Aug 3, 2012 - Mukuru Workshop

Super behind on posting — I wrote these up while we didn't have internet access. We're currently in a cyber café, which took us a long time to find since most of the shops are closed on Sundays. Unfortunately most of the pictures aren't showing up because we don't have the original files with us right now, but I'll fix those as soon as possible.

After Clara arrived in the morning on the 3rd, we headed to Sanergy’s Mukuru workshop in Kwa Ruben to meet up with Nathan and Daniel. Nathan gave us a tour of the workshop space and told us about the work Sanergy is currently doing with latrines. They have ~60 latrines installed so far, and are working to convert waste to fertilizer (a 6-month process) and trying out a biogas converter as they scale up.

We told them more about our Showergy plans afterwards, and Nathan recommended that we focus on keeping two or three concrete goals but be super flexible about the rest. I think the plan we came up with before traveling is way too detailed.

We've decided that our basic goals here are to find the materials and have two showers built by the end of the first week, then have them installed in two households for pilot testing the next (while teaching the youth team to build more), and have 10 showers installed by the end of the third week. The 10 showers might be a stretch, but we definitely need to have two built and installed. We might not end up using the creativity lesson plans that Clara came up with if there's not enough time, since our primary goal while we're here is to train the youth team to be able to run this project themselves.

Later, Davis, another Amusha member, also came to the workshop. We talked about a ton of random stuff, as shown below. Daniel and Davis made us feel so ashamed of our knowledge (mostly lack thereof) of U.S./Chinese geography, population statistics, and government. They whipped out population numbers down to the individual!

The room we moved to so we wouldn’t bother Nathan at work.

Hello/how are you? and the response in Kiswahili slang and different dialects (Luo and Kikuyu, the tribes Daniel and Davis are from).

Kenya! Daniel’s tribe (Luo) is from the west and Davis’s tribe (Kikuyu) is from central Kenya. There are 43 tribes total.

Learning about middle and last names passed down by skipping a generation.

   

Nathan led us to a matatu (Kenyan minivan) that took us to the Railway Station in town, and then we took a bus to the Junction mall so I could buy a SIM card. Sadly all the restaurants in the food court were Western or Asian, though at least we got a great super smoothie from a juice shop.