Work or Play?

I would have to choose today as my favorite day of work, out of the entire co-op experience.

We went to Nyambogo to rebuild some of the filters that were not working well. One was working especially poorly; I suppose that's what you call a filter that takes water with a 10 bacteria count per 0.1 mL and turns it into thousands. So we set out to fix these filters that we were hoping were built wrong. I mean, if they weren't built wrong, than it was something else, and we had done our best to cross off all the other possible problems. This field work is quite interesting in that we don't always have a control and chosen variables, like we do in the lab. Fortunately, we found that the filters had been constructed very poorly, and all should start to work wonderfully now that they are repaired. Two of the rules, or perhaps the only two, of construction of the filters had been broken. A sand filter must have three distinct layers, fine sand being the top and thickest layer (it also does the important work). A filter must be built where it will be used so that this layer doesn't get disturbed. Of the four filters we tore apart today, one filter had all three layers mixed completely together and the other three filters had hardly any sand. I will feel like today was worthwhile if these filters give good data in the coming weeks.

The part that made today so great was our goal being oriented around something physical rather than mental. It reduces communication issues and when we're done there is a visible product of which to be proud.

The thing that really topped off the day was the kids. After we all built the first filter together, we split up and went in two groups to handle the rest. One little kid, who sat next to me while I worked on her family's filter, walked all the way to the next filter home, barefoot with me. She held my hand the whole way back, even when the other little kids giggled, although it was probably because they were jealous, or mad that I didn't have 20 hands.

Then when I got to the third filter home, there were so many kids. We had a hold up and somehow all of my team members got lost looking for things and people. I got to sit with the kids and just have fun. We started to sieve the sand, which gave us something to do. There were no adults around, so I got to try out my Swahili/Luo without any embarrassment. Good thing too, because it's pretty bad; I had the kids laughing non-stop. I also used a little English with them.

While the translator had been around I heard them all telling me the same thing over and over again, so I asked what it was. He told me that they were saying, "You make water," not specifically as a question or a statement. I find that sort of funny considering I mentioned in the last blog that making water is the only thing we can't do to water. Anyway, every time they asked me, I would shake my head no, because we're only cleaning it, and that confused them a lot.

It was really fun to see them interact with each other and with me. I had always dreaded the kids in the villages just a bit, because when other adults are around I feel so self conscious about all the things big people worry about. Will they say something inappropriate? Will they ask for something? How do we communicate without sounding ridiculous? Will they get yelled at for poking at my skin or touching my hair? The worst of all is that if I'm nice to one kid there will be a million of them surrounding me, getting more and more wound up, until it's overwhelming and exhausting. But today there were only fifteen or twenty, and they were relatively calm; they didn't get out of control, and we just worked on sorting gravel. They giggled, and they tried out the things that I said, and they bickered only a little. They even got on a kick of leaning really close to me and speaking extra loud and slow, but they saw that I still didn't understand, so they gave that up.

It was a great day, I enjoyed it.