Lion Roadblocks - by Ben Skelton

Hi everyone,

It’s been a few years now since I was doing the final year of my degree and attempting to avoid writing my dissertation by reading an email that had landed in my inbox from ‘Dig Deep’ – a small water charity looking for volunteers to fundraise for and manage projects in Kenya. I liked the charity’s approach to Development – using appropriate technologies and education programmes to help local people transform their own lives – so I sent them a quick email asking for some more info. As it turned out, this 5 minutes of procrastination has had a significant impact on my life.

 

Ben on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

18 months later - after having persuaded a close friend to take on the challenge with me and juggling countless hours of fundraising with finals/full time work – I found myself living in the Kenyan bush with Dig Deep’s Maasai partners, helping to fund and manage two large scale water projects. It was unforgettable seeing first-hand the complex social and political challenges of operating in the field, as well as experiencing the serious practical obstacles to development in communities with no paved roads, no utilities of any sort and a serious - and at times surreal - wildlife presence (you never really get used to  missing a meeting due to a pride of lions blocking the track).

The experience has driven me on to keep the charity growing so that we can support more and better projects. The reason I love my work is summed up in this recent video interview with Jacob.  He’s a teacher at Endonyo Rinka Primary School, the school that I first worked with in Kenya over two and a half years ago. Like all of our media posts this video is very simple – we just turned the camera on and asked Jacob to describe in his own words life since the project’s completion.

 

Ben inspecting the tanks at Endonyo Rinka!

What comes across is the impact that a small intervention can have. All we did was work with the school to install appropriate water technologies that are simple and cheap to maintain, as well as supporting Jacob and other staff in improving the sanitation and hygiene education available to their pupils.

The result? Students and staff no longer have to walk miles to collect water from contaminated dams shared with livestock and wild animals. This has improved the health of everyone at the school, where previously water borne diseases were taking a serious toll. Also, thanks to the hard work of Jacob and his colleagues, the student’s academic performance has increased and the school has been able to open boarding facilities, so that now over 700 children can reap the benefits of an education. In short it has made a tangible and sustainable difference to their lives.

I’m now looking forward to working with our volunteers, partners and supporters in Kenya, the UK and across the world to help hundreds more schools and communities to achieve the same success.

Introduction from our Country Director - by Anna Banyard

Currently Dig Deep is a young, strong, developing organisation which makes it a very exciting place of work. Being the only international member of staff permanently based on the ground in Kenya it is for me to spend time living with communities in which we work, in their schools and villages to build long lasting links with these people and the organisation. It is my task to encourage and engage the local people, at the household level to drive our projects in order to reach the most sustainable and appropriate solution to their water and energy needs. My role is to guide the community through the processes of project planning, community fundraising, implementation and construction and crucially, monitoring and evaluation.

The wide range of technology options Dig Deep consider to relieve the challenges faced by rural Kenyan communities ensures that the communities benefit from the most appropriate solutions. Dig Deep work to communicate sufficient information on different project infrastructure options or water supply sources so that the community are able to make an informed decision that coupled with our experience and advice leads to the optimum solution.

To date Dig Deep have carried out many different types of water source supplies and considers each community as a case by case. Rainwater Harvesting, Filtration, Boreholes, and Shallow wells are all types of water supply that we have developed in partnership with the community. Together we are planning to implement a shallow borehole and spring catchment project in the future coupled with sanitation provisions and hygiene promotion.

My academic background as an engineer assists the technical aspects of project planning and comes in to play to carry out calculations to size pipe distribution networks, design flow rates and tank elevations amongst other things. Using land surveying techniques that I work with both literate and illiterate community volunteers to implement, we plan the project very precisely to be certain that the investment we make using both our donor’s money as well as the money contributed by the community will allow the system to operate in the way it is expected to.

A lot of my interaction with the communities are through an elected board of members of a Water/Project Committee, and I speak through volunteer interpreters who live at the sites of our projects, however I am currently undergoing Swahili language training every week to strengthen my interactions with project beneficiaries, contractors and suppliers.

The scope of my work is very diverse and is difficult to summarise in one blog post, so I hope to provide better insight by regularly posting to discuss what is happening on the ground out here in Kenya.