Issue

This week revolved around issuing top dressing to farmers.  Top dressing is fertilizer you place on your crops after they have been growing for a while to strengthen them and increase yield.  We issued just shy of 600 bags of top dressing, each bag covering one acre of maize!

(Note: I've put a picture link and link to Nuru on the right hand side.  Just click on the picture to get to more.  I'll be adding pictures occasionally to the folder so keep an eye out for new ones if you want a visual on my work in Kenya!)

The week started off pretty strong with a lot of concentration on the turn over between the water and sanitation (w+s) manager from the previous team and myself.  We spent most of Monday going over the long term plans of the two main projects Nicole is handing over to me, rain water catchment systems and the four deep wells we are hoping to drill.  It was a pretty intense meeting but thankfully we still have two weeks to hash out the details so we should make it.  I also haven't forgotten that I still need to write about how the rain water catchment system works, I'm hoping by next week.

Personally this week was a little rough.  Late last week, I came down with some sort of sickness that tore me up.  We have some pretty intense antibiotics to handle really bad stuff we may encounter.  It's call cipro (Ciprofloxacin) and as my teammate Aerie describes it, it's an atomic bomb for your body, it'll take out anything.  Thankfully, I was able to pull a JFK and avoid taking the cipro because my body fought off the bugs by Wednesday.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I had a chance to meet the 48 w+s representatives.  The w+s representatives are members of larger groups, from about 5 to 10, that participate in specific training for w+s.  They report back to their larger groups and teach them what they have learned at their training in order to more organically spread knowledge.  It's a much more effective way to pass on information than having wazungu (white man, aka anyone not from Africa) stand up an preach to a large group.  The w+s representatives were a little confused at first and were talking amongst themselves trying to figure out who I was.  Lucas, the Kenyan leg to our tripod, thought it was best to let them discuss and only introduce me a half an hour later.  When Nicole asked about introducing me right away, he said, "Ahhhhh, no," a typical Lucas phrase, this time accompanied by a sly smile.  Lucas's planned worked out well.  People had pretty much every conceivable idea thought out except my real role.  They weren't aware that Nicole was leaving near the end of March but they understood it completely that we were basically tag teaming the project.

Thursday and Friday were basically manual labour days.  We spent the entirety of both days doling out top dressing to the farmers.   Jake and I, the brutes that we are, worked to move bags around depending on how many acres farmers were planting.  Each bag was 50 kg (110 lbs) so it was good to have four hands on a bag.  Janine, Healthcare Progam Manager for the first team, and her Kenyan counterpart, Nelly, checked in the farmers and told us how many acres each farmer needed bags for, one bag per acre.  We were a well oiled machine.  Well actually, not at all.  A lot of farmers forgot their receipts the first day so we had to double check their identities and re-write receipts.  The farmers on the first day didn't really know what time to come either so we had a little trouble with having to wait excessively long for farmers to pick up their top seed.  The second day was a little better because we were able to get the word out better through James and Andrew, the two Kenyans heading up the agriculture program with Jake.

Friday was quite a successful day for the w+s program.  Nicole had been waiting for months to meet with the district office of the water ministry of Kenya.  A district is about the size of a county in the US.  On Friday morning, we were able to finally get a meeting with the district manager and his deputy.  Nicole had been under the weather but was able to muster the strength to take the 35 minute ride to Kehancha in a matatu to meet with the ministry.   A matatu is basically a taxi that gets over packed with people traveling from city to city.  We sat 5 across the front, four in the middle, and two in the trunk, all slammed in a Toyota Corolla station wagon, a stick shift no less.  Being packed like sardines was well worth it though because we had a great talk with the ministry and it sounds like there may be some opportunities to work corroboratively together.  It is always nice to work through an existing government entity but sometimes we need to be careful to not step on toes.

So basically this week I got sick, met a bunch of Nuru members, worked out for two days straight, and then met the president of Kenya disguised as the head of the district's water ministry.  Who knows what next week will bring?

seven new pictures