Kibera

Today was a pretty productive day, in which I was able to get a sense of how Sanergy creates their ferreocement walls and how they are building everything. I was able to see how they were doing some of their field testing by loading weight on walls and such, which I took pictures of. I don't know if I am at liberty to load the pictures on the blog but it would be nice to figure that out. Anyways, I have a better sense of how they are constructing it and what tips we can use from their experience.

After that, Ani took me into Kibera today where I talked with Daniel from Carolina For Kibera and Edwin, an operator of the toilet. Both Daniel and Edwin showed me around the villages of kibera. The slum of kibera was so much different than Mkuru Kwa Njenga in which it had a lot more people and people were a lot poorer. Rather than having the walls made out of metal as in Mkuru (an industrial area), houses were mostly made out of wood and clay. It was interesting talking to the people there and seeing what kinds of toilets exist.

Facts about showers that I learned today:

• standard cost seem to be about 5 shillings for shower (but Ani had mentioned that we shouldn't really worry about that)

• water itself costs 3/= (shillings) for 20 liters

• almost all provide soap for use

• there were several places were showerheads (or shower pipes) were installed because not enough water was being brought (drought problems)

• almost all vendors got water from the main pipeline that the city provides but the costs are ~10-11,000 /= (shillings) for installation and about 500 /= per month for consumption

• mostly men use the shower but there was one region where the women also used the shower as often as men

• most places pay for use of shower but there was one which paid via per month

• most people use “bathrooms” which are essentially a room with a drainage pipe leading out and they would often pay 3-5 /= to use the room

• no working heating locations (one place apparently stopped it because people would get electrocuted...another wants to do so but haven't done it yet)

Other things that were discussed today was the conversation that we had with Ani: (I believe Jesika is also blogging about this so it would be interesting to see what she thinks is important...please read through both)

• Where should we work at? I have mostly visited two different slums (Kibera and Mkuru). We are trying to figure out what would be more feasible because those are just two of many slums around Nairobi. There is no way that we can address all of the slums or talk to people from every slum because within each slum, there are a variety of cultures and differences. Kibera is the largest slum but the problem with that is because it is so large, it would be harder for us to understand the area. There are like pros and cons to both areas and I think we are going to focus on Mkuru Kwa Njenge because 1. less villages for us to understand, 2. there is already some showers installed, 3. the youth there seem really eager to be learning and developing for their community, 4. Sanergy seems to be expanding in that direction and it would be helpful to have more partnerships.

• What is our goal? What kind of community do we want to address? Do we want to focus on people who dont currently have showers or those who do have showers? Are we creating a demand for those who don't use showers ? What is our long term goal? I think Jesika and I have decided to take on the idea that we should try to provide showers for people who currently have tried putting together showers and have recognized the value for them but they just can't make them good enough.

• Other approaches: Ani had suggested that another approach that we can take can be to help those people who bathe inside their houses to have a better area or have some kind of improvement that can be easy to install and work so that they wouldnt have the privacy issue (we are planning on double checking)

• Materials? Nathan from Sanergy and D-Lab was suggesting that we should find aspects of our design that we would like to build and test for a few iterations even though it might not be the entire shower design itself using the materials here. Maybe we don't have a full design laid out but I think it would be useful to test certain aspects. We wanted to test out: different soaps, soil composition, what soils are available (can we make a biosand filter), what pumps are there, and what types of heating are available. If people are able to provide some other ideas, that would be great.

I think all in all, our plan is probably to

1. do some more surveying and talking to people for a few more days

2. look for some materials and actually purchase them for test

3. rebuild and redesign

Any suggestions?