Aug 4, 2012 - Meeting Amusha folks and materials shopping

Started off the day with freezing 7am outdoor showers! With really low water pressure…we could use a Showergy shower right now. Too bad we haven’t built one here yet.

We rode a Citi Hoppa bus to town and met up with Daniel to take a matatu to Kwa Njenga, the slum area he lives in. He took us to SIDAREC (Slums Information Development and Resource Center), where a communication session was being led by a very animated lady named Eva. Davis was also there.

The session was conducted in a mixture of English and Swahili, but they were really good about translating for us and including us, so it was a lot of fun. When the session ended, Daniel introduced our project to some of the attendees and invited anyone interested to stay behind and join in. We met several other members of the team he recruited to work with us, and after we gave them a brief overview of our project plans, they took us to the Amusha headquarters.

The Amusha Youth Organization built the bio-center in collaboration with Oxfam GB. The guys we met did the groundwork and built the actual biogas converter under direction from an engineer, though it’s currently not in operation because of groundwater accumulation issues.

The area that the bio-center was built on used to be a trash dump, the remnants of which can still be seen in the surroundings shown below. They’re trying to get rid of the last bits by incineration. This picture was taken right in front of the bio-center.

The youth group meets weekly (officially, though informally pretty much every day) inside the center on Saturdays.

 

The room the group meets in. Davis told us the places on the wall where the paint is peeling off (the brown spots) are where the kids have practiced their karate skills. The Amusha group started off as a community soccer organization, and they have multiple teams of different age groups.

They also showed us these portable toilets that they’ve just conducted a pilot study of, selling for 700 KSH. They’re used at night when it’s too dangerous to walk outside to a bathroom, and the waste is collected in the morning.

The office space they use.

Their soccer teams

After showing us the center, Daniel, Davis, and Elly brought us around Kwa Njenga to take a look at the living conditions and stores close by. Walking down the street, we encountered high-fives all-around and choruses of “how are you?” following us everywhere we went.

A corridor between plots. There are six households living on this plot, each in 10’x10’ rooms. Daniel proposed setting up showers in these corridors.

A church in the slums.

After looking around a bit, they took us to find some of the materials we need for the showers. We were able to find a lot of the materials nearby in the slum.

Clara and Elly checking out some PPE pipes at a hardware store.

We asked the welder to make us a sample pipe holder to connect the pipes to the board at the bottom of the shower

The parts we bought today:

4 elbow joints

4 T joints

2 13-ft tubes of 20mm PPE pipe

2 13-ft tubes of 25mm PPE pipe

2 13-ft tubes of 32mm PPE pipe

60 ft of clear PVC tubing

2 blades for cutting the pipes

The total was 4070 KSH, a bit pricy. We're planning to go into town in the next few days and see if we can find cheaper prices.