In recognition of the variety of cultural and environmental differences between America and Kenya, EWB-MSU tries to encourage travelers to come up with a myriad of project ideas to pursue while on the ground and to plan for each to not go according to plan. One of the challenges of being dynamic and adaptive, is that we each feel like we should have accomplished more. When one project slows, we pick another up. Then, when we watch the Khwisero countryside pick up speed through the windows of a country-bus, it is too late; our trip is over.

This is my third trip to Khwisero and now, in my second month in Kenya, I’ve seen three teams of students come through and I’ve ridden that country-bus with them. I’ve seen them torn between their home and its comforts and the new home that has invariably been created for them by the community of Khwisero. Each time I return to Khwisero with a “To-Do” list. “Review the EWB-Khwisero financial logs” and “pay the hardware invoices” are easy tasks; “Restructure the Board, work with everyone to create a new constitution” and “Save the world” seem to be a bit more difficult.

As the remaining EWB-MSU member, I will be responsible for ensuring that the summer’s projects are finished and are appropriately transitioned to community ownership. We have four composting latrines that are receiving their final plastering and will be outfitted with plumbing, water catchment, moving walls and incinerators for feminine products. The MEM pipeline, after its third-year of planning, has recently laid foundations for a water tower and the first phase of trench—over a mile—has been dug thanks to community contributions. The first phase of the pipeline will serve Mundeku Primary School and the community through two additional water points. The sum of all three phases will serve five primary schools, two health clinics and a large portion of the community through roadside water kiosks. Our last project has been several years in the making as well: a water catchment system at Ekatsombero Primary School in the Eastern stretches of the District. The catchment system has undergone several redesigns throughout the summer but our team in the States is working with local contractors to come up with a final design that is amenable to all involved.

In addition to the material projects, I’ve been tasked with finding ways to build the capacity of our local support organization: EWB-Khwisero. We’re developing a constitution that more clearly outlines roles and responsibilities, restructuring our local Board of Directors in order to match recent political reforms and making sure the team has the tools they need by enrolling them in computer training at the polytechnic school and finding other opportunities for further training.

One month lies ahead of me and I have a list of my own. Ultimately though, I’ve addressed one of the central tasks on my list, answering a critical question: “Can I do this kind of work in the long-term, is it worth it?” When I take my turn on the inevitable bus-ride back to Nairobi, I’ll have few regrets.

WHO drinking water guidelines
The occurrence and distribution of fluoride in groundwaters of Kenya
Assessment of water resources and implementation of rural water supplies in western Kenya
A HYDROGEOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE NJORO AREA (RIFT VALLEY OF KENYA)
water resources of semi arid kenya
EXCESS FLUORIDE IN WATER IN KENYA
Kenya drinking water guidelines
KENYA GROUNDWATER GOVERNANCE CASE STUDY
Shape of the SubMiocene Erosion Bevel in Kenya_isricu

The pipeline was first conceived after analyzing the flow rates and the physical features surrounding a deep-water borehole that was installed at Emwaniro Primary School by EWB-MSU in 2008. Recognizing the capacity of the borehole to serve a larger population, EWB-MSU was approached by the district’s Member of Parliament who pledged CDF funds in order to bring water to a larger portion of the community. It was agreed upon that the MP would provide 2.5 Million Kenyan Shillings which would supply a tank, tower and electric pump; EWB-MSU would provide the piping and associated plumbing while the communities would provide the requisite labor for trenching and resources for hosting EWB travel teams.

We broke ground in similarly profound ways this week as well, the ceremony was attended by visitors from EWB-University of Wisconsin—Madison and the University of Nairobi. Using KenyaConnections as a medium for collaboration, EWB-Madison sent a team to tour EWB-MSU’s projects and learn about the management structures and development processes. EWB-Madison works in the water and sanitation sector, in a community just outside of Kisumu, which is about an hour and a half travel from Khwisero. The team toured several of EWB-MSU’s boreholes, two generations of composting latrines and a biogas latrine, visiting with each other’s American and Kenyan team members along the way. EWB-Madison has helped to create a bio-sand filter business in Kisumu and EWB-MSU plans to collaborate with these specialists to create robust community trainings for a water-catchment project that will be finished this month.

In addition to project visits and exchanges, a team of members from EWB-MSU, the University of Nairobi and EWB-UMass Amherst conducted a follow-up assessment for EWB-Arizona State University. EWB-ASU plans to assist a community in Bondo District to repair an earthen dam, which breached early last year. The assessment team was formed through KenyaConnections after EWB-ASU requested more information on the project. Survey and rainfall data for site, soil samples, research into the history and management structures of the dam were collected and a report is currently being compiled. The gains from this type of cooperation are obvious: EWB-ASU benefits from the cost-savings and can build better solutions through better information while the assessment team members gain valuable experience through cross-collaboration.

We hope that these examples can demonstrate the versatility of how KenyaConnections can be used: actively and creatively; in many cases, development doesn’t have to take years and we can make history every day.

http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=10032

The Project WET model is a simple one: American trainers partner with local volunteers—

in Uganda they are Ministry of Water staff—and host centralized training sessions in-country. USAID funded a large-scale Project WET distribution throughout East Africa over several years from 2008-2010, and our team is travelling across Uganda in an effort to garner insight into how the teacher-training-teacher model has worked and how schools, that have received indirect training, have utilized and adapted the materials.

By assessing schools across the country, we are able to survey a diversity of environmental and socio-political pressures that affect how communities and their schools respond to water-borne illness and traditional perceptions of sanitation. Mubende District of Western Uganda, for instance, runs into property rights issues when water-sources run dry as springs can be privately held unlike many other areas where water is communally accessible. Other areas in Mubende have a substantial migrant population, evidenced by one school’s attendance dropping by 88 students (approx. 25%) in between the first and second terms. This transience means that children face dynamic issues with access to water, and therefore, a curriculum based on identifying the underlying factors that contribute to unsafe water—direct contact with livestock, stagnant pools, etc.—may be more relevant to these students.

Our team is composed of Heather McKenney, an EWB-MSU member, Gilbert Ithika and Hakim Makumbi from the Ministry of Water and the Environment. Gilbert is about 6’2”, full of energy and has lived in Kampala, the nation’s capital, for the last fourteen years. Hakim doesn’t talk a whole lot most likely because in would only interfere with his rally-car driving. When Project WET first came into Uganda, they contacted a woman named Teddy Tindamanyere, who is a Principal with the Ministry of Water. Teddy coordinated the initial trainings and has acted as our central contact for this evaluative trip. She and her staff have conducted extensive evaluation in Northern Uganda—Gulu and Kitgum—and this trip is an extension to the West and South in order to gather qualitative feedback.

After Mbarara we’ll head back to Kampala and visit several of the urban schools surrounding the city.

It’s comforting to find your counterparts in a foreign place. Throughout my five years at Montana State University I’ve been involved in numerous student organizations and projects that ranged from environmental activism to public policy to international development. I often stretched myself really thin and got burnt out on occasion, but ultimately my involvement has acted as the primary director for identifying the answer to the classic question: What do I want to be when I grow up?

Yesterday, Peter Rasmussen—a member of the Engineers Without Borders-UMass. Amherst—and I spent some time at the University of Nairobi. Peter is a new resident of Nairobi with his newly-wed wife and has been splitting his time between EWB-UMass’ Namawanga water project and work on his master’s thesis. Peter and I crossed paths before either of us had left for this year’s trip to Kenya, as we conferenced on the website’s creation and potential overlap in the EWB-MSU project with UMass’. Since then, we’ve spent quite a bit of time touring Nairobi, attempting to uncover some contacts for EWB chapters. Yesterday, we hit a goldmine, and his name is Thomas Owino.

After meeting with the Civil Engineering Department chair last week, I brought Peter along to introduce the two as both Peter and the Chairman are interested in starting a Kenyan EWB chapter. After chatting for a bit, we were provided the contact information for a student whom the Dean of Engineering’s office staff thought would be an intuitive fit. After a quick phone call, we met the “tall guy,” Thomas Owino. Thomas is a fourth year engineering student from Nyanza Province and the Chairman of the University of Nairobi’s Engineering Student’s Association (ESA).

We found an instant compatriot in Thomas. Not only was he the University of Nairobi’s ESA Chair, but was also the elected Chairman of the National ESA, a group that links each of Kenya’s six university’s ESA chapters. Thomas was no different from any of the students that I had worked closely with over the past several years at Montana State University: high-energy, super competent and involved in quite a lot. He and his ESA group had just finished preparing a 7 million Shilling proposal for the Safaricom Foundation to start a reforestation program in the Mau Forest.

We agreed that KenyaConnections is an ideal mechanism for connecting EWB chapters and other NGOs to the existing Engineering and other student associations at Kenya’s universities. We also identified a model project to demonstrate how this type of collaboration would occur. One of the “connections” that the website has created is one between EWB-MSU and EWB-Arizona State University who is looking to repair an earthen dam in Bondo District. In order to better prepare project planning, EWB-MSU members, Peter, Thomas and some of peers will work with us in mid-August to conduct a preliminary assessment the project.

You can learn more about the University of Nairobi’s Engineering Students Association at:

http://www.uonbi.ac.ke/student_orgs/esa/

EWB-MSU has operated in the Western Province of Kenya and the project site is located about 45 minutes away from Maseno University. After some quick research on their website and an email to the Public Relations office, we found that Maseno has an extensive sociology department and has several graduate and doctoral students who are researching in Western. While engineering projects represent the material operations of EWB-MSU, it is the immaterial social capacity building that represents the most significant challenge for our organization. Partnering with sociology students who are researching everything from economic development to Luyia culture—the predominant tribe in Khwsiero District—may be one of best ways for foreign NGOs to begin to overcome the massive learning curve that often means the difference between long-term success and failure.

We’ve found that if foreign NGOs are able to make the initial contact with universities and create conceptual, mutually beneficial roles for Kenyan students, then both parties stand to gain substantially. EWB-MSU is hoping to link the MSU Sociology and Anthropology Department with Maseno’s and to use household sociology surveys, of which EWB-MSU has conducted nearly 3,500 to date, as the means of initial cooperation.

Joe and I continued our trend with several meetings at the University of Nairobi, which is Kenya’s largest with nearly 60,000 students across the country. Their engineering school is Kenya’s largest, though our meeting with the Chairman seemed to indicate an internal mobility suggestive of a small intimate department. One of the resources that KenyaConnections is planning on launching is an “Experts List” which is composed of EWB faculty and professionals as well as Kenyan professors and professional engineers. We figure that this will be one the best ways for new and continuing EWB projects to address the learning curve of working in a foreign environment.

Look for the “Expert’s List” on KenyaConnections soon.

To illustrate, you could start with categories for the general solution you’re looking for, such as “New water source development” or “Improvement of existing water source”. Say your NGO is charged with increasing your village’s water supply, so you select “new water source development”. Then you’d get a drop down list of technologies that other NGO’s have tried, such as spring box construction, rainwater catchment and borehole installation. Then, for each of these technologies, you could include generic design information, permitting information (e.g. if you drill a well then you need to sort our license and potential usage permits), and maybe a list of pros and cons could be provided along with a list of all the Kenyaconnections groups that have tried these technologies and whether they were able to successfully implement the technologies. You could also include links to or contact information for contractors (in case, for instance, you’re looking to drill a borehole). This type of structured search would also (I think) allow NGO A to efficiently connect with relevant NGOs that have already implemented the technology that NGO A is assessing.

Anyway, what I really want to communicate on this post is the idea of soliciting volunteer applications from interested Kenyan students to be embedded with EWB-USA student chapters during trips to Kenya. The Kenyan students would function as team members and would learn first-hand how EWB projects work. EWB chapters could post their applications on KenyaConnections and interested students could easily respond. This approach is a decentralized way to get Kenyan students involved on an individual basis in EWB and EWB-ish projects. Another decentralized approach to engaging Kenya students in EWB projects is an idea proposed by Matt, where you’d have Kenyan students who are from, say, Eldoret work on an EWB project based in the same location. A top-down approach could involve Kenyan university students organize chapters similar to the chapter structure that exists in the US. I think both approaches could be utilized simultaneously and would complement one another.

Through dialogue, however, we are able to better understand the meaning of words. When you discourse with another individual preconceptions and assumptions are challenged and commonalities are highlighted. It is through this type of discourse, between a motorcycle driver and a volunteer, that the meaning of the word “doctrine” has been analyzed, critiqued and constructed.

Its necessary to provide a bit of background about this motorcycle driver as he’s unlike any other, his name is Ben Yeswa and at 6’2” and sporting a fanny-pack, he’s a character for sure. Ben’s from Khwisero and works as a piki-taxi driver in the area, despite his university education. Ben is very much the conflicted philosopher, after walking away from a “good” accounting job in Nairobi, he came back to Khwisero, built a considerable library and, living alone, has been contemplating some of the most profound questions of life since. Development projects have been of particular interest to Ben, and he’s well linked to staff to the Millennium Development Villages and other projects in the area.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines “doctrine” as “a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party of other group.” While this definition captures the general scope of the term, it fails to articulate any meaning. Here is what we can up with instead:

A doctrine has two general components: a context and content. The context of a doctrine is somewhat objective in that a doctrine is structured universally: it is a set of ideas that are the product of a certain people’s culture: religion, ethics, laws and other beliefs. We likened this to an empty box that was filled with the particular products of this culture, which we characterized as the content of a doctrine. These subjective products of a culture—from Roman Catholicism to Keynsian Economics to Matriarchy—are the result of a complex combination of factors that are culture specific, ie. the time, place, economic and other socio-environmental factors.

Any structured set of beliefs is a doctrine, it is from this point, however, that we begin to differentiate doctrines. A traditional doctrine is one that is generated and loses its context, that is, it is no longer adequately linked to the context. Most often, the doctrine is handed down generationally, like many religious traditions, or it’s transferred from one physical place to another, like colonialism. Once this doctrine and its progenitors have lost their context, they lose their fallibility and become mythicized (ex. America’s Founding Fathers). In our discourse, we characterized this traditional doctrine as a “supertruth,” something that is sacred: unquestionable and impenetrable. We entertained the idea that this is sort of what the Titanic was once thought to be: to big and ironclad to fail.

So if the traditional doctrine is a Titanic super-truth, where are the icebergs? Moreover, how do we assume that role of the usurper? We found that this function is undertaken in two steps: first, the fallibility of a traditional doctrine needs to be demonstrable and clearly linked to the ideas that it espouses. Showing the correlation between Robert Mugabe’s economic policies in Zimbabwe and the utter collapse of the agricultural (and every other) sector, is not difficult. Showing the subtle links between other doctrines and their negative externalities, however, is often incredibly nuanced though not impossible.

Once the traditional doctrine can be publically tied to the discontent that it creates or what it has failed to achieve, then an opportunity arises for a new doctrine to materialize. All too often, it is at this point that a defunct traditional doctrine is replaced by another, and the cycle persists. If meaningful change is truly desired, change agents are poised and the community is ready to create its own doctrine—one that is appropriate to its needs and created through an iterative process from the bottom-up—then the traditional doctrine can be replaced entirely.

This replacement, a community-based doctrine, is an organic one as it incorporates relevant content to an exclusive context through participation and egalitarian dialogue. Through cooperation, the content of this doctrine—the ideas that will fill the empty box—are generated and they are distinguished by two co-dependant categories: processes and outcomes. The process of this organic doctrine is a dynamic one that includes participation by community members seeking a common outcome. In many cases, the outcome—a borehole for drinking water, a microloan or an ethos of activism—is the primary focus, but through the process of working towards the goal, the community interacts, learns and is subsequently empowered. In achieving the desired outcome, the community has enabled itself to continue to generate its own doctrines and to dispatch the alien, traditional ones that are irrelevant and oppressive. It is through the deconstruction of traditional doctrines and the subsequent construction of organic doctrines that a community is able to add meaning to its environment and redress the issues that underlie it.

Some thoughts from a motorcycle driver and a volunteer.

Yours truly,

Ben Yeswa & Matt Smith