Happy World Water Day!

Yet another totally unnecessary post on my part--who in their right mind would be stuck in front of a computer screen on the only day of the year dedicated solely to our planet's most unique and valuable resource? Regardless, take a minute today to learn some more about water issues around the globe.

To help you along, I have gone to great trouble to devise the following March Madness: Water Edition bracket (not to be confused with March Madness: Kenya Water Project Edition, which is our official Kenyan bracket pool. The winner gets a goat. Which will then be slaughtered in their honor. Except for if our friend Conner wins, in which case the goat will probably get pardoned and we will eat beans instead. I do think that there are probably more differences between the two editions besides the prize, but I cannot think of them so they are probably not important.)

ANDREW'S BIG BRACKET OF CANDIDATE WATER TREATMENT METHODS FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD:

1 Filtration vs. 4 Boiling

2 Chlorine vs. 3 SODIS (solar disinfection)

It's, uh, a pretty exclusive tournament. These were selected in a behind-closed-doors process from an original field of 5 entrants, so you know you're getting only the best of the best here. So do your research and send in your picks--match results will be posted here throughout the week (special bonus points for correctly picking upsets...cause, you know, I'm really unbiased and you never really know who's going to win and I do love a good Cinderella story...yeah, I'm gonna go hide all the Waterguard my project just bought now...)

Good luck!

Lake Victoria is kind of schizo

Apologies for the long delay between posts. Among other things, I've been having huge problems with my modem recently, as my computer has developed the rather nasty habit of crashing every time I try to connect using it. But don't worry, tomorrow I plan to sacrifice three chickens, a goat, and my co-worker's Blackberry to appease the technology gods and regain reliable internet access away from my office.

The other minor holdup giving me some semblance of an excuse is that my PIs have been visiting for the past two weeks to hold long discussions about tedious things like "Where do we actually want to do this study?" and "What can we do to improve people's sanitation?" and "If a certain water source has turbidity rating of 20 NTU in the rainy season and 5 NTU in the dry season and is used 8 months of the year by an average of 50 households, each of whom also collects rainwater 5 months of the year, what is its microbiological profile and what are the corresponding hypochlorite dosing recommendations and should seasonal supplies of coagulants be provided?" But now they are back in the States and we are still here, wondering 

Here's what you missed: Busia has been hot.

...

Yeah, that about covers it. Oh wait, also: dry. We have no water in our wells right now, so we buy it from traveling vendors on the street. Kind of puts the kibosh on our whole "Tuesday afternoon super soaker fight" tradition.

Anyway, apologies once again, and to make it up to you, I have 19 pictures, 1 video, and the shocking tale of two Jekyll-and-Hyde trips to one of Lake Victoria's most seductive and mercurial channels...

Trip #1: 

Probably oversold these stories a little bit with that preview, but that's what you get when I bottle all this blogging energy (blogergy?) up for so long without letting some of it burp out in African proverbs or development-related links. Here is some background information that is a little more, what's the word, honest?:

Mbita is a small fishing town on the shore of Lake Victoria, across a relatively small channel from where I live. To get there, you can take a ferry or hire a small fishing boat, or you can drive for 10 hours around the edge of the lake. This month, I had the chance to travel to Mbita twice within a very short period. These pictures are from a weekend trip I took with some co-workers. We had heard the place was pretty nice. We took the ferry. We stayed on the beach. After looking at the pictures, I think you'll agree with me that, as a description of Mbita, "pretty nice" walks that fine line between "gross undersell" and "downright criminal undersell": 

There aren't really any stories about Trip #1, because Trip #1 consisted pretty much entirely of sitting around and looking at this kind of stuff and wondering wistfully aloud about whether we would e'er again stroke such heav'n-sent shores (at the low, low rate of just a few hundred Kenyan shillings a day). It was pretty romantic.

Trip #2:

Fast-forward exactly four days. By sheer coincidence, my PIs have decided that the part of Mbita District lying further inland could be a promising area for our study, so we dutifully set off to retrace our steps. So there we were, trundling around in our trusty little WASH matatu, peering out the windows for latrines and advertisements for chlorine water treatment like we were on some dorky research safari (which we weren't...duh...) when we find ourselves right back at the ferry crossing to Mbita. After that it was pretty much just total chaos.

But first, here are some guys trying to load some couches onto a bus:

...yeah.

Anyway, basically we were kind of nervous about putting our vehicle on the ferry because there was kind of already this big oil tanker double-parked on the deck and we were going to be all polite and like "Excuse me, we were just kind of wondering if you could scooch a little bit and let us on?" but then we were like "Yeah, we're not really tough enough for that" and decided the next ferry might be more attractive from a buoyancy standpoint anyway and besides who needs the ferry when there are all these little fisherman boats here that can just motor us across right now?

This was all decided very fast.

So before we know it, we're all in a little motor boat wave-hopping across the choppy late-afternoon waters, spray in our faces, sun in the sky, and only the barest trace of a dark cloud on the horizon (this is called foreshadowing. REMEMBER THE DARK CLOUD.):

And it was an historic occasion! Moses, my project manager, right-hand man, and all-around life coach was aboard for his first ever boat ride. Turns out he is not really a "spray of the waves on your face" kind of guy and more of a "wear as many life jackets as possible and cling to the edge of the boat for dear life" kind of guy, but I have decided that I probably still love him.

In Moses's defense, I don't think any of us really thought that the motor would flood halfway across the lake and leave us floating dead in the water. In a leaky boat. With only a small plastic bucket for bailing. And no oars. Stuff like that just never happens in Kenya, I'm told.

A balmy 45 minutes later, our driver having exhausted his phone minutes on haranguing one of his buddies to sail out and give us a tow, we were back in business (no, wait, sorry, my bad, he used them on calling this girl he thought he might have a chance with while he was driving earlier. Seriously, my fault on that one, forgot. It was our minutes that he used to call his buddy. There we go.).

So now things are great, we're putt-putting along towards shore, where there appear to be cozy bonfires awaiting us. Maybe they have s'mores, we think!

Except then it kind of looks like the smoke is covering half the shoreline, so we're like "Huh, maybe this is actually bad smoke, like not the kind from s'more bonfires. But no, it's probably cool.":

And then there is this weird thin line of sky between the smoke and the horizon, and we're like "Hey, that's weird, but probably smoke has done weirder things, like that time on LOST where it was kind of creepy and mysterious for awhile but then turned out to just be some really old bitter guy, so it's probably cool."

And then the boat driver is like, "Yeah, so, you guys should all close your eyes and cover your faces with your hands." And so it turns out that the smoke was not cool at all and was not really smoke and was really a giant cloud of bugs that had all just hatched and were swarming above the lake surface in ginormous clouds and would get all up in your eyes if you didn't obey the boat driver like pretty much right away. We were all kinda bummed about that, probably more about the s'mores thing than the bug thing though. Except then someone said they thought they remembered seeing these bugs on "Planet Earth" one time and then we were all proud because we had experienced real nature that some guy with a British accent had once talked about and it was cool. According to the locals, these lake flies only hatch one or two days a year, so if you think about it and kind of tilt your head at just the right angle and squint real hard, we were really pretty lucky.

So then we did our best impressions of an 18-wheeler's windshield for about five minutes, and this is kind of where things stood afterwards (speaking characters, in order of appearance: Duncan Otieno, WASH Field Officer of shortish to medium height, also on his first ever boat ride; Phabian Agiso, WASH Field Officer, very tall, not on his first boat ride):

Then we landed and went to our guest house and I tried to take a shower and ended up coming out with more bugs on me than when I started because they were kind of not very smart and flew into the water and got stuck to me and I was all like "Aw man, 'Planet Earth' did not prepare me for this at all!". Dumb bugs. We didn't see the beach the next day, but I bet it was full of dead bugs.

The end.