Burkina Faso

I was just in Burkina Faso for work. I took my pink messenger bag that I used the last time I was in the country seven years ago (before this blog)!

Two weeks of clothes, field gear and (of course) cleats (for a tournament I went to straight from the airport when I got back to Europe).

We spent a few days in Ouagadougo meeting with government and international development actors and stakeholders. There were also other folks from the institute (past and present) around town, which was neat. Then the team headed to a town a few hours away from the capital, which is known for being the place that the buses stop between Burkina's two largest cities. We used it as a base for accessing the other towns and villages that are part of the project.

Checking out a brand new, never been used, ventilated double pit latrine.

I have over 600 photos from the trip - mostly of toilets and their buildings, but also of residences, water and waste systems, interviews, and workshops. I'll spare you the bulk of them. This was a challenging, but rewarding trip (+ no one I was with got malaria this time!): everything was in French, and it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day, but I think we got solid data and a great grasp of the project elements we were studying.

One of the interviews was with the proprietor of a dolo (millet beer) home-brewery/bar. I didn't see any bottles of StarSan, but the women did comment that things were much cleaner since they had a sink basin installed through the program we were evaluating. 

There was no official work on Sunday, so my colleague and I tried to take advantage of the nearby Deux Bales National Park. With hopes of  catching a glimpse of elephants or hippos, we set off after lunch to meet our guide. We did spot some illegal cattle, some flowers, a few birds, lots of termite mounds and something very large in the antelope family running away.

An elephant had been there in the recent past - the guide guessed the day before we were there.

Cool trashcan. The bin is hinged, so the waste can be easily tipped out, but can be covered from rain and some vectors. These were fairly common in the town, but had JICA logos on them. The waste was collected by donkey driven carts, but unfortunately I could not get a photo - I did take a video of what might have been a transfer station, but have not gone through the movies yet.

The coolest paint job of the houses we visited.

A newly built EcoSan toilet. You squat with your rear over the big hole, peeing into the center hexagon, which drains through a hole in one of the corners. This allows the liquids and "solids" to be separated - meaning less smell, theoretically easier hygieneization, and the potential for nutrient recovery.

Tanzania

In March I went to Dar es Salaam for a PhD training course on the sustainability of distributed infrastructure. That means we looked at various aspects of small energy, water, and sanitation systems. The course was organized by two different German universities, but there were students from Africa, the USA and other European countries, studying everything from engineering to geography to sociology to architecture. As an undergrad I did a program to bridge engineering and the humanities, but a good chunk of the non-science stuff was a little incomprehensible to me - and even worse for the pure mechanical engineers. I heard some complaints from the human geographers about the technical stuff.

Snack break! The globs tasted like hushpuppies.

Explaining my poster.

The last day of the course we did an exercise where we walked around the city and tried to document some of the infrastructure systems (or lack there of). Street coffee was pretty interesting and quite tasty. Guys walk around carrying a container of coals with a kettle balanced on top and a bucket which contains cups and water for washing.

Mobile coffee solution.

My group found instances of reuse and recycling. This ranged from book binders selling their paper shreds and men chopping up electronics with machetes.

Prices paid for different metals.

The last day involved a trip to a village that was two three five hours from Dar to visit a village where an energy services company was implementing a solar microgrid. Unlike most solar power companies who sell or lease panels to individual households, they install tripods with solar panels and batteries around the village. This allows the system to grow based on the actual (not the expected) demand. People then pay a connection fee and buy chunks of electricity (similar to how you would by pre-paid mobile phone minutes). The generation and load can be monitored in real-time over the cellphone network. The systems don't work with conventional electronics, so the company also retails compatible appliances. After showing us around, one of the founders rode back to Dar with us and was gracious enough to have a conversation about how they operate and a little about their growth strategy. I will probably not use any energy case studies in my dissertation, but it was interesting to think about if any of their approaches could be applied to water, waste, or sanitation infrastructure.

Me in fieldwork-mode (L) and a solar panel tripod with energy box (R).

The direct Dar-Zürich flight leaves quite late at night, so I was able to spend the day with some course-mates at a nearby beach, Kigamboni.

The Dar skyline from the ferry to the beach.

It was a little windy. It was a private-ish beach guarded by masai warriors.

Chipsi mayai - a potato-egg dish with hot sauce. It is eaten with toothpicks, which are not very effective knives.

Get ready for a post dump: accounts of my trips to Haiti and the USA are almost ready to be released.

Nairobi, Kenya

I was in Nairobi for work at the end of July. This trip was ridiculously short. We landed Monday evening and flew out late Friday night. I didn't even really eat particularly Kenyan food. I would have liked to have stayed longer or seen more of the city, but there was not really time to get comfortable in navigating and can be risky to explore alone. Next time I go somewhere outside of Europe, I need to try to get more out of the trip. The purpose of the trip was to check out the operations of some of the players in the water and sanitation field there and conduct a workshop. All of this went really well, but I am not supposed to talk about what we did, so instead of riveting discussion about the trickier bits of running your own water or sanitation service, I will just quickly show some of the other bits of the trip. One thing that I did notice was that it was much calmer than Accra or other cities in Africa that I have visited. When I did walk around some parts of the city, only once did I get called after and there was no hissing.

You don't get to escape toilet talk that easily, I paid ten cents to go into a public toilet in a park (I was just curious) and the attendant handed me some toilet paper. The stall didn't have enough depth to get a good photo, but it was a squatting toilet (very common in other parts of the world) and the tank was tied together with string. Overall pretty clean and functional. 

The hotel I stayed in made a pretty okay burrito (better than my Estonian Burrito) and a surprisingly giant and yummy choclate chip cookie. They also carried the locally produced Sierra beer, which had the silhouette of an ostrich on the bottle cap.  I bought fancy Kenyan coffee and postcards of the more exciting aspects of the country in the giftshop.

I took notes during a workshop with an "Obama Smoothline" pen.

Prototype of a new squatting model. 

Lunch at the workshop came in these cool containers with special sections for soup and rice!
Sort of like source separating toilets, but on the other side of the equation.