Drip Irrigation Up and Running

I'm happy to report that our drip irrigation kit is now up and running. We hit a snag when the seedlings our partners bought for us died on the way to Najile, but we're hoping to replace the dead tomatoes this evening. So far we've got a lot of interest in the drip kits and are praying for a good harvest. We even had our first rain in two months the night we set up the drip lines.

Water Women

In Maasai culture, most of the labor-intensive jobs are done by women. On top of the normal womanly tasks of cleaning, cooking, and caring for children, they must carry all the water the household needs. Girls are started young, maybe 3-4 years old, carrying 2-5 liters in jerrycans tied to a rope worn across their forehead. As the girls get older, the cans get bigger until they carry 2 20 Liter jerrycans at a time. That's about 90 pounds of water pressing into your forehead which they carry from anywhere between half a kilometer to 5 or even 10 kilometers. Every night we see the girls and women carrying their water home for dinner. They have nowhere to store water, so even if they could carry more at a time, it wouldn't help them. Some families have small dams near their houses but they tend to dry up quickly in the sun. This is just one of the reasons why we need to come up with ways to increase access to water, like sand dams!

Haggling Hassles

Leading up to a visit by another MCC couple who will conduct a training on drip irrigation kits (www.chapinlivingwaters.org/), I have been doing a lot of digging in our garden. To help enrich this newly dug soil, I need manure and lots of it. Fortunately, one benefit of living in a pastoralist community is that manure is easy to find. Steph went to our neighbor's house and asked if they could provide us with some manure, 30 wheelbarrows worth.
The first snag came up as our neighbor came by with the first load of manure (which she carried in a bag on her bag). We were thinking of manure in wheelbarrows while she was thinking of it in bags. So we decided one bag was about 1.5 wheelbarrows and then haggled over a price. Another friend was at our house at the time and helped translate since we've never mastered bartering in Maa. We agreed on a price of 60 shillings a bag. Just to compare that to dollars, its about 75 cents, given a normal wage for manual labor at less than $4 a day. We figured 20 loads would take about 2 days worth of labor so we'd be paying her at almost twice the going rate.
The next day the woman's co-wife (wife of the same husband) came to our house with bags of manure. This woman argued that the price we agreed upon was not fair and made us renegotiate the price to Ksh 85 per bag, since the bags carried close to 2 wheelbarrows of manure. As the manure came in via both wives, we saw an alarming trend. The second wife was bringing in very small bags (and tended to complain about them) while the other continued bringing big ones. After a few days we had all the manure we'd need and decided it was time to settle up.
We brought the women over to the manure pile and measured out the manure. It was 26 wheelbarrows worth, carried in 18 bags (so closer to the original 1.5 per bag we estimated). Given that, we said that we were willing to pay the original Ksh 60 per bag that we agreed upon. We paid them each and they went home. They did not seem happy.
The next day they came back demanding more money, 85 per bag. Now came the language issues. One interesting thing about haggling here is that the numbers people use are Swahili numbers. We don't know most of the Swahili numbers so we had a hard time communicating. This is on top of the fact that we were trying to multiply out the bags and wheelbarrows by various prices (showing them that we were being reasonable) and they had no idea of what we were talking about since they had never been to school and didn't know how to write numbers, much less multiply them.
Finally we found somebody to translate and mediate. The women's story is that they never agreed to the Ksh 60 in the first place. I think the second co-wife just wanted more money and convinced the first one to go back on her word. The conversation got heated when they threatened to prevent us from ever getting manure again in Najile (I almost laughed at the thought) before finally we agreed to pay them the full price if they would bring the rest of the manure (4 wheelbarrows worth) we needed for free. They agreed and went on their way.
Such is life in a country of no set prices. Hopefully our haggling hassles will pay dividends when we get back home.

Teaching Tag-Team

For the past year, Steph has taught music to Grades 4-8 at the Najile Primary school. Since she is one of three teachers in the Kleinert family, she invited both her mom and sister to help her in the classroom during their visit. By having three teachers, the student:teacher ratio dropped from as high as 60:1 to 20:1. Steph was able to assess students in one thing while her sister or mom taught another. Its amazing what having teachers can do for learning!
The big activity was training for an end-of-year performance on recorder. Some students played, others danced and others drummed a rhythm. The students were so excited to have fun at school (as compared to other classes where they are beaten for mistakes). As Steph is improving the musical awareness, ability, and appreciation of her students we pray she is able to create a safe environment to learn and see God's love. Thanks to the teaching tag-team, the Kleinert ladies were able to do just that to end the second term.

Referendum

This past Wednesday was a major day in the history of Kenya. The country voted and passed a new constitution, removing a constitution that was written and implemented in England in 1963. Many complained that the old constitution gave far too much power to the President, such as the power to take and give basically any land to any person, without any compensation. These sorts of issues have plagued Kenya and the people have tried to get a new constitution for years. The problem is, powerful people are always going to lose out when the status quo changes, so there have been vigorous campaigns to stop new constitutions from being accepted in the past.
This time around, the major arguments against the constitution were that it allowed Muslim courts for inheritance, and marriage laws if both parties wanted to use those courts and were Muslim. Another issue was abortion, a clause in the constitution allows it only if a doctor believes the mother will die. Many people thought this was a way for abortion to come into Kenya and some churches were against it.
Despite these things, opinion swayed to the "yes" side as people saw that the positive changes to the way the government was structured outweighed the negative. Of course the things people were most worried about were violence and election rigging. The 2007 presidential campaign ended in the deaths of over 1000 people, the displacement of thousands more, and the results were believed by most to be rigged. Thankfully, this time the election basically went off without a hitch. "Yes" won 66%-34%, giving a clear mandate to move forward with the constitution. There were no reports of violence and even the "no" side is willing to move forward. Some of the people I've talked to have said this is one of the first times they've been proud to be Kenyan. May God Bless Kenya and their new constitution.

Lots o' Lions

Last month, to top off Mom and Carolyn's visit to Kenya, we visited Maasai Mara. "The Mara" is the top safari destination in Kenya and is right across the border from Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. The big event is the migration of wildebeast. During July the wildebeast cross into Kenya to find greener pastures and have to cross the Mara river. This scene is one of the archetypal wildlife scenes. Thousands, even millions of wildebeast cross over the river with crocodiles and lions looking on for an easy meal.
It takes about 4 hours to get from Nairobi to the park. We went with Steph's family and another MCC couple who works in Kenya. The six of us piled into a safari van, which is basically a conversion van with a pop-up top so you can view animals by standing up, looking over the top of the van. In our days at the park, we must have seen over 250 vans, basically identical other than the stickers advertising the safari company.
Two highlights from our trip were actually seeing the wildebeast cross the Mara and seeing over 30 lions. The lions are utterly unafraid (and uninterested) in humans. This means, you might see a pride laying on the road with 30 vans surrounding them, the lions completely ignoring the humans. The wildebeast are funny and stupid animals. They line up,thousands at a time at the brink of the river bank. They hem and haw for hours before one of them decides to plunge. There are many feints, with a few running to the edge and then turning around. This can get old, so while we waited alongside the river, we watched the hippos and ate lunch. Finally the wildebeast charged over. Unfortunately, there weren't any crocs around, but it was still really neat.
Overall, our second trip to the Maasai Mara was just as good as the first. Having good company always helps and you can't beat seeing thousands of zebras, wildebeast, not to mention lots of elephants, giraffe and hippos.

Enkaji Engari (Car House=Garage)

While the Kleinerts were visiting us, Matt was hard at work. Many days there is little to do for the program so he decided to do more jobs around the house. The first thing on the list was to build a garage for our new car. Having never built much of anything from scratch, much less, a garage, this was a challenge. However, after a few weeks of hard work, our car is safely housed away from the sun.
Step one was buying materials. I was hoping to construct a basic structure, 6 poles in two parallel lines with cross bars along the parallel lines and two along the back. I would cement the poles into the ground, then construct a web of barbed wire to hold up sheets of sheets of poly-paper (the plasticy stuff you use for greenhouses). I bought the poles from a local guy and had them brought to our house. They were cedar and smelled wonderful when you cut them. After digging holes for the six posts, I cut joints into the crossbars so they would sit flat on top of the vertical posts. After nailing the cross bars to the vertical posts I mixed up some cement and cemented the posts in.
Step two was erecting the barbed wire. I basically wrapped the wire around the posts and made an asterisk-shaped roof. On top of that I laid 3 sheets of poly-paper. The sheets were about 2m wide so I laid them perpendicular to the rows of poles (left to right) instead of front-to-back. I wrapped each end of the paper around a crossbeam and then nailed them into the beam using small pieces of scrap wood I scrounged from an old sofa. To help keep the plastic from blowing too much, I put a few more strands of barbed wire on top of the paper and then sewed the joints between the 3 sheets using string.
The last step was the sides. One of the sides was basically against our house and one side would need to remain open to allow the car to get in. However, along the other two sides I decided to plant passion fruit. Passion fruit grow in vines and are ready to harvest after 12 months (I hope). We had plenty of seedlings at the project nursery so I built up some beds and transplanted 10 seedlings.
After all this, my car has a home. The wind is still pretty rough on the plastic roof, but it feels good to have made something with my own hands.

The Najile Card/Typer Shark

Steph's sister, like Matt, loves to do things. Night in Najile is not usually a particularly active time. There's nowhere to go, no tv, and limited internet. So most nights, Matt and Carolyn played cards. Carolyn learned a new game, Rook, as well as 500 hundred. It never seemed like a full night without a game of cards, even if we didn't get started until 10. Carolyn wins the award of being the card-shark of the trip! Aside from being a card-shark, Carolyn was introduced to a typing game called Typershark. The game drastically improved her typing speed in just 2 weeks. The basic game involves a little man diving and sharks trying to eat him. Each shark has a word on it you need to type before he reaches your diver. Carolyn went from "Beginner" level (15 WPM) to Expert level (~35-40 WPM). Carolyn therefore was the Card/Typer Shark of July.

Najile Washerwoman

After a month together with Steph's mom and sister, we are back in Najile for the Kenyan referendum on a new constitution. Over the past few weeks we've had lots of fun with our family and were especially blessed by Steph's mom being willing to wash clothes. Washing is by hand here and often takes hours bending over tubs of water. Mom was willing to wash regularly, often when we were just putting off our ever-growing pile of dirty laundry. Our Maasai neighbors were impressed (and a little horrified) that our visitors were doing laundry. In their minds visitors should not do any work, but we clarified that this was family and mom enjoyed the activity. So, we wanted to salute our Najile Washerwoman for all her hard work!