Goat time

Today is our last full day in Luanda. In the morning we went through the leftover supplies, part of which we are using for spares at the clinic and the rest we are donating to another nearby school so that they can build their own rainwater catchment system. After this I reviewed the maintanence information again with Michael the security guard. We had arranged for a well surveyor to come out and surveyor the surrounding area. We spent about an hour with the surveyor looking around for a good site to survey and then watched him use his machinery to test for groundwater. He apparently looks for changes in resistance in the ground to find the groundwater. This evening we are having a farewell party in our honor. Viagenco killed a goat and two chickens (one of which temporarily escaped but after a chase of a half hour or so, they caught it), and tons of fish. The typical Kenyan party includes tons of speeches, so I expect that we’ll hear at least 4 or 5… with Roy required to give at least one. Tomorrow we leave for Kisumu in the morning… and then we are off for states to begin work on next years project for the Luanda Community.
-Scott

Color wheels and wells

Tuesday I spent the morning training Michael, the security guard and handy man, how to maintain the water system and test the chlorine. Unfortunately, we found that the directions were a little convoluted and we weren’t able to figure out how much chlorine we should add to the water. We’ll have to go back to the states, rewrite the chlorine section of the maintenance guide. We are also bringing back some of the chlorine we bought for the clinic (we bought 45 kilos worth!) so that we can figure out how much we should bring. In the process of training Michael, I had to figure out the color wheel for testing the chlorine on the fly. When determining what data to collect, I realized that we really need to redo the datasheet that they will record the data on as well. I made a handwritten one which will have to do until we can post another maintenance manual. In the afternoon we met with the downtown Luanda community to discuss the drilling of another well for them. About 12 people showed up and though very quiet, I think they were very interested in having a well in their area.
-Scott

Color wheels and wells

Tuesday I spent the morning training Michael, the security guard and handy man, how to maintain the water system and test the chlorine. Unfortunately, we found that the directions were a little convoluted and we weren’t able to figure out how much chlorine we should add to the water. We’ll have to go back to the states, rewrite the chlorine section of the maintenance guide. We are also bringing back some of the chlorine we bought for the clinic (we bought 45 kilos worth!) so that we can figure out how much we should bring. In the process of training Michael, I had to figure out the color wheel for testing the chlorine on the fly. When determining what data to collect, I realized that we really need to redo the datasheet that they will record the data on as well. I made a handwritten one which will have to do until we can post another maintenance manual. In the afternoon we met with the downtown Luanda community to discuss the drilling of another well for them. About 12 people showed up and though very quiet, I think they were very interested in having a well in their area.

Lazy Monday

Monday was a rather lazy day as the first flush system was almost complete. We had made holes in the bottom of the first flush to allow the system to slowly drain water incase the clinic forgets to empty the first flush. Since the system was installed on all the tanks, I used the morning to test if the first flush worked and to test the rate that the small hole let the water out. Meanwhile, Phil was gooping the gutters to make sure they didn’t leak and Roy and Julia disappeared into the mountains to look for another well for testing purposes. In the afternoon we got all the well samples together and did began the water testing process.
-Scott

A day in the life of...

I spent today with Joyce Omollo and her family. I asked to spend a day with a woman in the Luanda community doing whatever she does in a normal day. Both Joyce and her husband, Churchill, are teachers at Nyasumbi Primary school so most of the weekly chores must be done on the weekend. The family attends church on Saturday, leaving Sunday for washing clothes, harvesting crops from the shamba (family farm plot), shopping, and fetching water for the coming week.

I met up with Joyce at 6 am, before sunrise, and we went straight to milk one of the family’s three cows. I wasn’t very good at it! We took the milk back to the kitchen, a separate mud walled building from the main house, to cook tea and uji (porridge made from millet) for the family’s breakfast. Joyce and Churchill have three sons, Jean Paulson, Onyx, and Shaule, aged 2, 8, and 9, and also take care of their 8 year old niece Anna. Like most families in Luanda she cooks with firewood placed in a depression built into the earthen floor of the kitchen. At first the room filled with smoke, but eventually the small chimney in the wall helped us out.

After eating breakfast in the main house, the two older sons tied 4 twenty liter jerry cans to a donkey to go fetch water at the lake. The walk would take them about 40 minutes each way and they’d been told to make two trips that morning. The 160 liters they collected would be used for washing dishes, cooking, bathing for 2-3 days. Joyce and I put the week’s laundry into plastic buckets and basins which we stacked on our heads to walk to the water pipe up the hill. About 15 minutes walk from their house is a broken water pipe from a well built by a private landowner. The well and tank have fallen into disrepair and now women in the surrounding area come to use the water that seeps out of the broken pipe to wash clothes and dishes. The community no longer drinks the water because it was found to be staining their teeth brown (which often happens with high fluoride groundwater). Joyce gets drinking water by putting buckets outside when it rains or by buying jerry cans of water from a different well in the dry season. We waited our turn to fill our buckets from the broken pipe. I got lots of surprised stares, greetings, and laughs from the other women, especially when I carried a bucket on my head. After washing and rising the clothes near the pipe we carried them back home to dry on the thorn bushes.

By about 10:00 we were ready to head to the shamba. Anna, Joyce and I took knives and buckets to the field of maize and sorghum a few minutes walk from the house. We filled buckets with maize cobs and sorghum grain and made several trips back and forth to empty them in the granary. Churchill joined us in the field when he returned from a meeting in town. At around 1:00 pm Joyce and I cooked a lunch of ugali (maize meal boiled in water until reaching a thick breadlike consistency) and fried oro (small sardine like fish caught in the lake) with tomatoes and onions. The boys were hungry from their trips down to the lake. Other children from neighboring households joined us for the meal.

Most of the afternoon was spent sitting in the shade of the house separating the maize kernels from the cobs by hand, a job that left me with a big fat blister on my right thumb. After a few days of drying, the grain would be taken to town to be milled into flour to make ugali. Anna collected more firewood and helped us sort out the stones and sticks from the beans and rice to be cooked for dinner. Once the beans were on the fire, we collected and folded the clothes, ironed some using a metal iron filled with hot coals from the kitchen, and brought the five goats back from the field where they’d been tied to graze. After a bucket bath in the bathing shed and bathing the little one, it was time to cook dinner. Just before dinner, Joyce showed me how to catch the chickens and toss them under their big sleeping basket for the night. There was much sqwauking involved. At 7 pm the family gathered in the main house for a tasty meal of beans and rice by the light of a kerosene lamp.
-Julia

Rain catchment systems, pianos, and colleges... oh my

-Today we headed to the Nyamasare Catholic Church, which is located up the hill from the clinic, in order to conduct a presentation on clean water. We arrived early so that we could experience the services. The service consisted of nearly 2 hours of wonderful music! : ) We all walked away in wonder at the wonderful voices that the parishioners have. Typically churches will have a choir that provide the backbone to the sound but the whole congregation had wonderful voices and the dancing was equally beautiful. The instruments consisted solely of drums and a triangle that was wrung with rebar. Following the services, Phil and I conducted a presentation on clean water. We discussed the use of PUR, WaterGuard, and the 3 Pot Method. Following the presentations, the church thanked us for our work and the presentations and then made some lofty requests. They started off pretty basic, asking for a rainwater catchment system… but then things got a little strange when they asked us for a piano and then for me to build them the “Scott Webb Memorial Engineering College.” Unfortunately, I feel that previous NGOs have given the community convoluted expectations. Roy took the time to explain to the congregation that EWB strives to work with the community on a level basis to provide technical support that they may not have ready access to. While EWB UCSB won’t be providing a piano and a university, hopefully our future projects can help bring clean drinking water to the community.
-Scott

Roy... dancing...

- No rest for the weary, as Saturday was just another day of work for us. However, today was a little special, as we made our way up to the Nyamasare School where the community was thanking another NGO, One Kid One World, who had provided funds for a computer lab and a solar system. The celebrations were a lot of fun and consisted of lots of singing and dancing. Even our advisor, Roy, got up and showed off some embarrassing dance moves! Later in the evening we met with another EWB group from the University of Wyoming who just began an assessment trip for the community of Waondo. Their EWB group consists entirely of undergrads, which contrasts sharply from our graduate school dominated EWB group. Tomorrow Julia is going to be spending a typical day with a Luandan Woman, from milking the cows to doing the washing, while we head off to a local Catholic Church to take in the service and give a talk about clean drinking water.
- Scott

3 water tanks installed... 1 to go!

On Friday we were able to complete the whole westside of the main building except for the addition of the first flush. We now have 3 of the 4 catchment systems complete! It rained last night, but unfortunately we didn’t have the pipes from the tanks to the roofs connected, so we didn’t catch any water. Its looking pretty ominous tonight, however, as we can see lightning and dark clouds in the distance. We’re hoping we’ll get some more rain so we can test our catchment systems!
- Scott

General Thoughts

-This morning we spent the morning preparing the south facing wall of the main building to run the gutters. After lunch we headed to Mbita, which was about a 30 minute ride west of Luanda, to visit Benson and then Mark’s school. The schools are very simple, and the students appear to have very little in terms of supplies, but they appear to be all avid learners. When prompted to answer a question, the snap their fingers vigorously trying to get the teachers attention. Compared to a US school, they are all very very well behaved and appear to be much more eager to learn

-In general, people in Kenya are very friendly and nice, almost to a fault… We’ve had to walk home in the dark twice because too friendly a Kenya talked us into the wee hours of the night. Generally everyone is happy to meet us and we have numerous visitors a day. It seems as if we get a visitor every morning… a person who generally just wants to come by and meet us… or give their daily salutations. The children are all quite hilarious as well. I think people must know we are coming for miles due to the chorus of children yelling “mzungu” or in English “whiteperson.” Our walk home in the evening is also entertaining, as we are usually ambushed by children and adults alike who want to shake our hands or give their greetings.
-Scott

The "Goop-i-Nator"

-I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before… but it is hot. In the shade the work is not to hard but the sun just beats you down and keeping hydrated has been an important preoccupation of us all. So today we completely finished the back two buildings, including sealing them with a black smearable substance we call “goop.” The goopiNator, Nate, has become quite adapt at applying the goop.

-Meanwhile, Phil and Julia headed to a nearby school to teach the children and staff about clean water with Steven as a translator (from English to You). The education revolved around sanitation and the importance of handwashing. To keep the kids entertained, they performed two skits. In one, Julia was sick and then handled water. Phil then drank from the same water and then received the same sickness that Julia had. The children and teachers were really attentive, having numerous good questions following the educational workshop.

-With the west side of the main building completed, we started on the eastside. The lattice work went up and we were able to make some good progress, marking out and attaching all of the brackets required to hang the gutters.
-Scott

Opanga Means Steel

-In the morning we headed over to the Mercy school, which has a mix of regular community students and orphan students. The program seems to be very well put together, as even Chief Michael has enrolled his son in the program. The kids were all really cute and they used the opportunity to demonstrate their singing voices! Their song topics ranged from a song of greeting to educational songs that taught about AIDS. The children at the Mercy School are quick learners and right from the beginning to teach them English and Swahili whereas most schools begin to learn in grade 7. Following the introductions, we presented the students with exam books and pencils, which the teachers were very happy to receive.
-After the Mercy school, we started work at the clinic. During the days work we were able to finish the back east building and get started on the back west building and the front building. As all the gutters were handmade, figuring out how to join two pieces to turn a corner proved to be an interesting task. After a few bumps, however, we were able to figure out the best way to join two gutter pieces while minimizing the amount of water lost. We put in a lot of hardwork today but were very satisfied with our efforts. It also gave us a great opportunity to teach the local handymen the importance of certain design components, such as the first flush system to clean away dirty water from the first rain off the roof.
-Scott

A Very British/Kenyan Breakfast

-In the morning we got up and had a very British (Kenya was colonized by the Brits) but nice meal of jam, peanut butter, butter, bread, boiled eggs, honey, freshly grilled peanuts (very Kenyan), and the usual serving of tea.
-After some breakie we headed to the clinic where we were greeted by the clinic staff. We then had the opportunity to explain what ewb was about, and how we would be helping to implement a rainwater catchment system with their help. Following the meeting we broke up in two separate teams to tackle several water issues. Team Slow Sand Filter, starring Julia and the clinic driver Freddy set to work putting together the slow sand filter. Team Rainwater, featuring myself, Roy, Nate, Phil, Aaron, a polytanks tech, and Matthew, a local laborer, set out to work on the rainwater system. Aaron began by setting our outlet and overflow taps. You have to be a trapeze artist to conduct this job, because it involves climbing into, and most amazling, out of the very tall water tanks. Afterwards Meanwhile, Nate, Phil, Roy, and I proceeded to layout all the piping and gutters so that we could ensure we had enough. At this time we noticed that our large 15,000 liter tank had been busted during the transport. Polytanks wanted to repair it for us but we decided we didn’t want to start the clinic off with a broken tank and asked for a brand new one to be delivered. They eventually agreed, but they’ll have to make us a new one from scratch and we won’t get it till Friday.
-After lunch, we finally got a chance to start putting a system together. We choose the back east building because it was easy to reach the buildings roof without the use of ladders. Everything was proceeding well until we realized that the nails we purchased to mount the gutter brackets to the wall had no heads! There was no way we could mount the gutters… this was a problem because there was no big hardware store to bail us out. After 2 hours of trying to find a solution, we finally found that local roofing nails would do the trick. Within an hour we had the gutters up on the east side of the back east building. Julia had also finished her demonstration slow sand filter by this point.
-Next we met with the Opanga Water Committee to discuss the possibility of EWB helping them implement a water system for their newly drilled well. They were very enthusiastic and had some good ideas about how to distribute water and who the well could service. Prior to heading to Kenya this year, one of our biggest worries about implementing a large clean water system for the community was who would operate the system and pay for its maintenance. They had already thought about all of this! We also learned that Opanga means steel in Luo… the area that the well is in is called “steel” because this area had the first house to get a steel sheeted roof.
-Scott

The future of the project?

-In the morning we met with Johnson Anyumba, who is a geologist from the Groundwater Solutions Drilling Company. His company recently drilled a well for the community of Luanda. Julia and I had discovered a couple of days earlier, when speaking to Michael, that the community had drilled a well. Michael told me that the community was concerned about the quality of its water, especially after our water quality demonstrations last year. They had put together a water board for the community and had developed a system to help maintain it. We were very impressed, and this actually will help us implement the next part of our water project next year. Anyways, back to the story at hand, Johnson had just drilled the new Opanga well and was briefing us its metrics, i.e. the safe water yield, pump intake depth, etc.
-In the middle of the meeting Phil and Nate arrived from the Kisumu airport (they were picked up by our driver, Julia, and Benson).
-Following the meeting, we tried to catch the ferry but we missed it because we found out two lids for the tanks were missing. As a result, we ended up driving to Luanda…. It took us around five hours, including a stop in Homa Bay for lunch. Phil and Nate had just arrived in Kenya for the first time, so they quite enjoyed seeing the countryside
-We eventually arrived in Launda, where we had the opportunity to visit the VIAGANCO clinic. They’ve painted the building since EWB was last there, and the place is looking quite nice. They’ve also already wired the building for electricity and are only waiting for the government to commission the transformer down the street. We were able to see our new purchased tanks placed on the cement platforms we had designed… the whole setup was looking quite nice. Now all we have to do is run some guttering, piping, troubleshoot some problems, and we’ll have ourselves a real rainwater catchment system!
- Scott

Our tanks arrive!

This morning we met Roy, our team advisor, at the Airport and then headed back into town and had breakfast at the New Victorian hotel (with Roy, Michael Benson, Julia, and our driver Seth). We then headed to Arihunt where we reviewed the changes we made with Roy to see if he was okay with them. While we were at the hardware store, Polytanks arrived with our order of four water tanks.... they were massive. I mean absolutely huge. Julia and I had seen 3000 L and 2000 L tanks elsewhere in Kenya and were impressed by their size... but this was a whole new level. We had foru tanks in all, with the 6000 liter tanks being short but very fat and the 10k L and 15K L tanks proving to be monsters! We then spent a good 2 or 3 hours making sure everything we ordered was loaded on the truck and to our pleasing. After finalizing our order we visited the Nakumat and a stationary store to get some writing books and pencils/pens for the children at the local schools.
-Scott

Design Modifications & Viagenco

In the morning Julia and I headed over to Arihunt to discuss our order in more detail. Pradip, the shops owner, was in today and he proved to be quite knowledgeable in the parts needed for a tank install. His advice was quite good and we used a lot of his modifications. We also learned that the gutters are all hand made... if we had know this in the states it would have been very beneficial, as we came up with some rather weird methods to make sure we captured all the water!

Around noon Michael from Viagenco showed up and we went to lunch with him at the New Victoria Hotel... the food was decent, though not excellent. We then ran by Arihunt again to get his input on the design changes to the rainwater system. He had some good insight, and provided some new details about the concrete slab which he recently completed for the tanks. Around 6pm Benson from Viagenco also arrived in town. Nurin, the nephew of the hardware store, offered to show us the local scene and brought us out to this really nice restaurant which featured both Kenyan and Indian foods. I tried some "turbo naan," while good... proceeded to make me sweat like mad.
-Scott

Kisumu & the start of our EWB work

Julia and I woke up early (5:20 am) in order to catch the early matatu from Kakamega National Forest to Kisumu. During the ride from Kakamega town to Kisumu I chose to sit in the front row with my bag... that was a mistake. The front row has a raised floor because of the motor. The ride was very uncomfortable to say the least. We arrived in Kisumu after an hour and a half much to my legs delight . From there we checked into the "Sooper Guesthouse," which had adequote rooms (about similar to any cheap hostel). Julia and I then headed out to start surveying the hardware scene in Kisumu. To our delight, we found our local vendor was located 3 doors down from our hostel! Ater a quick visit to the hardware store we unsuccessfully tried to contact the Lake Victoria Water Services Board, but we did speak with three other government organizations with names very similar to the LVWSB, leading to some confusion on my part as to what department did what.
-Scott