GRANADA HILLS : Peace Corps Workers Recall Malawi Efforts

Thirty years ago in a small village in Malawi, Art Weinstein of Granada Hills established a health clinic to provide medical care and education to the mothers and babies of Namitambo, where the infant mortality rate was alarmingly high.

Then, more than half the babies born in Namitambo died before they reached a year old.

Weinstein, years later, discovered that the clinic he helped build had become a renowned community health center, where medical professionals from all over southeastern Africa come to learn how public health care can be accomplished.

The clinic is one of Weinstein’s proudest achievements--an experience made possible through his three-year stay with the Peace Corps.

In 1964, when Weinstein was 21, he and a group of 36 young men and women headed to Malawi on a mission to combat tuberculosis. Last weekend, these volunteers congregated at Cal State Long Beach to reminisce and discuss plans for their Friends of Malawi organization.

“On Saturday morning, we sat around in a group circle and each person talked about our experiences since Peace Corps,” Weinstein said. “I told everyone that I feel so lucky to have been part of this group and that I’ve dreamed of meeting everyone again.”

Weinstein said he was especially happy about reuniting with his roommate, whom he calls achimwene wanga , or brother of mine.

The Granada Hills resident decided to join the Peace Corps after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

“It was that feeling of compassion for the President and a desire to do something good for the world,” he said.

Weinstein was first sent to Chiradzulu, a mountainous village, where he and his Peace Corps partner were responsible for vaccinating and monitoring 1,000 people for TB.

As he traveled around Malawi, he noticed that Namitambo was in dire need of a baby clinic. He managed to finagle funds from the U. S. Embassy--a meager $2,600--to build the facility.

He originally was scheduled to stay in Malawi for two years, but when he found out that the funding for the clinic would be terminated without a Peace Corps volunteer there to oversee it, he signed on for another year. “I just couldn’t walk away from it,” Weinstein said.

Today, Weinstein is an attorney for the State Compensation Insurance Fund, after spending 17 years in the Los Angeles County Health Department.

He said the Peace Corps gave him the opportunity to learn that he had talents he never knew he had, in such areas as community work and even architecture. Weinstein drew up the blueprints for the Malawi clinic.

His wife, Dina, said she is looking forward to visiting Malawi, a trip scheduled for 1996, when the couple’s youngest son graduates from high school, to see all the places Art Weinstein has been talking about for 30 years.

Although proud of her husband’s accomplishments in Malawi, she said there has been one drawback: “He learned to like powdered milk,” she lamented, recalling how every five years or so, he buys powdered milk, fixes up a batch and puts it in the refrigerator, hoping that no one in the family notices.