School Days

Teizeen:

As Ryan and I walk across the school compound, the younger ones pipe out, “Hi, how are yuuuu? Hi, how are yuuuu?” gleefully polishing their English vocabulary on us. They giggle when we respond to their question and giggle more when we ask them in return, “and how are you?”

They swarm around us as soon as we remove our camera – and when we show them photo or video we just took of them, they let out excited shouts and comments to each other, laughing now, crowding around so that everyone can get a peek.

Ryan and I are helping SANA International (SANA = Sustainable Aid iN Africa) perform technical assessments in five primary schools to outfit them with new toilets and as well as rain water catchment systems and tanks to capture and store rainfall. None of the schools have running water, and most of them have simple and dilapidated pit latrines. Leaves are used as toilet paper.

The teacher’s say that diarrhea and other water-borne diseases are somewhat common among the students. Half of the primary school children don’t have shoes. Most of them walk more than a kilometer a day in the early mornings (before school) to fetch water from the nearest source to bring to school. The students are responsible for cleaning the school toilets and fetching water for themselves and for the teachers for use during the day. So yes, there is a lack of access to water. But honestly, the lack of a decent place to relieve one self seems to me, a more immediate threat to health and dignity.

Prawns!

Ryan:

Though all 4 of Teizeen’s grandparents resided in Kenya for most of their lives, her grandfather (on her mom’s side) was part of a particularly expansive and noteworthy family unit consisting of 13 brothers and sisters. They grew up and married in Kenya, had many more kids each who grew up, married and themselves had many more kids in Kenya (Teizeen’s generation), some of whom already have kids of their own (though not exclusively in Kenya anymore). Whether you were able to follow that or not, the point is that Teizeen’s family, especially on her grandfather’s side, is gigantic.

To that point we recently met a more distant strand of the family that resides in Kisumu - a pair of middle aged brothers, with white and graying beards respectively, named Shafiq and Maad. Teizeen herself is not even sure how they are related to each other, but she assures me that they are.

The two brothers run a cotton ginnery and live together, with their spouses and children, in a flat on top of the tallest building in Kisumu (which is 5 stories tall). Living on the top flat they have access to the rooftop where one can look over the entire city and beyond to Lake Victoria and an expanding panorama of dry flanking farmlands and brown boulder pocked mountainscapes. Yesterday, Shafiq and Maad had us over for a rooftop cookout where we ate prawns in perfectly mild t-shirt weather until 1:00 in the morning.

Shafique was doing the cooking and the equipment consisted of the following:

(1) Propane tank: similar in size and shape to those used on BBQ’s in the US
(2) Burner attachment & grill: reminiscent of the old oversized Coleman camp stoves
(3) Cooking pan: a giant (at least 24” in diameter) “wok” shaped steel tilling blade that Shafiq removed from one of his tractors - this is where the magic happened.

Shafiq’s shrimp cooking procedure:

(1) Pour enough oil into the pan to fill a cereal bowl
(2) add chopped onions & cook until clear
(3) slide onions out of oil to the edge of ginormous wok when done
(4) repeat steps 2 & 3 with a bunch of chopped garlic
(5) add lots of beef bacon & repeat step 3 when done
(6) add more oil, then add prawns
(7) mix in bacon, garlic, and onions from the edges and stir
(8) when the women aren’t looking, drop in 2-3 sticks of butter and hide it under the prawns
(9) Aggressively serve timid eaters first

This prawn cooking took place in two separate sessions, each taking about 45 minutes to complete. Sooooooooo bad for you yet sooooooooooo goooooooood! We ate chicken curry and drank sodas between sessions, so that, by the completion of the second round of prawns, we were totally stuffed and wondering how our bowels were going handle the next day. Then Shafiq started a new pan of oil and proceeded to describe the differences between the previous prawns and the ones he was going to cook in the next rounds (round’s 3)! Good lord! I can barely walk today!

Trees

Photos, finally!

Teizeen:

So, we finally managed to post some photos from SANA's office. They are from our first week in Mombasa. Just click on the link under "Photo Links" on the left - more links will appear as we post more photos in the next week or two...

Slums

Yesterday, we visited one of SANA's projects, situated in Obunga, located in a per-urban slum. The area has poor drainage and limited to no sewerage conveyance. We met Wilfred, the ‘big chairman’, or the head of the community task force/neighborhood association. SANA has built communal latrines, and Wilfred mentioned how this has really helped the sanitation situation in Obunga. Just as he said that, a little girl, maybe about 6 years old, tromped out of the nearby hut, rolled up her skirt and peed in the courtyard near where we were sitting, and then tromped back in with a smile. Minutes later, a little girl, about 2 years old, walked barefoot over the same spot.

Volunteering begins

Teizeen:

This is our third day into our first official week of volunteering with SANA International, an NGO that does water and sanitation projects in western Kenya. The general set-up is that SANA provides the technical assistance, designs and constructs the infrastructure, trains and educates the community, who are then responsible for continued operation and maintenance of the water supply and/or sanitation system.

This week, we are being oriented to SANA’s different projects. There is on in a rural area, called Paga, where SANA has designed and constructed a water supply system designed to serve 20,000 people. There is an intake from Lake Victoria and a large underground sand filtration complex. A pump house then pumps water from the lake to an elevated tank about 3 km away, where it is doused with chlorine and then distributed to kiosks. Kiosks are open during the day, and sell water to customers for 1 shilling per 20-litre jerrican (75 Shillings = $1.00). This is a tremendous improvement in terms of water access – prior to the project, women would collect water from the lake, which is of low quality, and carry it back and forth. However, the system is currently not running: someone in the community sabotaged the electric cable that keeps the pump running, and 200 out of 270 of the laid pipes in the distribution system were stolen in the last month. There seems to be some antagonistic behavior within the community.

The system is supposed to be run by the community like a business (they sell water and revenues cover the operating and maintenance costs of the system). However, there seem to be some divisions (perhaps political ones) within the community and some who may be against the project. SANA is hoping to brainstorm ideas with Ryan and me to see how we can create a more sound management system with the correct checks and balances to make this run effectively. The idea is to hand all the management responsibilities back to SANA and then slowly phase the community back in.

We are also going to visit two schools tomorrow, where SANA has proposed to construct a rain catchment system to collect rainwater and having water available for the students on site. We may help in the technical assessment and design of this sytem while we are here.

The first two weeks

Teizeen:

Our first two weeks in Kenya have been a whirlwind of family visits with a little bit of touristy activities scattered in between. Our stay in Mombasa, where most of my family is, was a little brief since we wanted to go on a safari to Masai Mara (one of Kenya’s most famous national parks) – the rates go up in July, so we managed to squeeze in a 4-day trip to the park and are now in Nairobi.

My grandfather (mom’s dad) had 13 brothers and sisters, all of whom have their own families, so that makes for a large extended family. We received warm welcomes from everyone as well as lots of good food! I have been speaking more Gujarati in the last two weeks then I probably have all of this year so far, and it is good to feel that I haven’t totally lost fluency in it. However, this also means that a lot of the time, Ryan has been surrounded by Gujarati speakers and doesn’t have much of a clue about what is going on. However, he has learnt one important Gujarati phrase: Khabernathi = I don’t know. This has turned out to be a very useful phrase and has elicited some humorous laughs, especially when he says it with his hands turned outward, looking confused.

Masai Mara was an interesting experience. The African savannah is beautiful, with rolling grasslands peppered with broad trees. We were able to see the most of the big game: lions, cheetahs, wildebeest, elephants, giraffes, impalas, ostriches, rhinos, crocodiles and lots of other deer like species and birds. The two we missed were rhinos and leopards, which are a rare sight. We traveled in a safari van, which has a hatch on the top that lifts up so you can stand up and poke your head out. We were able to get within a couple feet of the cheetah’s and lions. It was a little disturbing to see how familiar the ‘wild’ animals have become to cars and people, allowing us to get so close.

We leave for Kisumu tomorrow by bus, which is our main destination where we are volunteering. Things are informally organized at the moment, so it will be interesting to see how things pan out.

Photos Urgh!

Hundreds of photos + sluggish internet connections = no photos online. I have asked around, but it seems like there are limited options in terms of speedier internet connections. I tried to upload just five photos the other day, and my patience didn’t last long enough to let it finish uploading. It could take hours to upload just 30 photos or so. In most cases, we are paying per minute for the internet, so the toll can add up fast.

So, apologies for no photos so far.