Hump Day

Ruthie* - Most of the morning I stayed inside working on typing up an operations guide for guest house that Dominion is going to build. There are always people that visit the farm and take tours but the closest lodging is about 2 hours away, thus the need for a guest house (basically a bed and breakfast type deal) I randomly got placed on this project- little did they know my background with B&Bs. When I told them they were thrilled! Hopefully I can be a big help. Calvin the CEO of Dominion really wants visitors to experience the farm first hand. So the visitors will be encouraged to work right along side the Dominion workers. People can work with the ladies in the rice fields, spend the day at the rice mill, help with the fish ponds, the banana trees, chicken farm, or even at the machine shop. Its going to be a great experience for anyone who comes. I included a picture of the ladies working hard in the rice field. Friday our team gets for join them for the day! It should be a lot of fun!

Nate*- This morning Kevin and I went out to the tilapia breeding ponds. There they were draining a pond to retrieve all of the baby fish (fry). For Kevin and I this meant standing around in the sun taking pictures and notes. The workers had a lot more to do. They had to wade out into the very muddy pond with nets and encircle the pond. They did this to get all of the tilapia parents out of the water. Once the pond drained enough they used volleyball sized nets to scoop out thousands of baby fish that were as long as a finger is wide. The most important part of my days tends to be the conversations had with the workers. I think Kevin and I are really growing on them. After lunch Kevin and I started putting our biodigester together. We are using this plastic bag tube stuff that is about 3 feet in diameter. For the first digester we cut out two 30 foot lengths of the tube stuff. We had Ginsey crawl through one bag with the other bag to double it up and Ruthie followed to straighten the inner bag. We made a real homemade gas outlet and slurry inlet and attached those to the bag as well. Then we went to bed asap because we knew we had to wake up at 4:30 the next morning.

Fish Guts

Ruthie* Dan and I biked down to the rice mill again (this time on my own bike) to work on our project. Also this time the media girls came with us. We needed them to take pictures of each step in the milling process so we can have pictures in our operations guide. This actually took quite awhile, but it needed to be done.
Nate* This morning Kevin and I started on our biodigester. We got metal barrels and both cow and chicken manure with Bryan. We spent most of the morning mixing the poop with water and filling the barrels. We are starting the poop in barrels because they are more manageable than a 30 foot plastic balloon in the ground. Once we are sure the manure is going we will move it into the constructed biodigester. Most of the locals that we have talked to are very interested in starting their own digester at home. We spent our afternoon gutting fish. It didn’t smell as bad as I thought it would. The weirdest part was how the tilapia would continue to flop around with all of their guts removed. Ruthie said I was a horrible person for gutting live fish…

Our new friend, Teresa

Ruthie*- Monday has been probably the most fun day yet. Nate and I got to go into the village together and meet with the craft lady, Theresa. I met her on Saturday and learned that her sewing machine had been broken for months- maybe even close to a year. I told her that I would take a look at it and try and help her fix it. When Monday came I realized that I have no idea how to fix so Nate came with me. We met her at her shop (an old barn/shed) but her sewing machine was at her house, so she took us there. On our way to our house I was asking her about her family. She told us that she was kind of a widow. She had been married for 5 years when a war or something broke out. Her husband ended up fighting in the war and going down to Tanzania, but he never returned. She has no idea what happened to him- it was like he vanished. He may have been killed or found another wife along the way. She was then left with 2 children to raise by herself- she never remarried. She had a boy and a girl. The boy ended up passing away when he was a teenage from liver problems. Her daughter Linda is still alive and lives with her today. Linda has a little boy. Teresa is a very happy grandmother. She is such an amazing lady. Anyway, after looking at her machine from the 1940s we both realized we couldn’t fix it. But since we were there failing to fix it another man stopped by and fixed it! Even though we didn’t fix it ourselves she was grateful because we helped make it happen. I think she was also grateful that we cared enough to try. It was a good day Btw- On the way home we found the most amazing tree!
Nate* -This morning we dissected fingerlings (teenager fish) to find out how efficient the sex reversal process was. A sample of about a hundred fish are taken and preserved a month prior. We cut the fishes bellies open, pulled out their guts, and put their gonads on slides. The sexes of each sample fish is recorded in a notebook. There are mostly male (around 95%) with the remainder either female or intersex (both). The sex is found by looking for the presence of eggs within the gonads under a microscope. After this we drove around with Bryan looking for parts and manure for our biodigester. After lunch we dug a ditch for the biodigester with the help of a backhoe. After lunch I tagged along with Ruthie as she mentioned above. We spent the remainder of the day after this writing up curriculum on the computers.

We went to the local church here this morning. We thought we were going to be late but when we arrived the church was almost empty. About 15-20 mins into the service the church was nearly full! Each week we are going to have a couple of people give a brief message (about 15 mins long). From what we heard it is very common for pastors to volunteer visitors to preach the message that morning. Thankfully we had a back up plan for 2 people to be prepared the first Sunday just in case it happened- and it did. At the end of the service each of us had to stand up and tell a little bit about ourselves. Everyone was so welcoming! After church we were invited to visit a couple homes in the villages and pray for sick people and just love on them. A lot of the people really do live in grass huts with dirt floors. It was really neat to be welcomed into their homes. The most common Kiswahili words we hear are “Karibu” which means “welcome” and “Jambo” which means “hello.” The people are so amazing here. We finished off the evening playing a fun game of frisbee.

Day 3

Ruthie* Today was a very fun day! Saturdays at the farm are only half work days. I left with my team member, Dan, in the morning to talk with the manager of the rice mill, David. Oh and since the girls bikes hadn’t arrived yet I had to sit on metal tray dealy on the back of his bike. I felt so silly. I think I giggled the whole way there . Anyway, our meeting with David went really well. Our job is basically to learn how to operate everything in the rice mill and learn the positions of all the employees and see how we can make the mill more efficient. This is going to take some time but it’s a great learning experience for us and it will really help the farm. Nate spent most all of the morning scooping up poop for the bio-digester. He was very stinky when he came home. This hopefully is the only day he will have to scoop poop and then he can start on the actual construction of the bio-digester! Later in the evening our bikes came in! They are only a few inches shorter than the men's bikes but the lower bar in the middle makes it easier to hop on. None of us can still touch the ground but at least we can reach the peddles! Once we got the bikes we went on about an hour bike ride. It was so amazing, but we were soooo tired and sweaty afterward…time to get in shape! Later this evening we are going to see a movie outside on the wall with the locals. This is something that the owner Calvin tries to do for the locals when he comes in town-they love it! It’s going to be a lot of fun! The people here are probably some of the nicest people I have ever met.

First full day

We started off the day with a tour of all the property. Everything is so beautiful! We came back ate lunch then had some meetings with the staff of the farm. The projects we were assigned are going to be a lot of hard work – I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. Later in the day our bikes were delivered. Because the farm is soo big we need bikes to get around. The only problem with the bikes was that they were men’s bikes and WAY too tall for all 5 of us girls. Someone ended up taking some of the bikes to exchange them for women’s bikes. It was really fun attempting to ride the bikes though, well more like attempting to get on them- we didn’t do much riding. It was a pretty relaxed day which was good because most of us were extremely tired from all the traveling. It was just what we needed to organize our thoughts for our projects. Tomorrow is going to be even better!

We finally made it to Kenya!

We finally arrived! We left on Monday at 6am and arrived late last night (Thursday) around 9pm. We ended up missing our very first flight because of technically difficulties with the plane, thus making us miss all of our connecting flights and making us extra late arriving. But we finally made it to Dominion Farms! Kenya is beautiful! The land where we are located is mostly flat but with beautiful mountains off in the distance. Everything is a lot more lush and green than I had expected…especially for it being “winter” here (but it makes sense being on the equator).