Objective: The breadth of material found in surgical pathology services in African countries significantly differs from the common spectrum of "the West". We report our experience in the pathology departments of Blantyre and Lilongwe, Malawi. Method: During a six-week period 405 cases were processed (378 histology, 27 cytology). Results: The vast majority of cases showed significant pathological findings (n=369; 91.1 %): 175 (47.4 %) were non-tumoral conditions and 39 (10.6 %) benign tumors or tumor like lesions. The large group of malignancies (n=140; 37.9 %) comprised 11 pediatric tumors (e.g. rhabdomyosarcoma, small blue round cell tumors), and 129 adult tumors. Amongst women (n=76), squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) of the cervix uteri predominated (n=25; 32.9 %), followed by breast carcinomas (n=12; 15.8 %), and esophageal SCC (n=9; 11.8 %). Males (n=53) most often showed SCC of the esophagus (n=9; 17.0 %), and SCC of the urinary bladder (n=7; 13.2 %). Lymphomas (n=7) and Kaposi's sarcomas (n=6) were less frequent. Conclusion: Providing pathology service in a low resource country may be handicapped by lack of personal, inadequate material resources, or insufficient infrastructure. Rotating volunteers offer a bridge for capacity building of both personnel and the local medical service; in addition, the volunteer's horizons are broaden professionally and personally. Objective: Antinuclear antibodies (ANA) are routinely tested by indirect immunofluorescence (IF) and immunoblot. In this paper we aim to retrospectively analyze results of both methods. Method: On two cohort groups: A (a total of 5518 samples), and B (a total of 2615 samples) we performed IF on commercially obtained Hep-2 cell, and immunoblot on (strips Euroline). Results: IF revealed at least 14 different morphological patterns of ANA staining, which we grouped into 5 easily distinguished categories: speckled nuclear fluorescence, homogenous nucleoplasmic fluorescence, multiple nuclear dots, nucleoli staining, and scattered nucleoplasmic dots. We compared these groups according to frequency, type of antibody and correlation with immunoblot resuts.