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I presented these slides at the Scotland Malawi Partnership Conference at City Chambers in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2009. If you are interested in the slides, particularly if you were able to attend the conference, I encourage you to contact me with follow up questions.

The short one-day conference was great. A few interesting tid bits I learned: More than half of all international health and development aid from the Scottish government goes to Malawi. Until Malawi began to build its first medical school just a few decades ago, most Malawian doctors were trained in St. Andrews. Blantyre (Malawi’s largest city) was named after Blantyre, Scotland, the birth-place of Dr. David Livingston. Dr. Livingston (of the oft’ quoted question “Dr. Livingston, I presume?”) was a Scottish Doctor who was the first European to explore much of East Africa, and his story is at the root of much of the long relationship between Scotland and Malawi. It was great being at a conference with so many people with extensive experience working in Malawi, and I particularly enjoyed meeting Maeghan Ray and the other conference organizers and speakers.

Since the conference I’ve been as busy as ever, meeting up with Ken Banks in Cambridge, visiting Dutch friends and host family that I hadn’t seen since I was an exchange student in the Netherlands (4 years ago!), and most recently re-launching the FrontlineSMS:Medic website.