Not a drop to drink

I am still editing, I promise. Deadlines for other work have crept up on me, as has a stint at STV news in Glasgow shadowing reporters. In addition to these distractions is the fact that University College Falmouth’s media centre is operating on severely curtailed hours as it is the summer holiday. While this is understandable – we students cannot expect the staff to take no holidays at all – it does mean that time in the Avid suites is limited to between 9:30 and 4:30 on weekdays. A far cry from term time opening hours, which are 8:45 am  – 9:00 pm.

Something that I am thinking about a lot at the moment is what exactly the point of my project is. Yes, Kenya and the rest of East Africa are suffering from drought. Yes, the number of people with access to safe water and sanitation lies around the 60% mark (depending on whose figures you look at). Yes, lack of water affects all areas of life from education, to health, to wealth. But why document it right now? What will be the outcome of many people, especially in poor rural and urban areas, not having enough water? Will there be conflict as resources are stretched? Will foreign governments and NGOs step in to improve the situation? Will the Kenyan government be able to do so? Answers on a postcard please…

I got back nearly two weeks ago, which seems hard to believe. I’ve now captured all 6 hours of footage using our editing software, Avid – bear in mind that this documentary is only supposed to be 20 minutes long. At least, I didn’t shoot as much as my colleague Nina who returned from Uganda with more than 20 tapes, each with an hour of footage!

After reviewing my footage, I’ve found the following problems:

• I used the gun mic as the camera’s top mic most of time. The sound is great, but unfortunately the furry windshield appears in lots of my shots in the top righthand corner. This can be rectified in the edit suite, but is very annoying, especially because you don’t see it on the LCD and I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it through the viewfinder either.
• If you decide to film in Kenya during the rains, take an umbrella. The waterproof cover for the camera is cumbersome and impractical and the rain can damage the camera. A large golf umbrella is ideal for keeping the rain off.
• If you’re self-shooting and trying to do pieces to camera, ALWAYS use auto focus and auto white balance. They are there for a reason. Getting your very inexperienced driver to try to focus for you does not work, believe me. The light changes so often during the rains that it’s not practical to white balance every time – meaning I am going to have to do a lot of colour correction in post-production.
• Always get someone to translate for you as you go along during interviews. It will save so much time. I think I’m going to have to send audio files to contacts in Kenya to help translate where I only have a rough translation. Most people I interviewed spoke English thankfully. I can understand them fine, but I will be asking advice about whether they need to be subtitled for a UK audience.
• It’s a good idea to have a set of release forms for interviewees to sign. This is something I didn’t have and actually it didn’t really come up. If the film ends up being commissioned (unlikely at this point), I will have to negotiate with the NGOs I worked with to make sure I can release the footage.

I will be posting more about how the edit is going in the next few weeks.

My final day of filming has involved a journey into Kibera, not only Kenya’s biggest slum, but also Africa’s. It is estimated that 1 million people live in around 2.5 square kilometres. It is also home to civil society organisation Umande Trust.

They agreed to take me to a few water projects in the peoples’ settlements in Nairobi to see what the urban situation is like in terms of access to water. I think it was a good idea to give them a few day’s notice because it gave them a chance to talk to the people they work with before unleashing a mzungu (white person) with a camera on residents. The people’s settlements (more commonly known as informal settlements or slums) were the location of much of Kenya’s post-election violence in late 2007 and 2008. Things appear to be quiet now, but situations can turn volatile surprisingly quickly.

We didn’t stay in Kibera, instead taking a bus across town to Korogocho. This peoples’ settlement is much smaller than Kibera but suffers many of the same problems in accessing water. In all the slums, water rationing is a fact of life. People earn a living from water collection which means the price of a jerry can of water fluctuates wildly. My companions from Umande, Njeri and Grace, told me that at cost price, a 5 litre jerry can should cost just a few shillings. However, water collectors are able to sell them at 30 to 40 Kenyan Shillings.

What’s really crazy about Korogocho is its location. Right next to the city sewage treatment works. But it seems it’s impossible to link up the settlement to the sewage network. There are sewage pipes going right through the middle of the slum! Before the projects that I saw came into existence, the preferred toilet was a flying one: doing your business in a plastic bag and throwing it as far away from you as possible. Umande and development donors have funded some public toilets that cost 2-3 KSh to use and also recycle the waste as biogas. I did ask if everyone can afford to pay to use the toilets, but the community groups that run it say they always let people in, even if they have no money.

I got some really great pics of the projects and the environment and we even walked through the sewage works grounds, so I hope to show how Nairobi’s ‘have-nots’ live cheek by jowel with the ‘haves” wastewater.