Follow the Liters Campaign Brings Water Filters to Rural Kenyan Schools

The Simakina Primary School is located on a remote dirt road that has been ravaged by the trucks that come to collect the sugar cane that grows in fields that surround the school for miles. The school has 520 students plus another 72 in early childhood development (ECD). Classrooms are crowded and spare. There is no electricity, though wires run from poles along the edge of the property. The children come from farm families, who mostly work in the cane fields, though some grow vegetables that they sell in market stalls in the nearby town. Most of them are barefoot, though a few wear plastic clogs.

There is a drilled well on the corner of the school property. The water has never been tested. A young girl lowers a plastic bucket on a rope into the water, then fills a jug which she carries on her head to one of six small buildings a hundred yards or more away.

We are there early. Kids mill around on the field. It somehow has the feel of summer camp. After introductions,  Viola Adeke, the local area coordinator for Vestergaard explains in enthusiastic Swahili how the filters work. I can pick out the words maji safi, safe water. The teaching is done in a call-and-response manner, the children chanting the answers in unison. They already know the names of the diseases, in English: malaria, cholera, typhoid, bilharzia and they call them out as if reciting a nursery rhyme.

Viola demonstrates one of the seven units being donated, showing the brownish liquid obtained by back-washing the filter and comparing it with the clear water obtained from one of the four spigots that encircle the  bright blue plastic device. "Which one is safe, she asks? The children all point at the clear one.

"Always use the clean, filtered water to drink. Also use it to wash your hands, brush your teeth and to wash fruits and vegetables with."

After the presentation, I spoke with a young girl named Melvin. She said she got sick with diarrhea and missed three days of school plus an additional day for a doctor's visit. She did not like this because it caused her to fall behind in her studies. She has a brother and a sister in school and both of them have lost time due to illness as well. She says that she feels safer now with a LifeStraw filter at home and another one at school.

Monday was the opening ceremony for Vestergaard's Follow the Liters campaign. It took place at the Ebombwa Primary School. A number of health and education officials were on hand. The students  performed with dance and song and poetry, followed by a demonstration of the filters by the Vestegaard team. CEO Mikkel Vestergaard was on hand, along with his father, Torben, the former head of the company.

The filters were gratefully received by the head teacher who said that,"Water sanitation and hygiene are our biggest problems. Kenya  is not on track to meet Millennium Development Goals with only 37 percent of schools having access to clean water. Absenteeism due to sickness is a major factor. We are going to increase our performance now."

The ceremony was the flowering. The seed was planted years ago and the tree has grown to  a youthful strength. The fruit it will bear will be healthier children starting today. More than 1600 LifeStraw Community filters will be distributed by this program, each one providing clean water to 75-100 children for several years.

Western Kenya was selected because while water access is plentiful, water quality is poor, and water treatment is nearly non-existent. Government officials claim that municipal water treatment will arrive in ten years. When that is ultimately completed, a program like this will no longer be needed.

Images by RP Siegel

Editor's Note: Travel expenses for the author and Triple Pundit were provided by Vestergaard.