Friday, November 14, 2008
errr...whoops
Hey all,
apologies for the Wishabi email you may or may not have received...
its a site I joined that a friend from university created, but I
accidentally did the whole "invite everyone in your address book"
thing... sorry about that
Steve
Thursday, November 13, 2008
I've added you as a friend on Wishabi
I've added you as a friend on Wishabi
Hi scheesy.waterforlife,Here's the link: http://www.wishabi.com/start/scheesy.waterforlife
Thanks,
Steve Chee
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Happy New Year!
If you've been following the news at all, you've probably heard that Kenya is a little unstable at the moment. Federal elections were held on December 27, and because democracy is maturing in this country, the opposition was very strong (which is a good thing). Unfortunately, the president unwisely decided to rig the election, and so for a number of days now, there have been hundreds of violent clashes across the country. This is super sad because Kenya is widely considered to be one of the safest countries on the continent and has so much potential for meaningful, lasting development.
Teresa and I are currently stuck in Nairobi. We're safe and sound in the SP guest house, but can't go outside, so we've been passing the time by watching the news and eating toast. It's pretty boring. Thankfully, everything is calm in our area of town...we just need to wait until it's safe to go back to Mombasa. We're hoping to "make a break for it" by sometime next week.
Please pray that the political crisis is resolved soon so that people (including Teresa and I) can get on with life and go back to work; that no one else would be hurt; for the SP staff stranded in Western Kenya; and that I would have patience.
Oh, and if you're the worrier-type, please do yourself a favour and don't watch CNN. Things are generally much better in Nairobi than they'd like you to think.
Take care!
"And I will grant peace in the land, and you will lie down and no one will make you afraid. I will remove savage beasts from the land, and the sword will not pass through your country." Leviticus 26:6
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Hey! Merry Christmas!
Here's a picture of our house. I know you've been curious...
We live on the left side; you can see our open door. The big black thing is our water tank, which holds our precious supply of rain water that we use to drink and cook and bathe with. I took this picture standing right in front of our latrine, so that gives you an idea of about how far away our toilet is from our door. Oh yah... and there are some of my rafikis (friends), hanging out in our backyard.
We've held a few community mobilization meetings this month so we can better understand the needs of the community. The goal of these meetings was to bring people together to discuss their community, identify their strenghts and weaknesses, and brainstorm about ways that they can address problems that their community faces. This is a picture of our first meeting, held in the church in Vigurungani. It was a super interesting day.
That's me, squatting under the window.
We've also been taking every opportunity we can to just hang out with the community. We've gotten to know some really cool people and have been blessed with the chance to live and work, eat and play right alongside them.
That's all for now. Sorry this is brief.
Hope everyone is doing well and that you have a great Christmas! God bless!
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Tea with Friends
After finishing up a community mobilization meeting in the village of Kariaka, we were invited to a Maasai household (actually, we were invited to many households) for tea, ugali, and chicken. The picture above is of Teresa, Judy and Winnie (all water interns) talking with our new friend, Depress. I've already developed a strong liking for this Maasai community, and am super excited to start working with the people there.
We sipped tea, swatted flies, and watched the cows come home. The Maasai love their cattle.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Banner Update
I finally managed to overcome a horrendous connection to the internet and a mouse-less PC laptop (I'll be honest, I miss my Powerbook) to get a new banner image up. Now all the non-SP staff who read this can put a face to all the interns. Apologies for it taking so long for me to get this posted
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Night in the Village
After working all day building filters and teaching health and hygiene lessons, Winnie, Judy, Teresa and I made our way through the village to our home for the night. There is nothing extraordinary about Kazamoyo; in fact, the village, with its two churches, small primary school, and handful of shops (all constructed of mud but the school), is one of thousands of similar, and equally “mundane”, communities in Kenya. But, as I have been learning and reminded of daily, life, often abundant, happens here too.
Tired and dirty and followed by a trail of laughing children, we walked through the village, stopping a dozen times to greet people outside their homes. They were pleased we were spending the night in their community and wanted to welcome us. After many stops we finally came to our host’s house: Pastor Francis and Agneta live in a humble and clean mud home with their five children. Married before they became Chrisitans, Francis says that he was always mourning and that he struggled with alcohol. One day, on his way to visit a very sick friend, he met some strangers who told him about Jesus, and he knew then that he needed and wanted to become a Christian. Francis is now the pastor of the small church in Kazamoyo, and is happy, in a serene and quite way.
His wife, Agneta is one of the people I’ve become most attached to in Kazamoyo. She is forever welcoming, and clearly delights in being with us and serving us. On both occasions that we stayed at her home she tended to our needs in every way. Crouching in their smoky mud and thatch kitchen, we helped her make chipati over an open fire and she talked freely with us about her life. (Oh, if I only spoke more Swahili and could hear her stories straight from her own mouth!). We spent the evening this way, talking with Agneta playing with the children from the community outside their home, and although the evening was uncomfortably hot and rats kept me up at night, I sincerely enjoyed our stay in Kazamoyo.
Many, many times I’ve heard people talk about the generosity of “the poor,” but during these overnight stays in Kazamoyo, I’ve be blessed by truly feeling it. Aside from slaughtering two chickens for us to eat (a significant sacrifice); aside from them setting up our tents inside their small house instead of outside, displacing themselves from one room in their two-room house; and aside from carrying water from many kilometers away for us to wash with, Agneta and others from Kazamoyo have been generous us not just by serving us, but by really welcoming us: their attitudes of acceptance and humility, were, to me, unbelievable and unexpected.
Life isn’t easy for these people. Many are sick; few children attend school; water is precious and dirty and far away. They are neglected by the government and are vulnerable to conniving middle-men, who rip them off by undervaluing their goats and sheep. They are without work, yet have many mouths to feed. I wonder why I’m really here, because it seems like change, any change at all, is so slow to come that I’ll never even see it in my lifetime.
Both Francis’ and Agneta’s families have practically disowned them because of their faith. But they are strong in it; utterly devoted, in fact. I can see that they are a light in that community and that they envision abundant life for their friends and neighbors. I have a lot to learn from their faith and hope.
There are many other things I have to share with you but it’s almost 1am, and can’t do it now. When I come home, ask me about Peter and John, and about how the kids in Kazamoyo sing and play their jerry-can drum. Oh! and ask me about how matatus (Kenyan shuttle buses) drive on the sidewalk when they don’t want to wait in traffic, and about how I held our supper (chicken, and alive) on my lap all the way home before it was slaughtered. They’re good stories.
Oh, and just for the record: don’t assume by this blog entry that I haven’t felt, as I wrote above, awkward or out of place, or even afraid, during my time here in Kenya. I feel that way all the time. BUT God in His mercy has blessed me with more moments affirmation than of awkwardness, so when they do come, I’m strong enough to bear them.
Friday, November 16, 2007
... it's gettin hot in huurrrrr
I wasn't tired last night and JUST as I put my head down to drift off to jt's little 'Sigur Ros sleepy time mix' I heard a huge commotion coming from the back courtyard of the Kimboko Town Hotel where Steve and I have been staying since arriving back from South Africa... awaiting our funding to continue our project. Thinking nothing of it I continued on my fast trek into dreamland... until I heard our Malawian night guard running down the hallway banging on the doors yelling 'FIRE'
Perhaps its our western 'conspiricy theory...' : I personally like to blame our recent trip to Joburg where people talk about crime more than weather... but when I heard him yelling fire my initial reaction was NOT...'oh God do I have my passport, money, favorite tshirt and retainer!~?' (of course jt's personal list of what to grab in a fire) ....NO... my initial thought was... SURE... they are scamming a fire...getting all of us half naked in the parking lot w/all our stuff...and ROBBING US. Great. We're DEAD.
It's a unique and truly intimate feeling being woken in the middle of the night... stepping into the hallway of your hotel ....looking into the faces of all your fellow night lodgers sceptical faces... and seeing what they wear, or do not wear... to bed. A sort of 'stripping away of all inhibitions for the common purpose of seeing if our lives are in danger' A sort of United Nations in the buff... HA. " oh hellllllooooo didn't we meet at breakfast.... "
Steve-o was fast asleep- already in dream land.. and JT had to 'save his life' ... yes i know... I'm such a hero... no mouth to mouth was necessary! Remember.... I was a trained lifeguard...
I stepped out onto the second floor balcony with other lodgers to view the street. It's funny how EVERYONE has/owns the SAME fanny/pack/money belts.... clutching their documents/money.... I guess there was a fire in the restaurant Don Brioni's below the hotel... at the time it didn't seem that serious... until smoke started to fill the hallway.
jt
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Construction time in Kazamoyo
October 10, 2007
We've had our first real taste of living in the field, and I must say I enjoy staying in the village much more that driving back and forth on the worst roads in the world every day.
We are working in Kazamoyo but living in the village of Samburu. This is necessary because SP works in a lot of different in villages in the area and we want to avoid accusations that we favour the village we live in. Anyway, we were under the impression that our house wasn’t ready yet, so we had planned to sleep in tents for the first few nights. But, it turned out that the work was done after all, so we moved in, setting up our bunk beds, mosquito nets, and camping stove and cleaning up everything as best we could. The house (not a hut, unfortunately) is great. It's made of stone and is quite large, and we even have running water. We also have rats, frogs (in the shower, toilet and sink), bats (one of which died on Teresa’s mattress – she wasn’t too happy about that), and a snake that lives under the house and eats the bathroom frogs. We’ve also had chickens and a hedgehog saunter through the house, and we have a huge, and I mean huge, spider living right above our front door. His name is Mfupi, which means “short,” and I’ve been told he’s poisonous. We'll be living here for a month. We've already made friends with the neighbour kids, who have made themselves at home in our house.
We spent Monday and Tuesday in Kazamoyo, constructing of our filter-building work site. This was an unexpected change in plans: we were supposed to be doing filter installation in a different village this week, but someone had died from AIDS, and when there is a death in the community no one goes to work. Apparently, delays in work plans are quite common due to frequent funerals.
Anyway, we need to build a shelter/construction area to shade us from the sun when we are building filters, and to store our molds and other supplies. Basically, we're building a fairly large structure with nothing but pangas (like a machete), and saws, and nails (no hammer), and the whole time we were working I felt like I'd stepped back into cave-man days. We started by pacing out the dimensions of the shelter and then marking it with sticks. We dug holes with the panga where the main supports of the structure would go, then went into the bush to cut down trees (really thorny trees that have ants living inside them that will come out and bite you) and then stripped off the branches. Then we carried them back to the site and straightened them - yes – we learned how to straighten a stick. This is a fairly time consuming process that involves making lots of strategic cuts along the trunk and then inserting small pieces of wood into the trunk to force it to bend one way or another, thereby straightening it out. Then we took the timber and formed the walls, putting each tree into the hole we had dug. We strung rope made of tree bark across the tops of the timber (poles) to make sure they were level. Then we went back into the bush to cut more trees for cross supports, and started nailing them on the poles to make the walls. We don't have a hammer, so we used the flat side of a wrench. This has taken tree days.
We also built a slab for latrine we are going to be building behind the village church. There is no latrine in the entire village yet, so we are going to be building a lot of them. The slab is the concrete block with a hole in it (that you pee into), that covers the latrine hole.
Of course, I have no idea how to do any of this, so we have been working with and learning from the men in the village. There are about five who have been helping us, one of which is the pastor of the church. It's really challenging because 1) their first language is Duruma, not Swahili, and 2) they are men and we are not. I could tell that at first they didn't know what to think of us. Construction is seen as men's work, and it was strange to them for us to be there. But, eventually they got used to us and started to see that we wanted to be part of the work and to learn from them, and that made them happy (I think). It's crazy how you can communicate with people who don't speak your language if you really want to.
I'm also excited to work more with the women because I think they will be a bit more accepting of us. The first day we came to the village they showed up at the work site to check us out, but I've haven't seen any of them since then. I've been told that since building the work site is seen as "men's work," they will wait until the site is ready and then come to help with filter construction. I hope so.
Oh yah, one cool thing: The village church is about 20 steps away from our construction site and inside the church there is a big drum made of cow hide. On our first day, a group of kids hauled the drum out of the church and sat a few feet away and beat on it while we worked. It sounded amazing. Yesterday I got to try, and I was so much fun. I'm hoping five months in Africa I might be enough time acquire a sense of rhythm!
A New Name
October 3, 2007
After spending a week in Nairobi and two weeks in Mombasa preparing for the field, Abraham, Winnie, Judy, Teresa and I have finally begun our work in the villages. (In case you need a reminder, Abraham is the Household Water Program project manager, Winnie and Judy are the two interns from Nairobi, and Teresa is my fellow Canadian water intern).
The first half of our internship will be spent in Kazamoyo, a remote village comprised of about 80 households. We sleep in another village named Samburu and make the rather uncomfortable, hour long drive out to Kazamoyo each day, on the washed-out, bolder-strewn road. Getting there is usually an adventure, and I’ve been enjoying riding in the back of the SP truck, squinting against the wind as I try to keep my eyes peeled for elephants.
How’s the village? What is it like? Being here is a dream come true. I’ve always wanted to go to Africa, and now I’m definitely in the middle of rural African life. Winnie says Kazamoyo looks like Sudan: mud huts, red earth and blue sky. The ground is as hard as concrete and everything that grows is covered in thorns. The sun assaults your body as you bend to labour beneath its glare. But as harsh as the landscape is, the people are beautiful. I don’t speak much Swahili, and even less Duruma, but communication does not always have to be verbal. Handshakes and smiles speak louder than words, and despite not knowing us, people have been very generous in welcoming us. Rarely have I ever felt such hospitality.
Although we will be working in Kazamoyo for the first half of the internship, we spent our first week in the field in a village called Mwangoloto. This community was the recipient of the last BioSand water filter project, so we went to meet the people and do follow-up in the homes of filter beneficiaries.
Follow-up consists of visiting households that have already received filters to check up on how it is being maintained, if it is being used frequently, if it is working properly, and if the health of the people has improved. This is also a time to review health and hygiene practices (ie: hand-washing and latrine use, etc). So, off we went, with our BSF follow-up sheets, full of anticipation, to check in with a number of households who had received filters two months earlier. It was cool to finally see the filters being used by the real people, and we visited about 13 households over the course of a day and a half. For the first time I was able to witness how rural Kenyans really live.
If you have any sort of romantic notions about mud huts (and you probably don’t) let me just confirm that at first glance they leave much to be desired. The walls are constructed of intertwined sticks and then packed and covered with mud on both the inside and out. Most huts are very dark inside because there are no windows, or only very small ones. The poorest people live in huts with thatched roofs, and wealthier people in the village have roofs made of metal sheeting, called mabati. (Even in rural Kenya, where at first glance everyone appears to be desperately and equally poor, you find economic stratification). Yet people here are very happy, and they are eager to share what they have – and they share it with us! The people who have come to “help” them! We’ve already been blessed with sodas, kuku (chicken) and ugali several times, and I know that in order to provide these gifts to us the givers have made substantial sacrifices. Talk about being humbled.
Anyway, doing follow-up was interesting and frustrating. We went through a check-list to evaluate of how the filter is being used and maintained, where beneficiaries get their water, what other steps they go through to treat it, what hygiene practices the household observes, how their health has improved since receiving the filter, etc, etc. Most of the households in the region are polygamous, so the wife who is responsible for filtering water would conducted the interview with us. My Swahili isn’t so good, so this was challenging because I really want to talk to and understand these people. For now, I need to have almost everything translated, otherwise I have no clue what’s going on. However, frustration with the language barrier has provided the motivation I need to work my butt off to learn Swahili, so I guess my frustration with my inability to communicate is a good thing.
Doing follow-up was hard for another reason: even though I desired to enter the homes of each family as humbly as possible and interact with them in a way that affirmed them and upheld their dignity, I still felt like the “white expert” coming to tell the “ignorant African” what to do. I hate that. I know that SP’s goal is to for its staff to work in communities as servants, not kings, and we are striving to do just that, but there are cultural barriers that make this hard to do, even if you are very deliberate about it. I’m very thankful that Abraham, Judy and Winnie are Kenyan, because that gives us some credibility, but it still feels awkward. I realize that I have a lot of learning to do about cross-cultural interaction and that I’m going to have to expect that things will be awkward until people come to know us. After all, how would you feel if a stranger came into your home and asked you (even in a gentle, respectful way) about the last time you or your children had diarrhea??
After a day and a half of follow-up we went to work digging in the hot hot sun. The village’s water source (a dam) has almost completely dried up because the people neglected to maintain it, so now it resembles a large mud puddle. Run-off from the steep sides of the dam has caused it to fill with silt, so we set to work de-silting the dam. If you’re confused about what I mean by “dam,” then picture a large pond, 50 ft long, 30 feet wide and about 7 feet deep, that has completely dried up except for a small puddle at one end. It is here that people draw water and goats come to drink.
Anyway, we arrived at the site, met the people - greeting them in clumsy Swahili, and got down to work. The men were in the dam with picks, shovels and sledge hammers, digging up the dirt and mud, smashing the large rocks, and then shoveling them into 20L jerry cans for the women to pick up, balance on their heads, and carry up and out of the dam. The really big chunks of rock (the ones that are too big for the 20L buckets) are balanced on the women’s heads without being put in a container. They do this wearing skirts, flip flop sandals, and sometimes with a baby tied onto their back. After greeting everyone and shaking many hands, it was our turn to try (gulp!) They loaded up a bucket of dirt and rocks, perched it on my head, and watched with big smiles and cheers as I made the precarious journey up the side of the dam to dump the bucket at the top. I thought I might wipe out, but I did it!!!! And then I did it again. And again. And again.
We worked for a long while, resting now and then under a very thorny tree. Despite my horrible Swahili, people were very happy when I tried to talk with them, and I realized that they genuinely appreciate it when mzungus (white folk) aren’t afraid to try and speak their language, even though we might sound a little silly. It was very humbling, but they were very gracious. At the end of the day we all gathered under the tree and Abraham addressed them for a minute or two, encouraging them to continue working together on the dam. Then he asked each of the interns to stand up and introduce ourselves and tell the people our impression of their village. I said as much as I could in Swahili (which again produced many big smiles), and Abraham translated the rest. It felt really good. Then the people gave us new village names - they called me Kabemba, meaning “small grain.”
Then the community asked one of us to pray to close the meeting, so I stood and thanked God for the people of Mwangoloto and the work He is doing there. I prayed that He would be with them as they work together and that He would give them sweet water from the dam. I asked God to bless each person there that He would unite them in love as they work together. Then we all said good-bye and shook hands, and the children waved and chased our Land Rover down the road.
If the rest of our time in Kenya is like few days we spent in Mwangoloto, then I know I’m going to love it here.