Water You Doing?

You would think I would be done writing about water.  I mean, come on, I have a 50 page thesis paper from my senior capstone project that was all about water.   I then did a group project on the “Great Flood” of 1916 for the same class.  And that same spring got extra credit in one of my classes for going a week without using water for anything but drinking and cooking (I look back and laugh at the fact that a week without a shower seemed like an eternity to me at the time). 

But, actually, when I think about it, it makes sense that I’m not done writing about water—it’s something I’m interested in, access to it is something I see as extremely loaded and problematic, AND it’s a global issue.  In short, I think I could write about water for the rest of my life and probably never really run out of things to talk about and perspectives to approach it from.

The issue of access is way more evident here, as I talked about in my post a few months ago about bucket showers and boiling all our drinking water.  At home, we turn on the faucet and water comes out 99% of the time.  Here, we turn on the faucet and water comes out most of the time. And, honestly, we're incredibly spoiled.  Most of the students here come from homes where they have to walk (sometimes for miles) to get access to any water at all.

It’s not that bad when we run out of water.  It’s usually only until the next morning, and most of the time I just go “meh, I’ll just shower tomorrow.”  What was (debatably) worse was the new problem we were having for the last two weeks of January.  In those few glorious weeks, turning on the faucet was like playing a game of Russian Roulette.  In this simile, the role of the gun was played by the tap and the role of the bullet was played by tadpoles.

One of the first "friends" that came out of our tap.

To make a long and kind of gross story short, I all of our little friends grew up into frogs over the past few weeks because we've been tadpole free for  15 10  a number of days now.  Realizing now that I don’t know the exact number is sort of concerning, but I know it’s been a while.  Mostly because I have become less anal about checking my bucket every time I do laundry or shower.  Now that I think about it, maybe I should be more careful… maybe they’re just trying to lull me into a false sense of security… but it’s probably fine.

I also want to talk about water because I started teaching environment and science club every Monday with Veronica.  Our first lesson was on—you guessed it—WATER!  Well, actually it was technically on diffusion, but we related it to water pollution.  The girls in the club are mostly Form 1 (the preform girls that I taught last year) and standard 7, so we’re just trying to do pretty basic stuff, introduce them to concepts, and get them more interested in the sciences.  As most kids do, they LOVE experiments, so they were totally excited about the demonstration part of the lesson.  Using water and food coloring, we looked at how temperature and mixing affect the speed that something diffuses.  I then related it back to water pollution.  We talked about how in oceans and rivers, the water is constantly moving and how this movement speeds up the spread of water pollution.

This past Monday we talked more about water pollution, this time focusing on how it can spread and how it ends up in our oceans.  In order to do this, I built what's called an "enviroscape" which is essentially a model of a watershed used for demonstrations on water pollution.  Even at home, enviroscapes are obscenely expensive and it’s obviously not something that I could buy easily here.  So, I did what I do best-- I got creative and used stuff we had on hand.

I started out with a plastic tray that I took from a donated board game we were getting rid of.
UNRELATED-BUT-SORT-OF-RELATED TANGENT: it's great to donate things, but please make sure they are things that can be used by the organization to which you are donating.  Donating 20 board games that are written entirely in German to a school where the students speak English and Swahili... not that useful.  Except I do have a LOT of materials for collages and random art projects now...

But, anyways, I then used masking tape to secure old juice containers, boxes and other random containers I saved to the plastic base and put a layer of bubble wrap on top to give it a bit softer look and feel.

Then came the fun messy part.  I decided I would use a bunch of neon modeling clay I found in the art supplies to create the basic shape of mountains, farms, roads, and stream beds.  The clay I used was waterproof, never dries/hardens, and we had a WHOLE box with five different colors.  It seemed perfect.  And it probably would have been except for the fact that clay like that tends to melt and get incredibly sticky when it is stored at high temperatures.  Like the "real feel" 105 F we've been having the past few weeks (the "long rains" have yet to make an appearance in my time here).  This made it pretty much impossible to roll or press it as thin as I would have liked, which in turn meant I used more clay than I originally thought I would need.  When I figured this out, I had to scrap a few of my original mountains and again, get creative.  I ended up using dead pens and pen caps to make a basic "skeleton" for the mountains and then covering those with thin(ish) layers of clay.

Honestly, it looked pretty ridiculous at this point.  When I showed some of the girls they thought the clay was cake frosting.   To be fair, cake frosting here does come in slightly obscene neon colors.  But I decided I had to paint it with acrylics to make it more "earth tone-y" to try and avoid confusion.  And to avoid girls trying to eat the model.

Amazing what a coat of paint can do for a project.

I then added houses, a car, and a ship to the model courtesy of our German version of Monopoly (okay so the board games were not completely useless, I suppose).

For the demonstration we dropped food dye onto different places that would produce potential pollutants (a farm, a city, the road, etc.) and made it "rain" in the mountains.  The girls saw how the water went from the mountains down to the ocean, carrying any pollutants (food dye) with it and finally ending up in the ocean.  We talked about how the things that we put into the environment don't just effect us-- they spread and impact everyone who lives downstream.

They seemed really excited and one of the youngest girls came up to me after our meeting to ask me questions about the model.  She even related each of the parts on the model to places in Tanzania (Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Pangani River, and the Indian Ocean) which really impressed me and made me pretty confident that the lesson sunk in with (at least some of) the girls.  I am meeting with another one of the Standard 7 girls this Saturday because she wants to give her morning talk (a short speech each girl gives in English in front of the whole school as part of morning assembly) on pollution and the environment!

Waiting for the long rains,

Carolyn

P.S. My next installment could potentially be a vlog (video-blog) sort of showing "a day in my life" if people think that would be at all interesting?  Let me know!