Not a drop to drink

My contact at UNEP wanted to meet me at the very plush Nairobi Safari Club rather than at UNEP’s offices on the other side of town. While waiting for her, I met a Somalian MP. Somalia is in the news for all the wrong reasons these days, what with the pirates and the never-ending war. I asked him to tell me some good things about Somalia, but all he could come up with was the fact that Somalia gained independence first in the region.

Damaris from UNEP is a well-educated, urbane Kenyan, very different from the NGO workers I have met during the shoot. I wasn’t sure before meeting here if it was worth interviewing her. My shoot has already included far too many interviews and not enough cutaways or general views. I thought I would get to clarify how the United Nations can actually help with the water situation before launching into another interview.

One thing I wanted to get clear was how deforestation has such a negative impact on rainfall. It was one of those things that I’d agreed with when reading up about Kenya’s water problems without knowing why cutting down forests means less rain. Damaris put me onto the water cycle - something I thought left behind in GCSE Geography.

Damaris summarised the UN’s role as mainly awareness-raising, acting as watchdogs of countries and brokers for aid. NGOs follow the UN agenda. The UN advises governments. The governments hire NGOs to do development work. It seems like a really circular way of doing things.

It all sounded a bit dispiriting. We expect the UN to solve everyone’s problems. In the end, I decided that asking Damaris to be interviewed wouldn’t add to my piece because of the number of interviews I already have and the fact that I want to emphasise the impact on ordinary people. And also Damaris was on leave at that point, meaning I would have to negotiate with someone else from UNEP.

My last day with SNV today – and what a day. It was another long journey in the 4X4 way out to the Ugandan border. On the way, I heard about this bandit country. The Pokots are really quite violent, often stealing cattle from the neighbouring Turkana people (and vice versa). Lots of cattle farmers carry guns here. Also, because the people are nomadic pastoralists, there is an arrangement with Uganda that they hold dual citizenship and can even vote in both countries’ elections.

I thought I’d been rural before in Kenya, but this really was in the middle of nowhere. The road was a red dirt track and sometimes a dried up river bed. The sun was beating down and there were camels lurking in the undergrowth.

There didn’t appear to be a village at our final stop, just a school and a sand dam. It’s impossible to convey just how hard it is to work in the full heat of midday in this area. Thankfully, there were a few trees around to provide shade. Dan at Quite Bright Films had warned me about the midday sun creating shadows on people’s faces during interviews, so the trees were a real boon.

The problem here seemed to be the lack of rain this year so far and the fact that there is no well here to extract water from the sand dam. It seems insane but before the sand dam was built, the women had to walk for 40 km to collect water. They mentioned that pregnant women often miscarry as a result of this epic journey. And there’s no guarantee that waterborne diseases like malaria, typhoid and cholera won’t get them too.

Now I’m going back to Nairobi and the wonderful Flora Hostel. I hope my last few days will see me getting a UN perspective and also a trip into the slum to see how access to water is managed there. The newspapers tell me that water rationing has been underway at water points in the slums for the last few months.

This morning, I noticed a United Nations Jeep parked in our hotel and then again on the street when we went out for breakfast. Intrigued, I asked a few questions and it turned out that the World Food Programme was using Kapenguria (our base for visiting projects in West Pokot) to distribute food aid in the area. The drought here has really affected harvests and people are actually starving. A sobering reality check on the consequences of not having enough water. I made sure I got some shots of the food aid lorries and UN vehicles.

This afternoon we got into the 4X4 again to visit some people who are hoping to get a sand dam like the one I saw on Monday. The way these projects seem to work is to require the communities to invest their own time and money in return for providing the majority of the money. So when we arrived, men and women were moving piles of small rocks from one part of the seasonal river to another part in preparation for the sand dam. One of the village spokesman told me about how their life has changed, how they no longer move their cattle around. Their children no longer want to drink cattle blood as their parents did for years. They desperately want a more secure way of life so they can branch out and earn money in new ways. The women make intricate beaded necklaces and other jewellery for initiation ceremonies and weddings and they want to be able to sell these to outsiders, among other wheezes.

I made everyone laugh when I tried to help them with a few stones. Surely it’s impossible to carry stones wrong?! Apparently I managed it.

Today was a gruelling experience. Up before 5am to visit Topowon, a village in the highlands. We drove for hours to what Caroline laughingly called a shopping centre. This means a market place with a few huts and houses. We had a couple of chapattis to fortify ourselves and then our intrepid driver drove us for another hour at least. This time, the track climbed the mountain steadily. We probably got halfway up in the 4X4 before transferring to Shank’s Pony. I’m fine with hiking…the Kenyan sun from 9.30 onwards is a different matter!

All the way up, we passed shambas – the Swahili word for crop farms-come-vegetable gardens. For the first time in rural Pokot, I saw piped water with public water points as we climbed the mountain. When we eventually reached Topowon, you could really see how the shambas benefit from irrigation. Fields of lush maize waving in the wind and then a few hundred metres away fields of less lush, smaller maize plants that aren’t irrigated.

I had a moment with the camera when I accidentally disconnected the top mic and could only use the internal mic – the sounds was horrible. But in general, today was an unmissable experience. The villagers were welcoming in ways that only Kenyans can be – inviting us into the hut for lunch and tea and proudly showing me their avocados and bananas. They told me in no uncertain terms that growing these things was impossible before the water scheme.

The scheme itself involves piping water from a spring to all the shambas we passed on the mountain and using only gravity to get it down there. Pretty simple and effective.

Tomorrow will be an opportunity for a lie-in – no filming until the afternoon.

After the Coast province, my next port of call is Eldoret. This small city was home to Kenya’s second president following independence, Daniel Arap Moi. According to Lonely Planet, Moi was often seen around town when he was in power, and Eldoret allegedly received more than its fair share of development money as a result.

Eldoret is also the location of SNV World’s North Rift Valley offices. SNV World is a Dutch development organisation. It used to be part of the government in the same way that the Department for International Development (DFID) operates in this country. Now, however, SNV is wholly independent in its decisions while all of its funding continues to come from the Dutch government.

SNV are keen to show me a range of water projects in the West Pokot district – probably about as far as you can get from Mombasa without straying towards the Somalian border in the north. According to my contact here, there is a big disparity between the highlands and the lowlands in terms of access to water. Interestingly, the Pokot people are traditionally nomadic, moving their livestock with the rains. Some communities have settled down though, which presents different challenges.

Today, Caroline (my contact here) took me to meet people from a village who have this amazing sand dam. There are lots of seasonal rivers here in Pokot. One way to capture water is to kind of block them up with a combination of stones and sand. When the water comes with the rains, the sand dam absorbs all the water. This village also had a hand pumped shallow well linked to cattle troughs. It was incredible to see the people pumping water out in such a dry and dusty landscape.

While here in Mombasa, I took the opportunity to look at the other side of the water question: where it goes after we use it. Most places in Mombasa are hooked up to mains water supply but treating waste water is another matter entirely. This is where my cousin Sarah comes in. Her company GreenWater has an approach that is perfect for a country that cannot afford the massive investment that sewage infrastructure requires. We went to visit a scheme in Kiembeni, close to Nyali where she lives. A large estate of houses was built there, and all the waste water went straight into a stream. Sarah built a series of ponds which filter the suspended matter out of the water using things like gravel, reeds and algae. It’s a work in progress and Sarah is currently experimenting with some rafts of reeds – the aim is to get the roots of the reeds trailing in to water to aid purification. It’s environmentally sustainable and low cost because all you need is space to build the ponds and the labour costs involved. Space is not what’s at a premium here – clean water is.

Having spent a few days visiting the Coastal Rural Support Programme’s projects in the Coast Province I feel I have a good idea of the challenges of providing the rural communities with water for drinking, irrigation and washing and also some of the solutions. What has been frustrating, ironically enough, has been the rain. I really don’t feel the footage I shot captured it adequately. It rained so much on the second day that interviews became impossible, the tripod was slipping around in the mud and water kept dripping onto the lens. My piece to camera was literally a wash out – it makes me look a bit silly saying earnestly into the lens: “It hasn’t rained here since last year” when the heavens have opened and soaked me through. Whilst this was great for the farming communities who rely on the rains coming, it’s not so good for film-makers. I dread to think what Falmouth’s media centre manager would say too.

I’ll have to wait until getting back into the edit suite before deciding if the pictures really are unusable, but I am looking forward to going west where conditions are much drier.