Engineers Without Borders at MSU: Eric: Landing in Nairobi

Karibu! Welcome!

Since 2004, EWB@ MSU's professional and student volunteers have worked with community members in Khwisero, Kenya to provide water and sanitation infrastructure at the district's 58 primary schools, making it easier for Khwisero's children to avoid waterborne disease and get an education.

In that time, the group has grown from a small club to one of MSU's premier student organizations, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund seven borehole wells, six composting latrines and a biogas latrine that serve thousands of community members.

Thank you for joining us as we continue to work hand-in-hand with local partners to make a difference in one small part of our world. As Western Kenya's limited internet access allows, we will update this blog while in-country with the successes, stories and lessons provided by our work.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Eric: Landing in Nairobi

As I write this, we're recovering from meeting our trip's first unexpected challenge: navigating the international air travel system after the winter storm Matt mentioned below threw a wrench in our itinerary. As a result, we've arrived at Nairobi a day later than we'd originally planned, after spending a night in Chicago, 20 hours in London, and more time than I'd like to count in assorted airports and aircraft.

Needless to say, we're thoroughly exhausted at this point--I don't think any of us got more than 15 cumulative hours of sleep between leaving Billings and landing this morning. This afternoon, I sat down on my hotel room bed to do a bit of reading and woke up four hours later, only to discover everyone else on the team had done the same thing.

After taking a cab from the airport this morning, we met with Maurice, one of our Kenyan team members. He'll be accompanying us to Khwisero tomorrow, and somehow managed to arrange bus tickets for us even after we had to drop our original reservations due to our delay (much of Nairobi's workforce consists of people who've come to the city to find jobs so they can send money back to their families in rural areas, so finding transportation to the countryside as everyone travels home for the holidays is difficult).

At Maurice's suggestion, we're staying at the Wab hotel, part of the Buruburu shopping center on the outskirts of Nairobi. It's an interesting neighborhood, to say the least. As I'm writing this about 8:30 in the evening, we're being serenaded by something that sounds like a combination of karaoke night at the local bar and car alarms, though it may very well be someone blasting the latest Kenyan pop hit.

Fortunately, I'm exhausted enough this evening I don't think it's going to bother me. Actually, I'm starting to nod off as I write this, so I should probably quit before I get even more incoherent than I already am.

Mulembe (I'm pretty sure that's "peace" in Luhya),

Eric