Hey, we just surveyed you. And this is crazy. Where is water? Drill again maybe?

Bill, our other professional mentor, arrived on Wednesday evening, so for the past few days we've had the whole team together and good thing too because we've had some really big decisions to make.

We received the report from the hydrogeologist Mr. Omwamba yesterday morning, and we were really crossing our fingers that the results would be favorable for drilling in these new locations. He recommended drilling about 300 meters away from our first location, but this time 250 meters down!

Mr. Omwamba is very good at his job, but fortunately so are our mentors. Natalya explained to us that the method of vertical electrical sounding that he uses to test for resistivity and detect water is only really accurate up to about 50 meters below the ground. So we couldn't exactly take his report as fact.

Jon Reed and school students watching the electrical sounding process.

We were also able to access a hydrogeological profile of our area done by a Dutch company in 1988. This report gave us some general information about the geology and water prospects for the area, and the one key point we found from the report was that most groundwater will be found between 50-70 meters down.

In the end, the only sure way to know where water is, is to drill for it. So, we had to decide to drill or not to drill.

We all got together, crowded into one hotel room and had a discussion about how to move forward.

The first dry borehole cost about $10,000, so is it worth the risk to try again?  Is there another way this money could be used with more certainty to get water?

In the end, we decided that we should not drill another borehole this trip. The risk is too great.
This was an incredibly difficult decision for us, but we know it is the right one.  After speaking with the WatSan and Peter Oduor from ECODS, we decided on another alternative to provide water for the schools - improving and expanding their rainwater catchment systems. We also visited another part of Kolunje that doesn't have many water sources, but has a better geology for drilling - a subvillage called Lunga.

In this remaining week in Kenya, we plan to do assessment for rainwater catchment for three schools - the Miranga Primary School, the Bishop Okoth Secondary School in Miranga (both schools that we planned to serve with the original borehole) and a large primary school in Lunga. All three schools have some sort of existing rainwater catchment, but they are either damaged or inefficient with some roof area unutilized. This week we will also ask Mr. Omwamba to do some surveying in Lunga with hopes of drilling a shallow borehole there on one of the upcoming trips.

Sadly, we had to say goodbye to a few of our team members this morning as they headed home and back to work. We wish them a safe journey home and hope that they enjoy the clean, dust-free air and smoothly paved roads back in NJ.

Please leave any questions you have about our project or about life in Kenya in the comments!