Flowing blessings

KAKAMEGA, Kenya -- We had been told we would start at 10 a.m., but as Sarah Lanier points out in her terrific book "Foreign to Familiar," cultures from tropical and equatorial regions don't always see time the way we do.

Almost no visitors were at James Mundi's house when our van rolled onto the property. James, the pastor of the church, lives in Shikhambi, a neighborhood at the edge of Kakamega, within walking distance of the New Life Restoration Ministries church. The church itself, about the size of my bedroom, was too small to host the workshops, and so a tent had been erected behind the house.

A member of the church at Kakamega pours salt water through the Khlor Gen 3000, turning it into a chlorine solution which can be used to sanitize a larger quantity of water. (T-G Photo by John I. Carney) [Order this photo]

There were seven of us. Bishop Paul Mbithi, his wife Grace, Duncan Macharia and William Kimanzi were from the New Life Restoration Ministries church in Nairobi; Ruthie Lilyquist, an American who had been spending several weeks working with the church in Nairobi and whom Paul and Grace invited to join us on the trip to Kakamega; Jan Schilling of Smyrna and myself. Technically, Jan and I were the LEAMIS International Ministries team, with me as team leader, but for our week in Kakamega it was more accurate to say that we were all a seven-member team bringing workshops and water purification to the neighborhood of Shikhambi.

Almost as soon as we'd gotten out of the van, Paul told me that he and and Duncan were going back to Kakamega to search for supplies while we still had access to the van and driver. So the rest of us were left cooling our heels, not quite sure when things would get started in earnest.

Healthier living

Since one of my main responsibilities had to do with water, I asked about the neighborhood's water supply.

We walked down the road and then across a stream to a little pond -- apparently spring-fed. It looked somewhat dirty and cloudy, but apparently some of the dirt settles to the bottom because some of the jugs filled from the pond poured relatively-clear, not perfectly-clear but relatively-clear, water.

I've mentioned the statistics about drinking water before, but they bear repeating: worldwide, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 1.1 billion people don't have access to clean water. Thousands die each day from preventable, water-related illnesses like diarrhea, typhoid and cholera.

LEAMIS responds to the water situation in two ways. We install a water filtration and chlorination system at a central location, usually the church that is hosting our visit, and we also teach SODIS -- a more individual solution by which families can use plastic water or soft drink bottles to sanitize water before consuming it. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks, and so the one-two punch gives a better chance of helping address water problems in the community.

Needless worry

I was worried about the water purification system. I was supposed to have installed the system in Bolivia in 2007, but for various reasons we never got a chance to install the filtration drums, and when I tried at the end of the trip to train the Bolivians in the use of the chlorinator its only moving part -- a small plastic venturi pump -- broke.

I'm not particularly handy, and I wondered if we had all the right connectors to run the PVC pipe between the barrels.

I would also be the first LEAMIS team member to install a different chlorination system than the one LEAMIS had relied on previously. The good news: no moving parts. But I still worried what would happen if the new system didn't perform correctly.

James Mundi, pastor of the New Life Restoration Ministries church in Shikhambi, poses in front of the water filtration system built by Duncan Macharia. The water flows from the source barrel at left through a barrel filled with small stones and another filled with sand before being collected in the barrel at far right. (T-G Photo by John I. Carney) [Click to enlarge] [Order this photo]

I needn't have worried; Duncan was my ace in the hole. Duncan had worked with the LEAMIS-installed system in Nairobi and had helped install the system during last year's trip to Malaba, Kenya. When it came to the actual, physical installation of the filtration system, I ended up not having to lift a finger. Duncan, and a couple of people from the church in Kakamega, did all the actual work.

How it works

The filtration system consists of four plastic drums, PVC pipe to connect them, and a wooden platform to put them in the correct relation to each other so that the water can flow by gravity from one to the next.

The first drum holds the source water. The water flows up through the second drum, which contains small stones, and then down through the third drum, which is filled with sand. Within a few weeks of setting up the system, the top layer of the sand becomes a "bio-sand" filter, with good micro-organisms assisting the filtration process. The water then deposits into the fourth barrel, where it waits to be chlorinated.

The filtration process removes larger parasites from the water but does not truly sanitize it. That takes chlorine. The unit LEAMIS used to use, the McGuire Water Purifier from New Life International, is a U-shaped, briefcase-sized plastic contraption which runs off a car battery and extracts chlorine gas from salt water, bubbling it through the water to chlorinate it.

Newer method

The new unit, the Khlor Gen 3000 from the Hays Pure Water For All Foundation, uses the same electrochemical process in a slightly different way. A small amount of salt water is poured through the softball-sized Hays unit four times, until it becomes something similar to liquid chlorine bleach. (Actual chlorine bleach can't be used because it contains other, laundry-related, components.) The chlorine solution is then dosed into the water to be treated in a measured amount, and swimming pool test strips are used to measure the chlorine level.

You must wait an hour for the chlorine to do its work and for some of the chlorine to evaporate so that the water won't taste like a swimming pool. The Hays unit is cheaper than the McGuire unit, even before you realize it comes with its own battery and solar charger. And, as mentioned, it has no moving parts.

Duncan's construction of the filtration system went smoothly, but we had one problem: the only sand we could find in Kakamega was filthy. Duncan cleaned it, bucket by bucket, before putting it into the filtration drum, but it was still dirty, and I estimated it would probably take several loads of water through the filtration drums before the water would truly be clean.

Teaching moments

Once the filtration system had been fully installed, it was my turn to teach the people who would be operating the chlorinator. I think that went well, although I made a critical mistake in our test run. The literature I had in hand -- some of it which came with the unit, some of it from the Hays web site -- had several different formulae for mixing up the salt water, depending on whether you were using metric or English units and on how much chlorine solution you needed to produce.

I decided to use the simplest formula possible, one which measured the salt in capfuls. But I thought the cap to which they were referring was the cap on the small sample bottle of salt which comes with the unit. That's what I used. But it turns out the cap referred to a separate little measuring device included with the unit. I didn't catch my mistake until after we'd finished demonstrating the unit. I told them what I had done wrong and I hoped they understood it. Although many in Kenya (a former British colony) speak English, they're more comfortable in Swahili, and so all of our workshops were translated.

Family PETs

SODIS training also went well. To use SODIS, you must start with relatively-clear water. The water is put in a PET plastic bottle -- three liters or less -- and then left in the sun for a whole day (two days if it's cloudy). A corrugated tin roof, such as you see throughout the Third World, is an ideal surface for this. The combination of heat and ultraviolet radiation kills the microorganisms responsible for diseases like typhoid and cholera.

I knew from past experience that PET bottles are widely-available in Kenya. Bottled water is sold in plastic bottles, and although Kenya still makes extensive use of glass soft drink bottles there are plastic soft drink bottles as well. I got a question in the workshop about what you could do if you could not afford an empty plastic bottle. Fortunately, Grace Mbithi stepped in and answered the question, telling the questioner that it should be no problem to find plenty unwanted bottles in Kakamega proper. But it threw me for a loop to think about empty plastic bottles, much less safe water, as a luxury item.

TUESDAY: Corn cobs become charcoal