Kisumu & Suam Days

For the weekend of the 18^th and 19^th we had a meeting with SWAP (Safe Water and AIDS Project) in Kisumu. SWAP has been running a pilot study of ceramic water filters in the Nyanza region. We also decided to use this opportunity to see a new part of the country. Kisumu is a nice city settled on the edge of Lake Victoria, it’s more humid, and apparently it rains a lot, but the weather was cooperative until we were leaving. 

After our meeting with SWAP we settled in and decided to enjoy ourselves and have a bit of a team building weekend. We started with a session of “toastmasters” as organized by Abdullah, to help work on public speaking skills, which was fun and funny to see how everyone reacted. I haven’t had as much public speaking experience so I found it quite interesting and good practice.

That night we decided to go out to the town. It was actually deemed to be my birthday, because most people had not been there for my actual birthday. We went out for supper and I got the Gladiator DVD. A week later we were to stay up until 3am to watch the end of the DVD only to find the climax of the movie was not on the disc. After dinner we went to  a nearby club and danced for some time.

The next morning we got up relatively early to go to Tilapia Beach a restaurant on Lake Victoria. From there we went on a boat ride on the lake. It was pretty ridiculous because the boat could easily be described as “dilapidated” or “not-water-worthy.” It constantly took on water which the guy driving the boat would constantly be bailing, and if he started talking a lot he would forget to bail and our feet would get wet. Just before we got to the dock the seat I was sitting on broke. But despite, or due to, this, it was actually really fun. We saw hippos, they were in the water, so there wasn’t too much to see, but they were still hippos, and the lake had other sights as well. After the boat ride we had tilapia from the lake, it was very good fish.

After we were done with the lake, we wandered over to the market and spent some time there. It was interesting to hear everyone, they all had the same merchandise and same sales pitch. When we were done with the market we got ready to go home, but we had to wait for a couple of hours because our matatu was late, so we went home in the dark and the rain, which was a little scary, but we made it.

With the excitement of Kisumu behind us we readjusted our focus to Kitale. We launched our first big promotion on Wednesday at Suam supermarket. What was originally intended to be a one day event turned into three days we’ll call Suam days. On these days we brought our Kenyan salespeople to pitch our product infront of one of the big Kitale supermarkets known as Suams Supermarket. The response was very good. Everyone from the team pitched in and sold filters. I even became a salesperson for a while. This despite my aversion to salespeople. We managed to sell 25 filters each day that we set up and now when I walk down the street people don’t just call me mzungu or (Peter) Crouch, they also called me CeraMaji.

With the success of Suam days we decided to find a place in Kitale that would agree to store our filters to make things easier for us. That place ended up being “the coffeeshop” a place on the edge of town where many NGO workers congregate. On the morning of the 29^th Andre and took the first big shipment of about 50 filters to the coffeeshop. By the end of that day our new shipment of buckets had also arrived from Nairobi. Which was very important, because the sudden jump in sales created the need for more supplies, and our current stock was running low. The buckets arrived in Kitale, so we had to pay extra to get the driver to take the buckets to Kiminini. When we got there we found the truck couldn’t make it all the way down the narrow road to the factory. Andre and I were freaking out, it was getting dark and we had 1000 filters to unload from a truck and it was getting late and dark.

Our solution: Child labour. Mama Sandra helped organize many kids from the school to help us unload the filters and bring them to the factory. At some point in the process I realized I was just getting the way and I stopped to take pictures instead.

Busia

Abdullah, Jessica and I were in Kitale with Joshua and while we were waiting for Joshua to finish at the market we got into the back of a Kiminini taxi. Then two school girls got into the front seat, and Joshua got into the drivers seat. “Did you buy the taxi?” Joshua I asked. “Oh, yeah” he replied, but then the cab driver squeezed himself in so that there were four people in the front two seats. We told Joshua to get in the back but he wouldn’t listen. There’s not far to go he told us. After about 5 minutes of driving Abdullah joked “are you working the clutch too?”

“Oh no, you can’t do that, it’s impossible to coordinate between two people”, Joshua said. It was about 10 more minutes before the girls got out and Joshua went to the passenger seat.

As for myself I can say that the past couple weeks were very interesting. I spent some time learning about various ways of marketing and education about our filters and about clean water practices in general.

First I spent a lot of time in church, even on Saturdays as there are many Seventh Day Adventists in the area. Some of the churches were quite remote and we accessed them by a car we rented. There is always a lot of negotiations involved in this and myself not knowing how far the churches always are, it makes for a lot of fun. Trips to churches gave Justin and me a good chance to observe the workers as they went out and promoted their filters as they had been doing before we had arrived. We were also very warmly received at many of the churches and we even got to sit down with community members for lunch on some occasions.

Besides going to churches I also spent some time with Jessica and Kelsey who’d developed an educational program to take to communities. They had a very detailed, thorough and well polished program. With us we also took Mary who helped to translate as many rural people only speak Swahili.

Many of the sermons we listened to were in Swahili as well. This makes marketing and education in such environments all the more challenging unless there is someone there to translate. Much of what we did involved trying to convince such groups to start merry go round type purchase arrangements whereby each group member contributes to the purchase of a filter for one group member every week until every group member has a filter. With the help of some local woman with the knowledge of many CBO’s, womens groups, and self help groups (the self being the group), Jessica and Kelsey were quite successful in getting some of these started.

To further learn about education and to work with other NGO’s we also went on a trip to visit AMPATH in Busia. Busia is right on the border with Uganda, and is only about 3 hours away. To get there we instructed them to get there at 6. They didn’t arrive until 7. But we really probably should have planned for that. But things went well, it was very interesting to see the city. I took a photo of a gasoline truck (or as they are here “petrol lorry”) which I found funny because all the petrol trucks around here are like this, no warnings signs other than usually a questionable looking tanker with the word “danger” painted across it.

I also got a quick visit to Uganda, really quick though. We stopped at the border to enquire about the cost of shipping the filter to Uganda. As we were being led about by customs officials we were taken to the Ugandan side of the fence. There was there was a big billboard of the current president and it listed the number of rebel forces that he’d defended the country against since 1986. I’d of taken a picture but all the people with guns were enough reason not to. I didn’t even manage to get my passport stamped.

After this we headed back to Kiminini, and settled and got back to work with other things. I managed to listed to the final game between Vancouver and Boston, but I fell asleep during the first intermission, and by the time I woke up the third was starting. It wasn’t much of a game.

Pickpockets and Footballs

This week didn’t have the best of starts, when I was in Kitale I lost my cell phone when I was pick pocketed. It was two pick pocketers, one acted really bad and distracted me, while the other one apparently got my phone. After the incident I checked my pockets and noticed I still had my wallet, so I kept moving. It was quite a hassle partly because I had a lot of numbers in the phone which I had not saved elsewhere. Luckily I was able to get my old number back, but to get the old numbers back I had to stand in the Safaricom store and wait in an incredibly slow line. It took about an hour and a half but I eventually got a list of numbers that I had dialled, which was good enough for me.

On Tuesday we went down the football pitch at the school to watch Pathfinder academy take on some rival school. It was a very good game, but at some point Justin and I found a kid named Mohamed in the corner of the field playing with a soccer ball. At first we were all kicking the ball around and trying to keep the ball in the air. Eventually this turned into a game of “give-and-take” also known as keep away. The football game had been pretty one sided, so it didn’t really matter that our game was spilling onto the field. The game just kept growing until there were many kids involved, at this point the game on the pitch had concluded, so we started a small game with makeshift posts at the corner of the pitch. Apparently there were teams, and Justin and I were obviously on opposing teams, but outside of a handful of kids who I could recognize (and one who kept coming up to me and saying “go! Challenge!”) it was just  a mass of kids chasing after the soccer ball. This was even more so the case when the game took to the whole pitch. I mostly stayed on the periphery for fear of booting someone by accident. At some a kid walked up to me and challenged me to a race. I ended up running a variety of races at a variety of distances. Those kids are fast.

Justin and I also made time to work on a marketing campaign in the Kiminini area. We began by launching putting up posters, and we ended up receiving a lot calls from people interested in what we were doing. With a bit more recognition we were able to take a consignment agreement that we had drafted up to some local businesses, including Subiri’s the biggest supermarket in Kiminini (still smaller than the average dollar store in Edmonton), and a pharmacy. We also had some other adventures by producing some T-Shirt and stickers. When we were walking around with our consignment document and filters wearing our T-Shirts we ended up walking by the main market area of Kiminini, and getting mobbed by, well, a mob of curious onlookers. It actually happened twice in Kiminini, and Martin and Collins were all to happy to explain our filter to everyone. There also several other interesting things going on, first of all the T-Shirts were a huge hit, many people asked for them, or if they could buy them. Secondly we printed a bunch of stickers, they were a hit, we gave some away to kids, to adults, and we were going to ask the taxis to put them on their cars, but their weren’t too many of them so we approached the moto bodas (motorcycle taxis) many of whom stuck multiple stickers all over their bikes. We visited two other markets that were a bit smaller than Kiminini, and we had similar results, drawing large crowds. Interestingly we also found that all the markets had one character. I’m a pretty good magnet for these people, so I end up dealing with them a lot of the time. The one in Kiminini (whom I had seen many times before) introduced himself to us… “hello, I am a magistrate of the court, I am about to serve 9 years in prison… give me five shillings”

“sorry, but I could never bribe and esteemed magistrate” I told him. He still hung around.

I had another fun time on the taxis as well. This time when I got to the stage was a brand new car (literally the car was new) and I was the last one to get in, and we were off. I have to reiterate that all the taxis are old, missing window cranks, missing inside panels, etc. Not this taxi, it was new, it had a CD player (there are floppy disks still for sale at the stationary store) some other disk player, and a tv screen mounted on the dash. But we got pulled over by the police again, and this time we ended up parked for about 20 mins. There were four of us piled in the back, and one the ladies literally said “Where is the justice for the people of Kenya.” They asked if there was anything like it in Canada, and we talked about such things for quite some time. Eventually the two people in the front seat got out, and a policeman got in. I got out at the first stop in Kitale and never found out where the cab went.

This weekend I also attended three Church services with Justin, Sammy, Collins, Martin and Pius to promote our filters. Seventh Day Adventism is big here so we attended a service on Saturday, and were invited for a lunch afterwards. On Sunday Martin, Collins and I attended the Salvation Army Church while Justin, Pius and Sammy went to a different Church. We eventually met them at a third Church, Kenya Assembly of God. Much of what was said was in Swahili, but there were still many English speakers and it was very good to go out and talk to people and to learn what they had to say.