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