Floortje Roelvink
Our first weekend mainly spiraled around killing cockroaches, cleaning the house and exploring Bondo town. This quietude ended on Monday, when our workweek started and we had our first brainstorm session. Having loud voices and strong opinions, this session certainly took some time. Because of our good efforts on Monday, Tuesday there was time to attend a cultural activity, which was the graduation ceremony of the nursery school. We were honored guests and asked to give a word of thanks and admiration to the children. Simone quickly recovered from the shock of having to do this and almost seemed to have prepared her speech. The rest of this day, as well as the following two days were filled with meetings till our hands were soar from greeting people. The Vice-Chancellor welcomed us heartily at JOOUST and was very happy to have us. His face lit up even more when he learned about our fields of study. According to him, we would be a perfectly suited team to build the water reservoir of 1 million cubic meters for the Student Hostel. That sure would be a lot cheaper than to hire contractor, wouldn’t it? If we could take some of our time to design this system, maybe a week or so? And maybe redesign the piping at the Student Hostel? We thanked him for his confidence in us but explained this what somewhat out area of expertise.
So we worked on a design for the rainwater harvesting system, started with the draft version for the curriculum of our course on greenhouse farming and in the evenings, we met students and people from the community. Each one of them was eager to share stories about Kenya, its politics and its culture, its traditions and its values. We were instantly invited to visit their families, whether they lived around Lake Victoria or all the way up to the Rift Valley. The week ended with a field trip to local farmers, accompanied by Mr. Achuti, an extension agent working for the Ministry of Agriculture. This gave us a very nice insight of the life of a farmer, their troubles and their opinion on greenhouse farming.
As everybody insisted we should see Kenya, we gladly went on a trip during the weekend. We crossed Lake Victoria with a ferry, drove around Rusinga on a Piki Piki and made a boat tour to Mfangano Island, where we climbed the hill overlooking Lake Victoria. The view this gave was definitely worth the not so little streams of sweat dripping from our faces. We hurried back down as we saw the ferry come in view, drove back to Bondo and ended the week with a cold glass of Tusker.
