Internship Overview

My title with Aqua Clara is something like Research and Program Development Intern.

At work this week, I divided my time between my two largest projects for the summer. For three days, John and I trained students from Kenyatta University to collect water samples and help us with our lab tests. Next week is the start of our major water quality testing project in the Kisii region. To summarize, we’ve randomly selected filters from three nearby districts, and the students will sample each filter for four consecutive days, as well as carry out an 80-question survey about water availability, water use and health within each school or household. We’ll test the input water, output water and direct source water (stream, borehole, public spring, etc.), and evaluate whether the filters are producing output that meets standards for safe drinking water. This will help Aqua Clara monitor the performance of filters that have been installed over the past few years so that we can evaluate success based on filter age, location, builder (Community Development Entrepreneur), etc. This will hopefully identify project successes and opportunities for improvement. Also, in partnership with the Public Health Department, we’ll gather data about public water sources, which to date has not been formally studied in this region. I am grateful for the opportunity to be responsible for this project alongside John.

I spent two other days on my second highest priority – exploring the feasibility of a Public Participatory GIS platform (like Ushahidi) to spatially organize information for our NGO. I’m looking at mapping filter locations, partner schools and source water quality using standard SMS/text messages. If this works, I think it’ll really help Aqua Clara gather information in a more useful way than they have previously. As of now, they have a lot of disaggregated information, and only a very rough idea of where filters are located. I mentioned PP GIS as an option to the project director a few weeks ago, and he was really excited about the possibility. I hope I can make it work.

This afternoon, armed with the Kenyan roadmap that my mom purchased with amazing foresight, Sam and I are renting a car (2500 KES/day) to drive to Nakuru for the weekend. This will be both of our first times driving here, so that will be interesting. We’ll explore Nakuru town and the national park, and hopefully hike to the Menengai Crater, which is supposedly 90 sq km. Huge. I’m looking forward to my first visit to one of Kenya’s many national parks, hoping to see lots of flamingos, rhinos and giraffes!

Kisii

I’m living in a town called Kisii in the Nyanza Province, a bit west of Nairobi and not terribly far from Nyanza Lake/Lake Victoria. I don’t have an address here; few people do. So when taking a piki-piki (motorcycle) home, I tell them to take me to the “Chief’s camp” on my corner and walk about a minute from there. If you’re picturing little huts and a village chief wearing a cloth skirt or something, stop there. It’s a concrete building with a respectable flagpole, and most adults around here dress more professionally than I do.

Kisii is a hilly town with paved roads downtown and everywhere else muddy roads and exposed red soil. There is some beautiful greenery in the center ravine as well as on the hills that skirt town. Chief’s camp is just opposite the ravine, which I walk around on my way into town. I took that walk with Sam yesterday and with John today, joining the endless streams of people who walk on the roads throughout Kenya. Few roads have shoulders and I’ve yet to see a paved sidewalk anywhere, so everyone just crams onto the roads and tries to avoid the crazy drivers - especially the piki-pikis.

There are so many little kids everywhere. They walk in uniformed, staggered packs along the side of the highway in the mornings on their way to school, and they walk alongside their parents in town after school. I’m literally the only white girl in town and Sam is the only white guy, so the kids like to gawk at us and either yell “mzungu!” (foreigner or white person, I’m not sure) or shake hands while asking, “How are you?” They’re cute, but I’m being called mzungu more frequently here than I was called the equivalent farang in Thailand, where white visitors were much more common than in Kisii.

Yesterday Sam and I headed to the grocery store and stopped at a few bus stations near the stage (ridiculously busy lot with matatus en route to nearby towns and Nairobi), and today John and I had lunch at The Nile restaurant before doing some shopping for our training session tomorrow. The Nile was good – I had chicken tikka with chipati, but the best part was its location overlooking an active but not insane intersection in town. I liked being able to sit there and people-watch, which I’ve had surprisingly little opportunity to do so far. Then we walked home, things quieting down with every block away from town and back toward the Chief’s camp. We walked on the muddy edge of the road around the ravine with the harsh sun nearly obscuring my favorite view in town – this lush green valley with its few cows munching away on the grass and a couple women working quietly on their small terraces of crops along the hillside.

Arriving in Kenya

It doesn’t seem right that I’ve only been in Kenya four days – they’ve been very full days.

Scott and Claire picked me up from the airport Wednesday night, apparently just hours after there was a big uproar at the airport as a large crowd protested that the Ugandan opposition leader was boarding a plane from Nairobi to be the face of opposition protests in Uganda. But my only slight worry came when the customs agent stopped Susan, my Kenyan classmate, and began pointing at me while talking to her. I was, in fact, carting 50.5 lbs of water filter parts that I hadn’t declared. Anyway, that was all fine. I met Scott and Claire, and we traveled to a very nice Mennonite guesthouse on the west side of Nairobi. I was wide awake that night – the 7 hour delay at O’Hare on Monday made me incredibly tired that day, but it actually set me right for the Dutch & Kenyan time zones I’d soon be entering.

On Thursday we drove 5 hours toward Eldoret (northwest Kenya), and arrived at a school in Kapsabet to launch that school’s water filter. All of the schoolchildren were there, with a strong parent/community presence as well. The parents and teachers finished installing the filter (user participation is critical to Aqua Clara’s business model) and got it running. The headmaster made a speech, then invited Scott and me to do the same. I didn’t have much to say, given that was literally my first hour of working with ACI, but I introduced myself, said I’d just arrived in Kenya and I thanked them for welcoming me. There were very excited to be the first school I visited, and a parent made an incredibly awkward speech about that. (“A child is created in the lust of love and born into a pool of blood. So we are happy that you, with your international body, are here to help these children.”) With no real idea how to respond, I just said thank you.

Then, after I flirted with the idea of fainting (we hadn't eaten since breakfast and had climbed a few thousand feet in altitude that afternoon), I went outside to hang out with the school kids. They were eager to talk about football, their English classes, youth in the U.S. and American music, especially rap and hip-hop. They sang a church hymn and asked me sing along. One boy said that they wanted to ‘be more like the niggers in America.’ I said okay, but asked if he knew that wasn’t a great word to say. Shocked, he reported hearing 50 Cent and Lil Wayne use it. I gently explained that some black people use it kindly toward other black people, but that it’s often a negative, “not nice” word. I offered that I would never say that word. When he asked what words are better, I said that some say “black” while others say “African American;” I say black because the majority of my black friends and acquaintances say black. I asked which the students think sounds better, and everyone who offered an opinion said African American. So – impromptu discussion about racial identity in the U.S.

Thursday through Sunday morning we worked in Eldoret and stayed at Aqua Clara’s rented house there. I accompanied Steven, a graduate engineering student from Purdue University, while he trained 7 Moi University undergrads on performing some water quality tests (turbidity and bacteria). Claire also provided the students with an excellent overview of Aqua Clara and how the biosand filters operate – I found that very helpful. Saturday, the four of us (Claire, Scott, Steven and I) worked 12+ hours writing procedures, fixing timelines, etc. Steven and I randomized our testing sites in a statistically sound way, as the tests and research we do this summer will be published and used by ACI for program and fund development.

Today, Sunday, was more relaxed in comparison to the non-stop work of the past few days. We drove 3 hours to our apartment in Kisii, had a late lunch in town and drove around a bit, and hung out with Sam, my roommate. More on the apartment and the town later. Sam’s cool, so that’s a huge plus. I have some hesitations about how little I’m supposed to venture out on my own – people like Scott, Claire and a Kenyan friend have sufficiently scared me into being much more careful here than I’ve been in the past. I like to say that I’m always aware of my surroundings and I’m always on the lookout for sketchy situations, but that I’ve never let those concerns stop me from moving around and behaving as I want to. Here, though, it seems that may not fly. I’ve been requested to never go anywhere alone, and I’m displeased with that.

In other happy news, Sam has just recovered from having both malaria and typhoid last week. Claire had salmonella, an amoeba and a water-borne parasite simultaneously last week. And as of today, Scott turned an awful shade of green-gray and felt faint. His hospital visit this evening confirms amoeba. I’m still healthy, and I’ve been here four full days!