Week 1

Hi everyone!

This update will likely be one of the longest (apologies in advance). I am more and more impressed every day with the things that Nyumbani is doing here, so I wanted to start off the year by explaining it all thoroughly!

Nyumbani, the umbrella organization that operates Nyumbani Village, was founded in 1992 by Father D’Agostino, an American Jesuit priest. The program first established Nyumbani Children’s Home, an orphanage exclusively for HIV+ children located in Karen, Nairobi. Nyumbani later started Lea Toto, a community outreach program that established clinics for HIV+ children and family members in some of the most impoverished communities of Nairobi.

Nyumbani Village was opened in 2006 to provide a holistic method of caring for members of the generations that were “left behind” by Kenya’s HIV/AIDS epidemic: the children and parents of those who passed away due to HIV/AIDS. In this part of Kenya, when the parents of a family pass away, their children go to live with their grandparents. For some families, this presents an insurmountable financial burden. Situated on 1,000 acres, Nyumbani Village is home to around 1,000 children and around 100 grandparents who have all encountered these tragic circumstances.

Scattered around the Village are 26 “clusters”, with 4 houses in each cluster. Each house contains a single family, which is made up of 10 children and a single grandparent. While some of the children are the biological grandchildren of the grandparent in the house, each family also has children who are not related, but were orphaned due to HIV/AIDS and did not have any grandparents to take care of them. All of the children and grandparents come from the surrounding area, meaning that they are all from the same tribe, Kamba. Almost all of the grandmothers (shushus) and grandfathers (umaus) speak exclusively Kikamba, the tribal dialect. The children also speak Kikamba, but they also learn English and Kiswahili in school, as these are the two national languages of Kenya. All of the matters relating to the families and clusters are handled by the Home Care department. Home Care is lead by 6 social workers who are each assigned to 4-5 clusters, and oversee everything family-related from distributing food to the families to dealing with conflicts within a family.

Currently, Nyumbani receives funding from private groups like Johnson & Johnson, as well as government organizations like USAID. The Village is hoping to be completely self-sustaining within a few years. In order to achieve this, there are many different programs run within the Village. First is the medical clinic. There is a full-time medical staff including a clinical officer, a nurse, a laboratory, a counseling center, and a nutritionist. There is also the on-site Comprehensive Care Center for the ~100 children and 6 grandparents in the Village who are themselves HIV+. The clinic has a pharmacy that is able to deal with a wide range of common household ailments, and there are several more sophisticated hospitals in Kitui or Nairobi where children can be referred if it is something more serious. The clinic is free for all children and grandparents, but is also available for people from the surrounding community.

There are 3 different schools within the Village. Hotcourses Primary School is for children from nursery school age through Level 8 (the equivalent of 8^th grade). This is the largest school, with around 700 children. After Level 8, students have 2 different options for continuing their education. The first is Lawson Secondary School, which has 317 students, Forms 1-4. As with the clinic, school is provided to the children of Nyumbani for free, but is also an option for a fee for the children from the surrounding community.

The alternative to Lawson High School is, in my opinion, one of the coolest parts of the Village. It is the Nyumbani Youth Polytechnic, which is a trade-based school with somewhere around 140 students. The school offers classes in carpentry, metalworking, tailoring, salon and beauty, construction, and solar energy. Almost all new construction projects in the Village are conducted with the help of Polytechnic students, including the current expansion of the Polytechnic. In this sense, the school literally builds itself, which I think is so impressive. There is a new program in the Village that allows for recent graduates of the Polytechnic to design their own businesses, put together a detailed proposal and budget, and apply to receive a microloan from Nyumbani to help get their business underway.

The Polytechnic students who study solar energy help maintain the solar gardens and solar panels that provide Nyumbani with 100% of its electricity. There is no electric grid out here to tap into; all facilities are powered by solar energy harvested on-site. Every cluster has solar panels that power lights inside all 4 homes, and larger solar gardens harvest energy that is used for lights and charging phones/laptops inside the administrative building and the guest house. Solar panels also power the water pumps that provide groundwater used for washing clothes.

As could be expected in a semi-arid climate in rural Kenya, water is precious. There are two rainy seasons during the year. The first is the “short rains” from November-December, and the “long rains” come from March-May. The rain that falls during these months has to sustain the Village for the whole year. Groundwater wells are helpful, but the most important are the shallow wells dug around the Village, sand dams in the riverbed that flows through the Village, and the Rainwater Harvesting (RW) program. RW is one of my primary responsibilities as Sustainability Fellow. Started by Johnson & Johnson (who also partially fund my Fellowship post), RW systems made of PVC pipe are on every housing cluster, the administrative building, and the guest houses. Each building has a 10,000-liter tank that holds water throughout the year. This water is treated using ceramic filters, and is supposed to be used for drinking and cooking. If water does not last through the dry season, there is a single tap in the Village that is connected to the municipal water grid. Nyumbani pays for this water per cubic meter, so water conservation throughout the year is a top priority. My job is to monitor the existing RW systems to make sure they are all working properly, and to oversee the construction of new RW structures. This year I am hoping to add RW systems to the many greenhouses where we grow produce for the Village, and on the barn where the Village keeps our livestock.

I have arrived in the Village during the busiest time of year. Because most colleges and universities in the northern hemisphere are on summer vacation, it is peak season for having volunteer and guest groups here in the Village. As the Volunteer Coordinator, this means my first few days have been nice and eventful. Guests in the Village are generally those who are staying for a shorter period of time, anywhere from a couple of weeks to just a few hours. While here, guests will become familiar with the goings-on in the Village, and will help with short-term projects in the Sustainability or Home Care departments. Volunteers must stay for a minimum of 2 months. While here, volunteers will conduct their own, more extensive projects. For example, currently there are 3 different volunteer groups in the Village. When a new group arrives, my job is to welcome them, give them the tour (telling them essentially what I’ve written in the first part of this post), and then make sure that their projects run smoothly for the rest of their time here.

The first group is 4 graduate students from Columbia University. They had initially planned on doing dental research, but ran into issues gaining ethical approval from the Kenyan government. Instead, they have been designing a dental health curriculum, and organizing a distribution plan for basic dental supplies. There is a doctor and a medical student from Poland, who are conducting medical screenings for intestinal parasites. Then there is a group from Comillas University in Madrid. They have been constructing high-efficiency stoves in each home. The stoves are made of bricks and clay, and contain an Italian-designed metal plate that minimizes the amount of firewood required to cook. I had the chance to spend the morning working with them on Wednesday, when we constructed 5 of these stoves. It was hard work, but the grandparents are really excited about the new stoves! I am really enjoying being here with these volunteer groups. There will be times of the year when there are no volunteers in the Village which I am definitely nervous about in terms of loneliness, but for now I am enjoying the hustle and bustle.

I’ll wrap it up soon, but I’ll end by talking about some of my daily routines and my living quarters. All volunteers live in the Guest House, which is a building that has 7 bedrooms, each double occupancy. The exception is my room, which I have all to myself for a year! There is an outlet with a power strip in the living room of the house that people can use to charge electronics, but, as is the case in the entire Village, there is no running water. Each bedroom has an attached eco-toilet, which is essentially a hole in the ground. To be more precise, it’s two separate holes in the group, about 6 inches apart. Without going too far into the logistics of using said eco-toilet, I’ll just say that there’s definitely a learning curve.

Right outside of the Guest House is the kitchen. Because propane is expensive and difficult to transport to the Village, all meals are cooked over a fire. We eat all meals in the Guest House. Breakfast is usually bread and butter or peanut butter along with chai and coffee. Lunch varies, but usually is either rice or ugali (maize-flour and water), along with a vegetable and either beans or lentils. Dinner is usually some type of bean and maize dish, but on special occasions we will have meat for lunch or dinner. This past Thursday, for instance, we had a goodbye party for a couple Kenyan interns who were leaving, and we had a goat roast. It was delicious!

The other accommodation option (which I’m including as an incentive to get people to visit me during the year!), is the recently-opened Kjer House. It is absolutely beautiful. It is located in one of the highest points of the Village, and is about as nice as any hotel or safari lodge I have seen. It is almost fully finished, and will include its own solar generator complete with hot running water, a refrigerator for cold drinks, and huge comfy beds. And at $15 a night, I think it’s the best deal in Kenya. The long-term plan is to open Kjer House as an eco-lodge to generate revenue for the Village.

Thanks for reading through this whole post! Or if you just skimmed the whole thing, below are some pictures that show some of what I talked about.

Feel free to email back with any questions you have about the Village or my daily life, or just to say hey!

Miss you all,

Shan

Solar panels:

Main office building where I work:

Soccer field right in the middle of the Village. Lawson High School is back to the left, Hotcourses Primary School is directly behind, and the Polytechnic is back to the right.

One of the housing clusters:

Sunset from a walk to a nearby river

My room!

Kier House! This is where anyone who came to visit me would stay. Note how incredible luxurious it looks for such a reasonable price.