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.