Material Recap and Surveying
Monday Recap--industrial area
We walked to the industrial area and talked to a few companies there to see what is available. We were mainly on the lookout for what types of pumps are available, showerheads and what types of connections for various parts. We decided that the PVC pipes are widely available in the city so we didn't really focus on them.
PIPES - we found two main types of metallic pipes that include a semirotary pipe and a drum pipe....they both were too expensive for our purposes but we have the specifications of the pumps so when we go back to the US we can reevaluate them....
showerheads- we bought a cheap shower rose but we might want to reconsider and test out different ones later...
Tuesday (today)'s surveying Results
We talked to a few landowners and a few tenants in the Kwa Njenga area again focusing specifically on what are the current costs of a bath right now and how they are dealing with the lack of water. It appears that most of the people that we hvae met so far have been using 5-10 L of water for a bath (essentially a basin full) per person.... and would pay more if they were to heat up the water.
Landowners seem to think that there isn't really much issues associated with their lands and try to play off that they have been helpful to their tenants (but we aren't sure if they are just trying to tell us this because they want to sound good in the ears of the foreigners).
I think tomorrow I am going to type up the results of the people that we have interviewed so far with some details that we have learned for people to read the raw data....
Anyways, our plan for tomorrow is to continue more surveying but I think we have a slightly better sense of what the area is like and what people would like.... Ani suggested that we should try building a small prototype for people to test using so that we can see how receptive people would be to certain things such as the water pressure from different shower heads or whatever to increase the shower experience. I think there are a lot of details that we need to work out.
posted by Michelle @ 3:11 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Great work! Once you have interviewed a comfortable number of people to get the general idea about showers, then I agree with Ani that it is helpful to show the community some hands-on prototypes. But I also think that the issue of water access (as you described last weekend) is a serious one, and should somehow be addressed as soon as possible. Have you asked the community what they think might work in terms of this issue? NGOs? Have you seen any working water delivery models in one of Nairobi's other slum areas?
(Somehow my brainstorming brings me to "rainwater", but I think you should probably brainstorm some other alternatives first.)
Hey Kevin,
I feel like we have a general idea about showers, which I'll put in the next post...
we have been askign the community what they think and they haven't really been able to think of any good solutions for their problem. And it doesn't look like the current water delivery models are that great in which it is either direct piping or buying from water vendor.
Rainwater doesn't exactly work because it doesn't really rain that often all year round so i don't think it will be that feasible. For example, even though it has rained three or four times since we have been here, it isn't actually that common for it to rain right now...i think they said that April-may and nov.
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