Tuesday, July 13th

Today I went with Jean, Aidan, and the KiKi Weavers to harvest water hyacinth in the morning. The process takes a long time, is boring, and is in the hot sun. Basically, we walked along the river to the dam, where we found hyacinth plants that had been pulled from the water and tossed on shore by a crew of prison laborers. We severed the stalks of the plants and cut off the leaves, and then collected them in large canvas bags. Once the bags were full, we returned to the project site and sliced each stalk in half and left them to dry in the sun. Tomorrow they will turn the stalks and on Thursday they will treat them and start making rope.

In the afternoon we all went with Chelina and Bernard, the leader of Ushirika, to see the Community Cooker, which is a project Ushirika created. People bring their trash to the Cooker, where it is sorted and combustible trash is burned to power a stove and oven that can be used by community members to bake and cook for themselves and for sale. Hopefully, this will serve as an outlet for the vast amounts of trash that people have until now been dumping at the second site, but this is dependent on the Cooker actually running when it is supposed to.

This evening, we all went to the community meeting at the second site, where the leaders of the three groups and Chelina talked to community residents who had been recruited to be the founding members of the CBO. Once again we stayed out late, and had to be escorted out of Kibera. When we got home the other interns and I cooked dinner together. Tonight was Aidan and Chase’s turn to make grilled cheese and tomato soup, since Jean and I cooked the spaghetti with meat sauce that we ate the last two nights. It’s been really nice cooking meals and spending time with the other interns, which has fostered sort of a camaraderie that I haven’t always felt at other internships. It’s nice having other people to hang out with and talk to in a place where there are so many cultural differences between myself and the residents.