Our Projects Have Hit the Ground

Hi everyone. We have quite a bit to update you about since last time. I don't really know where to start so I guess we'll just go through what each of the groups has done.
 
Our water and sanitation group has begun work on building our slow sand filter. We bought all of the parts in various shops around Kisumu and took them to the home of Peter Odanga who draws water from a broken borehole where they now have opened up the casing and are using buckets on ropes to get their water. The compound is home to 13 people which is exactly what we were looking for. We constructed the tank easily because they have a whole lot of experience cutting and fitting PVC, drums, etc. The difficult part was getting and washing the sand. Gathering the sand required us renting a hand cart and taking it a 15 minute walk (without the handcart - 20-25 minutes with it) to a dried up stream bed where some boys had dug out some sand. We paid them for the sand and then ran into some problems with a local who thought we were trying to steal it unfortunately. The sand we gathered yesterday was not enough so we gathered some more today from different boys and this time without incident. So now all we have to do is clean the sand. We have begun doing this and it turns out it is extremely dirty, but we are perfecting our methods and will be waking up in the wee hours tomorrow morning to get as much work done on it before the hot sun is overhead as possible!
 
Our irrigation group has had a lot of success trying to promote more modern irrigation techniques using hip and foot pumps. They have talked to organizations in Kisumu about this on multiple occasions and even held a demonstration this morning that drew 30 interested locals! I myself was not there because I was sifting sand, but I heard it was nice and a lot of people including our hosts are now very excited about the potential of these pumps.
 
Our agroforestry group is also going well. Buana Sam (Sam Dunlap - Our other sam, Sam Reuter, is now refered to either as Bebe Sam or Shirly) has helped us finish our design for our agroforestry plot at Orongo Primary/Secondary schools and has even begun to till the soil. It is quite a bit area and a lot of work needs to be done with creating the trenches, digging a pond for the run off to collect, gathering organic matter, gathering the appropriate seeds, and reinforcing a very weak fence to fend off animals. However, the head teacher at the school is putting together a club of interested individuals in grades 6-9 which will be established by tomorrow so we will have a lot of help! Already 4 of our members have really bad blisters from these handmade hoes so we are really looking forward to that!
 
Another good mark of our progress is that we officially have a committee of 10 local members of Orongo who will be overseeing each of these three projects while we are gone. John Ombwayo is naturally the head of this, and we will update you with the contacts of everyone else soon.
 
Other than our projects, things are still going well. We are eating well still and our food coordinators are Shirley and Zach so they are making sure we are eating well. Actually, yesterday Peter (the man who we are building the water filter with) was so happy with our work that he gave us a chicken! It is tied up in our yard now so I guess it'll be dinner tonight.
 
We must head back into Orongo now so we can get some work done before sundown, but we appreciate your comments and hope you are enjoying our updates! We told you we would give you our contacts last time (sorry!) so in case you are wondering, Nate's number is 254 725 529 824 and Mike's number is 254 728 408 165. My phone is already broken sadly...
 
Anyway, just wanted you all to know we are all very healthy and our work is going well. Take care back in the States!
 
-Mark