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
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
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
-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.
Monday, July 27, 2009
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
-Scott
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
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
