, however, I have discovered that what once was an almost flawless career path has been marred by a lot of politics and technicalities that have demanded evolution and adaptation for the every person who is joining the medical profession on the premise of guaranteed jobs and job security (and those who push others into the profession with the same idea in mind).

In one talk he gave, one of the keepers of the profession in Malawi, Prof Adamson Muula once narrated how having finished examinations on a Thursday, their class started internships four days later on the next Monday. Over the years, this period has exponentially increased to months and new graduates from the medical school have been hired after constant application of pressure from various stakeholders over the years. The transition from medical school to deployment to the districts has also been very difficult and lately we all might have heard of the 80 unemployed doctors sitting at home and awaiting government. For those who graduated in with degrees in pharmacy and physiotherapy and completed their internships, it is pretty much the same story and the ordeal is even much worse for those who study laboratory sciences to whom the government has made no commitment to hire despite the chronic lack.

One might wonder as to why I am talking about all this and I can sense that most would think that I am doing this in the spirit of advocacy. Contrary to that, I am writing about all this in a bid to spread the message of preparation for life after college for those who are in different colleges and for those who at some point send or will send their wards to college. The reason I am using my own experiences and the College of Medicine as an example emanates from my familiarity with the college and the fact that the college is one of the few in the country, graduates from which are taken as very marketable on the job market. The change of winds in the ease of employment for a medical graduate entails that graduates from other fields will be finding it even harder to secure employment or start up their own businesses and while this may sound negative, it is good to take it positively and let it inform preparation for life after college.

In finances, most people get through college having a constant source of income for their upkeep. However, there is a certain stretch in a graduate’s life that most of us do not like to pay attention to and that is the period between graduating and securing a job. In this period, most young people suffer and break down from the double burden of being broke and being unemployed. If one happens to be in college, here is one thing that has to be thought through from the early days.
Unemployment is on the rise in this country and conventional job hunting methods may not work in the modern day. The modern day intellectual needs to act like a mole burrowing through stuff to explore new opportunities and to create networks that will in turn help in securing jobs or getting business opportunities.

Among the major things that most of us overlook during our lives in college are issues of spiritual life after college and marriage. Most of the people who subscribe to Christian and Islamic faith are fairly spiritual and morally upright while in college but it is not a strange thing to see moral breakdowns after college. Similarly, it is not strange to see people who graduated with excellent grades not doing well in family life. College hardly explicitly prepares us for marriage but it is (rather objectively) one of the best settings to start out on such a journey. Reason? It is the time before people accumulate papers and money and that is the best time when people can get to know and build one another towards marriage. This is as opposed to what may happen to when someone graduates as an engineer; to whom potential spouses may flock, not for the real love but for the financial returns and security. Perhaps those who are still passing through tertiary education should give a serious thought to this and the fact that utsogoleri wa ku CCAPSO should go beyond the campus and translate leadership in the church out here.

I could have written more but that would have made my piece undesirably long. All in all, we are still here 8 years down the line. We are not driving as we anticipated but I guess that will be sorted with time. We are yet to get married and participation in church is not as good as we thought it would be, but I guess time will sort that too. College prepared us but I am left with the question of whether it prepared us well enough for the uncertainties of life after graduation.