Lillian Mwandha and Mildred Mkandla, my co-trainers at the AWWC
The ladies learned about water access, water storage and water treatment through hands on experience building rainwater catchments, a ferro cement water tank and the BioSand Filter. My co-trainers were Lillian-who is a lawyer in Uganda and Mildred-she is from Zimbabwe, lives in Ethiopia and has been working in the water development sector for many years. We had a great time together!
The Fireless Cooker supported by Solar Cookers International and the Portable Microbiology Lab for water testing being promoted by Robert Metcalf, a microbiology professor from California State University, Sacramento. The fireless cooker is a basket with "pillows" in it that, for example, you boil rice for 3 hours, stick it in the basket, cover it with the other "pillow" and an hour later your rice is cooked. The women's group who is making these collect discarded cloth from factories and other places for the "pillows" and use native material to make the baskets.I love this water testing method. It's nothing new, Dr.Metcalf just put two tests usually used independently in the food industry together and is making it available to people who have no experience with microbiology. There is a petrifilm test made by 3M and a test for 10 ml called Colilert. I won't bore anyone with the scientific details, but the short version is it identifies the presence of E Coli bacteria as an indicator of fecal contaminants which can cause major illness and it quantifies approximately how contaminated a water source is.
This is the Solar CooKit! Check out the website-http://solarcookers.org/. It is very cool and simple and cost effective and all the participants of the African Women and Water Conference got to make one of their own. It's a piece of cardboard with reflective material glued on and you put your food in a black pot (the cheap thin kind) inside a clear transparent plastic bag, set it in the sun for several hours (depending on the kind of food) and voila! Very neat idea in a place where sun is abundant and fuel resources-wood and charcoal-are expensive and becoming incresingly scarce. You can also use the solar cooker to pasteurize water and milk and they come with WAPIs (Water Pasteurization Indicators-a little devise with wax inside that melts when the liquid reaches the appropriate temperature to the bugs)
After the AWWC Gemma and Jan (she is one of the co-organizers of the conference, her group is called Crabgrass) and I went to Tanzania for safari. We traveled to Ngorogoro Crater and Manyara National Park and visited a Maasai village on the way home. Saw Kilimanjaro in the distance which was amazing, it is so striking on the landscape! I was glued to the window the whole time. Well, that's a pretty good glimpse of my time here in Africa so far. Until next time...
And as my sisters here would say, be blessed!
