Frohes neues Jahr!

Happy new year everyone!

So first off, a quick introduction! My name is Ajay Kashi and along with Sriram Gidugu, I am one of the 2015-2016 co-leads of the EWB-Rutgers Kolunje Water Supply Project! I will be one of the main contributors to this blog to help keep everyone updated on our day-to-day activities.

Now about this trip: The team members (myself, Sriram, Julia Sutula, Jared Lal, Tristen Wallace, and mentors, Heather O’Shea and Thomas Dwyer) are en route to Kolunje, Kenya for the next 2 ½ weeks to conduct a monitoring and assessment trip. We will be doing 3 things: (1) repairing rainwater catchment systems built for the Miranga Primary School and Arch-Bishop Okoth Secondary School located in the Miranga subvillage of Kolunje, (2) conducting water quality tests while educating community members and leaders on proper maintenance of the systems, and finally (3) performing 2D-resistivity hydrogeological assessments at 4 locations between the Miranga and Lunga subvillages to determine a suitable location to drill a borehole and later install a well! We will be staying in a guesthouse located in the Magwar subvillage during our time in Kolunje.

So here’s our story!

We left Newark Liberty International Thursday, New Years’ Eve to Frankfurt with 20 bags of luggage.

20. Bags. Along with our personal belongings, we each are carrying a component of Tom and Heather’s geophysical equipment, adding quite a bit of load to our travels! In any case, we made it to Frankfurt safely, New Year’s Day morning with an 11-hour-layover to gallivant around the city! And gallivant we did J With the help of an incredibly friendly Frankfurt local (we never got his name, so we’ll just call him Hermann the German), we made it into the city center where we walked around and got lunch. Somehow, we went the entire day in Germany using context clues to figure out signs, train routes, and menu options when English translations weren’t readily available. Seeing how incredibly lost we all looked, people were willing to help us out along the way, and even though it did get pretty embarrassing at times... I think we all learned a little something!  For instance, “exit” is “ausgang”, and not “auschbang” as Sriram thought.

As none of us had really slept well the previous night, after spending part of the afternoon in the city we went back to the airport and crashed till our flight to Nairobi that evening.