Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing (3 of 3) 2017.09.12 In my second week in Kenya, I was back to visiting farmers, both with Vibrant Village and through other connections. However, I receive my biggest surprize in between site visits. I was walking with Ernest Kulali, a field officer and farmer from Vibrant Village, and he was telling me about the effectiveness of farming techniques. Using traditional methods, Ernest was getting 20kg of maize (corn) in a season from his shamba , his farm . When he switched to using purchased seeds and fertilizer, the same land produced 360 to 540kg of maize. What!? I had him run the numbers by me again, 20kgs → the range of 400kgs. I still didn’t believe it, but Nick the Vibrant Village director later agreed that farmers were seeing that magnitude of increase. Not just doubling their income/food supply, but a twenty-fold return! Further farming modifications will not yield as large a jump, but that sort of scale encouraged me that changing te...
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We have spent the first week and a half in La Huaylla, Peru (a community of 270 households) reuniting with old friends, preparing our plans with a local contractor and municipality, and beginning construction of the first of two spring boxes. We have also had the opportunity to present at the first of two major community meetings and prep the local water committee with our plans and community participation requirements. For a bit of background, this the second trip that our Peru project has took through the non-profit UC Davis chapter of Engineers Without Borders. On our previous trip we collected data and assessed the viability of a project to increase the sustainability, supply, and quality of the communities water. Unfortunately, community members only have intermittent access to water and many only can rely on having water in the morning. We decided that on this current trip we would construct two catchment structures that would collect groundwater that seeps from the side o...
With the Real Warriors Nicaragua is the Latin American country with the highest growth of tourism. The diverse geography and the cheap prices make it the perfect destination for backpackers who enjoy paradisiac beaches that are great for surfing and the variety of volcanoes where people can have adventurous hikes or do volcano boarding. However, behind this beautiful touristic bubbles there is the story of thousands of people who every day have to work on the fields, get on the buses to sell sandwiches, or craft pottery regardless the 95F that heats up the region every day to earn just enough to feed their families. Poorly educated population that causes high unemployment rates affects the development of Nicaragua. Travelling around the country I also had the opportunity to meet people from around the world which made me aware of a huge contrast. Most of these people were European whose first language was not English, however I spoke in English with all of them; that English that ...
Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Midway (2 of 3) 2017.08.26 Jua kali - literal translation from Swahili is “hot sun” Colloquially means “modifications” as in the changes made by the workers out in the sun in order to keep things running Tuesday night around 8pm, when I was reassembling the pump’s gearbox, my heart sank. Earlier in the evening, I had made a bold choice to repair the gearbox with a larger gear than before. It would improve the performance, but I hadn’t tested the change. Plus, the larger gear had been welded permanently in place, so no take-backs. My feeling of doom stemmed from a big issue: the larger gear wouldn’t fit between gearbox’s support bolts, rendering the pump unusable. I could move the bolts, but only if I could drill new 10mm holes that night. All of the engineering shops and even hardware stores in town had been closed for hours, and my ride to meet farmers would be leaving at 7am the following morning. Adrian -a tall, red-headed, French-Hung...
Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Beginning (1 of 3) 2017.08.20 Karibu - Swahili for “welcome” Idea: A low-cost irrigation pump for small-scale farmers that is powered by a bicycle. Bike powered irrigation pump design reconstructed at UC Davis Motivation: “In the dry season, it’s bad. There is no food.” “Most people, we wait for the rain.” -Jared, a Nairobi Uber Driver During a layover in Nairobi, I talked with a driver, Jared, that summed up much of the motivation for this bike pump project. Jared wanted to buy a irrigation pump so that he and his family could have food and sell food during the dry season. Of the poor households in Africa, most (80%) are farmers, and very few irrigate their land (only 4% of sub-Saharan farmland). Gasoline and solar pumps are too expensive for most people, so Jared is saving up. Other organizations successfully make irrigation pumps more accessible through a cheaper “treadle” design that works like stair-master exerci...
Who get the money matters: Can cellphones make remittances more efficient? By Oscar Barriga-Cabanillas
As part of my current research as a Ph.D. student in UC Davis, I spend a few weeks in Haiti studying the role remittances play in the financial security of Haitian households. The objective of my visit was the establish the potential impact of a remittances services that delivers the money directly to the user’s mobile phone savings accounts. I was surprise by how advance mobile money is in Haiti. It offers a wide range of services that are beyond what is offered in any other Latin American country. Mobile money, in Haiti known as MonCash, can be access in small shops. Shops that are part of MonCash network act as an intermediary between the customer and the mobile company. They sell merchandise and provide MonCash services to attract visitors to the shop. The convenience of mobile money does not stop with the availability of a large network of agents that can be used to deposit and withdraw funds, in country where bank branches are difficult to find. The real advantage is th...
Once we had placed the order for the filter casing and were working on the pump, we decided to track down the filter media that would go into the casing: sand, pea gravel and coarse gravel. Our colleague took us shops which catered to construction purposes and we picked up 4 bags of sand and 2 bags of gravel first. This was less sand that we needed, but we wanted to check the integrity of the 1.2 mm thick filter casing before taking it to Phat Sanday, the floating village we were assigned to. The casing was delivered the same day as the sand (Tuesday), and we assembled it the next day. On Thursday, it was still holding the pressure and weight of the sand and gravel and we decided it was time to take it to the village. We set out at 5 am on Friday – 6 people, 6 bags of sand, 2 bags of gravel, a PVC pump, several PVC pipes and a 1 m tall stainless-steel filter casing, all in one SUV. 3 hours later, we were in the village of Chhnok Trou. It is from here that we took a boat to go to P...