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
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
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
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
-Scott
Saturday, July 25, 2009
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
- Scott
Friday, July 24, 2009
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
- Scott
Thursday, July 23, 2009
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
-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
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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
-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
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