Final Blog Post--Hannah

            My journey home began at 8:45 AM on Tuesday, August 23^rd, when Charles, the driver hired to take us to Nairobi, cut short the long, leisurely goodbyes I had planned by arriving at Mpala, of all things, early—an occurrence which I didn’t know was in fact possible. I thought I had mastered the intricacies of Kenya time (everything is always late, always), but it seems that it is a dimension that I am destined never to fully understand.

            Having left Kathleen at Mpala to meet her parents (who had flown in to spend an extra week touring around Kenya with her), Alice and I settled in for the five-hour ride to our hotel in Nairobi, along with Charles the driver, Meg and Jen (two more Princeton students) and Kathryn (a PhD student from Yale, but we liked her a lot anyways), the three of whom were all also leaving Kenya, and Kimani, a Kenyan researcher who wasn’t leaving the country, but hopped in at the last minute for the ride to Nairobi (I may not be totally up to speed on Kenya time, but I do at least know this about Kenya transportation—no trip anywhere is complete without picking up at least one extra guy along the way). The trip was mostly uneventful, though if the traffic through Nairobi had been any slower, I would have been seriously tempted to buy one of the freaking adorable baby bunnies a guy was hawking to passing cars.

            After spending the night in Nairobi, we endured an eight-hour flight to London crewed by flight attendants who enjoyed nothing more than zooming up and down the aisles, ripping the blankets off of sleeping passengers to check for seatbelt-fastening compliance, every time the “Fasten Seatbelt” light turned on. The captain thoughtfully indulged this hobby by toggling the seatbelt light at short, regular intervals that bore no correlation whatsoever to the exterior turbulence levels.

            As we tried to go through connecting security in Heathrow, Alice discovered that the Amarula Cream Liqueur that she had purchased at a duty-free shop in Nairobi, though contained in a sealed bottle in a sealed bag, would not be allowed through (because we had originated in Kenya, a country on their watch list. Had we brought the exact same item from Croatia, we would have been good). So Alice and I ended up killing the four-hour layover before our flight to Newark by exiting through immigration,

Exiting the airport resulted in possibly the shortest visit to London ever taken...

...though if this picture is any indication, we loved it.

using a bunch of bubble wrap and sticky baggage tags to package the Amarula, and proceeding from check-in desk to check-in desk until we found an agent willing to check the bottle.

After all of that, we were about ready to drink the bottle ourselves.

            If anything else interesting happened over the course of the next seven-hour flight to Newark, seven-hour overnight layover in Newark, and six-hour flight to San Francisco, I was too deliriously exhausted to notice. Suffice it to say that eventually, I made it back.

            Since I’ve been reflecting on all of my experiences in Kenya here in this blog over the course of the summer, I don’t feel like I need to write a big significant reflection here to wrap it all up. Actually, I doubt I’d want to do that even if this blog didn’t exist. One of the reasons I was so excited about this internship was that it presented a way for me to experience a very different country and culture while also working in a capacity that fit with the rest of my academic and future life goals. In other words, I didn’t want to just check the “visit a third-world country” box—I wanted whatever I did over the summer to have continuations into my post-summer life.

And it seems like this internship will. I might have left Africa, but I’ll reconnect with many of the people I met there back at Princeton (in fact, it turns out that one person will be my next-door neighbor!). I’ll also continue to be involved in the future of The Bucket Experiment at Mpala via phone and email, and I’ll report on the research I did at a PEI symposium for Princeton on September 30^th (if you’re on campus, come by!).

 

If you liked this blog, you'll love my symposium presentation.

So while I understand the reasons for pausing to digest, I don’t want to write a reflection that will bring closure to an experience that I don’t plan on closing. I do want to recognize a handful of people, though, for their contributions to my summer:

Keir, John, Ekomwa, and Molly: the rest of the Mpala arm of Caylor Ecohydrology. Great bosses, great lab dynamic.

Chrissy, Bianca, Alex, and Meg: fellow Princeton undergrads, looking forward to a reunion in 10blank Little this fall!

Matt, Bob, Oscar, Grace, Kathryn, Enock, David, Irene, Laura, E.B., Alison, Katie, Zack, Mal, Val, Amy, Alicia, Caitlin, Mike (x2), Arnold, Janet, Adam and more: other Mpala researchers. Thanks for great sundowners and good luck to those of you sticking out the year.

Lawrence, Julius, Eunice, and the rest of the staff: if I could have a Kenyan godfamily, you would be it.

Alice and Kathleen: the other two members of “Kelly’s Angels.” I have never spent so much of one stretch of time with any other group of people, fencing teammates, roommates, and family members included. There are few people who I think I could have done it with and ended the summer really, really, liking and appreciating rather than loathing. I think our “Fill-My-Cup Bananagrams” said a lot, but I’ll say it again: you guys are fantastic.

"Kelly's Angels"

            Also, thanks to Elizabeth for writing this blog with me, and everyone who followed it. We were up to 4,500 hits when I last checked, and my hope is that we’ll make it to the five thousand mark by the time all’s said and done. What do you all think—should we write a sequel next summer?

            Finally, I posted my favorite photos from the summer on Facebook. If you're not a Facebook person, you can see them by following this link.

            Kwa heri!

            -Hannah

I Hope You Stay

It has been 12 days since I waved goodbye to my office and office mates with a heartfelt kwa heri and set off for Mombasa International Airport to fly to Nairobi to meet my new-to-Kenya family. Since then, we have been on a Sajewski adventure, exploring the many national parks of Kenya and allowing me to see a lot more of this beautiful country. Right now, we are driving along the  "Escarpment Road," a narrow, winding road carved into the side of a mountain overlooking the Rift Valley (ah mobile internet, what a wondrous discovery). And although I am definitely enjoying the time with my family and the wild beasts of Africa, at times I can't help but wonder what I'd be doing if I were back in Mombasa. Right now, I'd probably be having lunch.

View from where I have lunch while working in Mombasa

View from our safari vehicle

About a week before I finished my internship with Seureca, I found myself, once again, squished in the cab of our trusty sky-blue CWSB pick-up, bumping along the roads in Kiembeni, this time on our way to check on some meter chamber covers which we have been promised for the past two months (see Challenges of the Field). Our driver, Alex, had his favorite cd playing, which was American country music, naturally. I was feeling a bit nostalgic, as country music is prone to make you feel, as I listened to the soft southern twang of country belles sing about their long gone memories and their horses. My ears perked up when I heard the first words of Lee Ann Womack's "I hope you dance," a country song that is familiar even to New Yorkers like myself who rarely experience the joy of country music on the radio.

A popular song for graduations and weddings, it now makes its appearance in my Kenyan worklife.

 I began singing along quitely to myself. It is hard for me to hear a song I like and not sing along. Just ask anyone who has driven around with my in my Jeep for more than ten minutes.To my surprise, co-workers Jane and Peter, crammed in the cab with me, joined in. After a verse or two, Jane mentioned that this should be my song, except with slightly different words. So Peter and Jane filled in the rest of the song, humming along, and then, in the chorus, instead of the well-known "I hope you dance," they sang,  "I hope you staaaaaayy..... Eleeezabeeeeeth.....I hope you stay." From then on, it became my song, and was stuck in my head, with its new improved verses, for several days. 

I have extremely enjoyed my Kenyan summer and I will miss my Seureca family. The Kenyan attitude, at least in Mombasa, is relaxed and in good humor and surprisingly comfortable and familiar. And although I'm still debating between medicine and engineering and don't know what exactly I'm doing next summer, everyone at work is very sure that I will be back in Kenya soon. Here is a view of a typical conservation during my last days in the office:

Me: "Ah I don't want to leave Kenya."

Henry: "Don't worry, you'll be back."

Me: "Maybe."

Peter: "No maybe, definitely. You are coming back to Mombasa/Kenya."

Jane: "Yes, and you should come to Mombasa for Christmas."

Me: "I totally should. By that time, I'll be a pro at Swahili."

We'll see what actually happens. One thing does seem sure though: I was meant to come to Kenya and, whether it is next summer or in a couple of years, I will be coming back sometime. 

PS Although my internship is done, I'm going to keep blogging for the rest of my time in Kenya. So if you like cute pictures of baby elephants or would enjoy a glimpse into the Saga of Sajewski Safaris, stay tuned!

In Which...

           In Which I Introduce This Blog Post 

           So the summer researchers are steadily trickling out of Mpala, the Princeton U-Store has begun sending me emails about all of the overpriced snacks, supplies, and sweatshirts that are NOW SLIGHTLY LESS OVERPRICED FOR BACK-TO-SCHOOL, and my brother and sister have already suffered through a week of high school, which begins freakishly early in the San Francisco Unified School District. All of which means that I’m wrapping up my work at Mpala, preparing to touch down at home for a little while, and, come September, heading back east to Princeton.

            In honor of the approaching semester, I’m incorporating some actual engineering into this blog post. But don’t worry; I’m easing back into academia slowly. Stick with me through the science and I’ll show you pictures of cute baby camels, promise.

            In Which I Explain What I Did This Summer

            You’ll recall that I spent the first half of the summer hacking away at plastic buckets with Exacto knives and drills to prepare them for The Bucket Experiment.

Calibrating one of many sensors used for The Experiment

            After finally finishing setting up the experiment without major incident, I’ve spent the past five weeks running it.

            Here’s how The Bucket Experiment works. First, you spend many days oven-drying pans of soil at 105 degrees for 24 hours, or until they reach below a maximum water potential threshold (a measure of soil dryness). You spend some of the early days trying to be efficient by having pans drying simultaneously in the electric oven and the gas oven, but after setting a big plume of gas on fire and scorching your finger when you forget to put the match in before you turn the gas on, you decide that it’s best to stick to electric.

After several weeks, you’ve dried enough soil to fill all six 65-L buckets, you’ve tricked out a couple of the buckets with temperature probes and soil moisture sensors, and, after much negotiating, you’ve convinced the Kenyans at the workshop to give you enough wood to build rails for the buckets to sit on so you can fit drainage pans underneath. Congratulations! You’re ready.

Buckets, finally filled.

To begin the experiment, you saturate each of the buckets with 30 L of deionized water.

Saturating the buckets. Hydrology in the ecohydrology lab!

Over the next thirty days, you let the soil dry out while routinely taking water vapor samples from five different depths on each of the six buckets by attaching a Teflon tube to ports at each of the depths. The tube runs from the bucket ports to a Water Vapor Isotope Analyzer, which draws up the vapor and analyzes it for water content (ppm H2O) and isotopic composition of the hydrogen and oxygen in the water—that is, the ratio of heavy hydrogen (deuterium, or hydrogen with an extra neutron) to normal hydrogen, and the ratio of heavy oxygen (O¹⁸, or oxygen with two extra neutrons) to normal oxygen. You do this five times a day, at 8, 10, 12, 2, and 4. For thirty days, you live your life according to bucket time, as in:

“Are you interested in going into Nanyuki this weekend?”

“Sure! Do you think we’ll be back by 4 o’clock buckets?”

            “Are you coming to teatime today?”

            “Absolutely! I should be there just after 10 o’clock buckets.”

            And so on.

  

            The point of the experiment is to identify the characteristic isotopic ratios of water vapor at different soil depths. See, atmospheric water vapor over land comes from three sources: air currents, evapotranspiration out of plant leaves, and evaporation from the ground. The Caylor lab already has some ways to determine the isotopic ratios of water vapor brought in on air currents; in fact, that’s what Kathleen has been working on this summer. The bucket experiment is designed to figure out the isotopic ratios of the latter two sources. Water containing more light isotopes tends to evaporate directly from the top 20 cm of soil. Heavier water continues to percolate through the soil, where it gets sucked up by plant roots. So water vapor from ground evaporation tends to have a low isotopic ratio (the isotopic ratio of water stored in the first 20 cm of soil) while water vapor from evapotranspiration tends to have a high isotopic ratio (the isotopic ratio of water stored at soil depths greater than 20 cm). Once we know the characteristic ratios of all three sources, we can look at the isotopic ratio of atmospheric water vapor and by using weighted averages get a pretty good idea of how much each of the three sources contributed to the total amount of water in the air. This tells us a lot about the way water is moving through this environment, which is helpful in, say, developing more efficient water-usage programs.

            So after thirty days, I’ve taken (as I calculated in my last blog post) well over 2000 water vapor samples from soil at all different dryness levels, put them all into a giant spreadsheet, and am spending my last days here working with my supervisor, the fantastic Princeton postdoc Keir Soderberg, to turn the numbers into something useful. My understanding is that eventually our results (and my name!) will go on to a very nice looking poster 

Graph of isotope values. The poster will probably have lots of sweet figures like these on it.

          that that Keir and Professor Caylor will present at a conference in September that will hopefully lead to more interest and more grants that will one day lead to more very nice posters. Ah, academia.

In Which I Discover My Bride Price

            Having spent a good portion of this last week staring at spreadsheets and data files (as a great engineer once said: “Engineering is a lot more playing with data in spreadsheets and less playing with models and fun techy-stuff than I had expected”), I was thrilled when Saturday afternoon brought the opportunity to tag along with Thomas, one of the Kenyan researchers at Mpala, to go visit the herd of milk camels he’s studying.

            The first thing I realized when we got to the camel bomas (corrals) was that if you raise camels for commercial breeding and milk, you need a lot of camels. According to Thomas, there were nearly 200 camels at the site we visited. 

            The second thing I realized is that a lot of camels means a lot of noise: especially if 30 of them are hungry month-old camels who would much rather be eating than be visited by three mizungus. But perhaps I’ll let you come to this realization yourself.

            After we were done bothering the toddler camels, we went to go bother all of the mothers with baby camels, which were even cuter. 

Don't you think?

           This went well for a while…

            ...but the mothers soon got fed up.

            So then we went back to toddler-camel-land. While we were aggravating the mothers of the baby camels, the herders had brought the rest of the lactating mothers over to the toddler camel corral, where the herders would milk each mother before allowing her to reunite with her offspring for the night.

Yep, I milked a camel. And yep, this photo is sideways. Sorry.

            Most of the milk got stored in metal cans, but the herders reserved some for us to share with them. While we waited for the milk to boil, Thomas chatted in Swahili with the herders (translating into English for us), who seemed to be quite enjoying our company—so much so, in fact, that they began to joke about how much it would cost them to enjoy our company in perpetuity.

The eligible bachelors.

            By the time the milk was ready to drink (hot, rich, creamy, and tangy, but all in all not something I’d like to pour on my cereal), they’d come to a consensus. And while I think I’ll remain an eligible bachelorette for the time being, I am oddly pleased to report that I am worth a bride price of twenty camels. Mom, Dad, you’ve done well.

In Which I Write A Postscript

            I’m leaving Mpala Tuesday morning, but I think I’ve got one more blog post in me. I plan on saying more wonderful things about my fellow ecohydrology interns then, but in the meantime Kathleen and Alice both deserve shout-outs for their contributions to this post: Kathleen for talking over the isotope science with me, and Alice for organizing the camel expedition. Thanks, buddies!

Cabin Fever

            Adventure begets boredom.

            I’m sure nearly all of you have come to the same realization somewhere in the middle of your third extra hour in the terminal waiting for the airport guys to finally figure out how to deice the plane. European explorers had to suffer through day after identical day of voluminous sky and ocean before any meaningful exploring could really begin. Heck, astronauts even have to go through isolation training to combat the boredom they’ll experience in space. And it doesn’t get too much more adventurous than space.

You bet it doesn't.

            I’ve mentioned before that the days at Mpala tend to blend into each other, but now that I’ve gone a couple of weeks without a major adventure (and possibly also because I’m nearing the end of my time here), I’m feeling a touch of cabin fever set in. The Mpala complex is not large—it’s no more than a five minute walk between any two points within it—and since buffalo, elephants, and predators roam freely ouside its electric fences, you’re not allowed to leave the boundaries unless you’re in a car or doing research accompanied by a field assistant or an askari (security guard). Since I don’t have my own car and do most of my work in the Caylor lab, a typical day for me occurs entirely within the same small space. There are mornings, like the one a few days ago punctuated by a gorgeous sunrise and double rainbow, when I’m struck by how fortunate I am to be interning in such a unique location. But there are also mornings when dik-diks and hornbills seem more common than squirrels at Princeton, and I long to see pretty much any non-acacia tree.

            Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: boredom begets innovation.

            With no television (sadly, no access to Elizabeth’s telenovelas), spotty internet, and nowhere to go, Mpalans have to be creative when it comes to thinking up things to do after work and on Sunday (Saturday, or at least Saturday morning, is generally considered a workday in Kenya as well). Ten weeks in, here’s the list of my go-to MRC activities:

Wikipedia: This one only works when the stars align (or when our tech guy, George, actually decides to come into work) and the internet is reasonably fast. In preparation for those times, though, I keep a running mental list of those things that I simply must know more about. Pieces of Wikiwisdom I’ve amassed so far:

-Trix comes from Kix! Same recipe, but with added fruit flavoring. Which when you think about it, makes so much sense.

                                     

How did we never notice this before?

-Venus is the most spherical planet.

-In the eighteenth century, the word "mango" meant "to pickle." So you might mango your cucumber.

Or you could make mango-cucumber salsa. Leah, that's on our agenda for when I get home.

-Q-Tips, for reasons unfathomable, were originally called "Baby Gays." This little bit of Wikipediaing also led me to this mildly interesting column by Joel Stein published in Time some years ago.

Counting Things: Since I have pretty much the same routine every day, I’m able to get a pretty good estimate of the number of times I’ve done or consumed something here. I’ve calculated that 69 days equals, among other things:

            11 gallons of tea and coffee

            138 bananas

            7 pineapples

2,100 water vapor samples collected (which translates into 52.5 hours of sampling time)

300 laps around the 0.85-mile-long track that runs around Mpala’s inner border

414 omnipresent tiny black ants, mercilessly smushed

Bananagrams: Hasbro, Mattel, and Milton Bradley ought to stop wasting money staging those scenes they put on their game boxes and just take pictures of us, because we (well, mostly me), get more into our games than all of the white-toothed, racially diverse families ever depicted on a Sorry or Connect Four box combined. 

We freaking LOVE Connect Four!

           Our hands-down favorite, as my Facebook friends may have guessed from my current profile picture, is Bananagrams.

If you're not my Facebook friend, you should fix that. In the meantime, here's the pic.

            Bananagrams is a set of 144 lettered tiles (like Scrabble tiles, but without point values) that come packaged, oddly but wonderfully, in a cloth banana. I am told that one can also acquire Scrabble Apple, which is similar to Bananagrams, the main difference being that the tiles come in a cloth apple. Let me say for the record that should the manufacturers ever extend to more exotic fruits, I would be first in line to buy Rambutangrams.

Rambutan.

            We used to play Bananagrams the normal way, where players tried to be the first to use all of their letters in an interlocking grid of words when there are no more letters in the central pool to draw from. After a little while, we ditched the speed element and played for style instead, trying to use the longest and most esoteric words we could. At this point, I’ve bought the Bananagrams set off Chrissy, who originally brought it, I play almost daily with Kathleen (the only other person whose B-grams ardor continues to burn as brightly as it did when at the beginning of the summer), and nearly everyone else here groans whenever we pour out the tiles again.

Social Drinking: An activity with a wider following than Bananagrams. Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.

Perhaps.

            Every few days, someone decides that it’s time for a “sundowner,” which requires everyone to haul out any sort of beverage they’ve got stored in their room, cram into the few cars at Mpala with working headlights, and drive somewhere to drink and watch the sunset. For a successful sundowner, it’s best to have as wide a selection of beverages as possible: vodka, hard cider, Coke, whisky, boxed wine, passion fruit juice, bitter lemon soda, ginger beer, tropical juice, rum, the mysterious Kenya Cane, and, of course, the giant ubiquitous bottles of Tusker beer. It’s also best to have the sundowner on a cliff or near a river, where one has a greater chance of falling to our deaths or being charged by hippos upon excessive consumption of the aforementioned. 

Sundowner at Lookout Rock. I don't think anyone's fallen off. Yet.

         Like I said, we’re always on the lookout for a little extra excitement.

         But don't worry, I won't go too crazy, because one thing my cabin fever has made me realize is that I'd better never get arrested, ever. If I can get restless here, there's no way I'd ever get through any time in jail. Especially since I don't think most inmates are too big on Bananagrams. 

Work In Progress: Into the Field

Welcome to Kiembeni Blue Estate, a peaceful collection of aqua-roofed homes adjacently to the similar, yet red-roofed, Kiembeni Red. Peaceful from a distance, but its water network tells a different story. Along the pipelines, dark deals go down, water disappears and sewage infiltrates spaghettis which venture off the main lines. And who is the culprit, the cause of this turbid underworld? Some blame the leaks, others the vacuum-inducing lack of water but one villain skims over the rest: unaccounted for water (UfW). Water which just disappears, with leaking mob bosse sending it to the depths of the earth. 

However, Kiembeni is not left completely to the whims of water-impurifying fiends. For what is that coming over the hill? Is it a ndege (a bird)? Is it an ndege (a plane)? No! Able to distinguish a volumetric meter from a velocity meter with a single glance, faster than a speeding matatu (if said matatu had four flat tires), it's Customer Survey/Serial Metering Girl!

That's right, I have a super hero alter ego. The whole office side of the job is really just my Clark-Kent-eqsue cover. In real life, I'm out in the field, checking meters and taking names.

With my trusty sidekick, Meter Reader Man, I venture into the compounds of Kiembeni, inspect meters, take readings, count tanks and complete surveys on consumption patterns and water availability.

Nyamawi, my meter reading/translator friend.

Conducting customer surveys and designing a scheme for installing precision meters in Kiembeni has been my main task this summer. Customer surveys were really interesting to create and conduct and the one of the main things I learned is that, however much you plan in the office and however many lists you make, once you get to the field, everything changes. You have to be able to adapt to anything. Which is why it is good to be a Surveying Super Hero.

The survey sheet I created. I could fill this out in my sleep at this point.

 One of my extra special super powers is an extraordinary knowledge of domestic water meters. I know them down to the serial number by now. One of my co-workers even suggested that I write my thesis on meters. And I am pretty sure that, combined, I have more pictures of monkeys and meters than anything else on my camera. Just check them out for yourself:

Dunwell Single-Jet Velocity Meter

Kent Polymer Volumetric Meter
(with a leaky gate valve.
That's unaccounted for water (UfW) for you)

ARAD Model P Volumetric Meter
(this was an exciting find --ARADs are rare)

Kent S130 Velocity Meter (most common)

However, this immense database of meter knowledge is not easy to come by. If I really was a super hero, one of my catch-phrases would be "Challenges of the Field." That really isn't a very catchy phrase at all actually, so I would probably choose something more like "There's a snake in my meter chamber," to take a leaf out of Woody's book, or  "Holy hose pipe, Meter Reader Man! " or maybe even "Go go engineer-in-training skills!" (which probably would be pretty useless).  However, "challenges in the field" does portray an important theme to field work. There are challenges everywhere.

Meters are often hard to access:

Yes, I followed my sidekick over this dangerous  dump of debris to get my meter reading.

Or sometimes, they are buried under banana trees:

See that speck of blue down in the left corner? That's a meter. People are supposed to elevate their buried meters within three months of being informed to do so. Otherwise their water is disconnected. However, with such a nice banana tree, the debate water vs. banana gets to be tricky. And you can always just bribe the meter reader. A few bananas every time they come by and I'm sure they'll let you keep your tree. 

But nothing will stop Meter Reader Msichana Muzungu! Through pouring rain, slopping mud, and baking sun, I climb over tires, skirt around boiling pots of water, leap over laundry and conduct my survey. It has been quite an adventure. I've even made some friends along the way:

My friend here got very excited every time I came to check her meter.
She even gave me a few yards of fabric so I can make a beautiful African dress to remember Kenya by. 

And finally, after many weeks of toil, my great reward: to see my serial metering set-up actually in the field. The precision meters in series with the sample meters are so beautiful, it almost makes me tear up a little. 

After drawing a bagillion sketches and learning all about plumbing and fittings,
 I was amazed that my scheme actually worked out. 

The point of all this surveying and serial metering is to develop a consumption pattern for Mombasa so we know how much water people are using and when they use it. Serial metering also helps us to check the meters in the field and see if they are correctly registering the amount of water being used or, as is often the case,  if they are under-registering and contributing to that dastardly UfW. Which is all very exciting stuff. If you don't believe me, just look how excited they are:

Emily and Mrabo, our plumbers. Serial metering is so much fun!

And finally, after a long days work, the sky blue Coast Water-mobile arrives to take me and my water-saving cohorts home.

Time to leave the dusty roads of Kiembeni for another day.

But wait! What is that you say? You haven't had enough? You want to hear more about the adventures of the young intern as she dons her (imaginary) cape and fights water-borne injustice? Well alright, let us take a brief trip over to Changamwe and check out the status of the reservoirs there.

The view from afar looks pretty tame, but let's get a little bit closer.

The inside of a reservoir. How intriguing. Yes, those are holes in the roof and garbage floating in the water. And what is that scrabbling and chattering in the distance? 

Oh, monkeys. Naturally. Because who wouldn't want a fluffy ball of mischief running around where your water is stored? Reservoirs make a great home for monkeys.

Luckily, they treat the water. Because that is what reservoirs are for. To hold and treat water. And chlorination is a good method of water treatment. Just open the tap and dump some in.

Ah, but treatment and filtration is all upstream of the monkeys. So the water from Mombasa taps is straight from the monkey den. And I still use it to brush my teeth. Crazy, I know.

It seems to me that these reservoirs need a more in-depth exploration.

Down into the reservoir I climb. Luckily, there were no snakes in this one. Only a few lizards. Just another day in the life of Msichana Muzungu: Engineering Intern Extraordinaire.

P.S. Soy Tu Deuna is drawing to its dramatic conclusion this week. The evil Roscendo has pulled a Phantom of the Opera and kidnapped the noble Valentina and taken her down to his sub-terranean lair. She is now in very ill with a fever but still has enough vivacity to spit in Roscendo's face when he tries to feed her soup. And Jose Miguel is battling bats and Roscendo's attempts to kill him to save the life of his one true love. Oh so much drama!