“Do you mean walk…or hike?”

Muraho everyone!

Weather report from 1 degree south of the equator: 70 degrees with a light breeze and cloud cover for the last couple days, perfect hiking weather!

A hazy Muhabura volcano overlooks Cyanika

Coincidentally, hiking is exactly how we spent our first full day in Cyanika. We walked about 6 miles, from the local government building, out along the currently pipeline, through the lovely hills of Rwanda, all the way to the border of Uganda. Along the way, we stopped at 9 different villages, each without ready access to any water. We discovered that there was a pipe system installed through 5 of these villages about half a decade ago; but it stopped working in 1973 and was never repaired.

Technology is difficult. How many engineers does it take to turn on a GPS?

Salka and Stephanie used the handy dandy Garmin GPS to plot the location of potential tap stands throughout all of these villages, beginning from the end of the current pipe. Ariana and Swartz also worked on testing water from existing tap stands in the villages that do have water. All tests came back well within the potable water range! Great news.

Clean Water! Turbidity = 0 NTU

The village leaders all took time out of their days to keep us company on the walk and tell us about their vision for these tap stands and the pipe line extension. They are incredibly patient with us, waiting for us to gather GPS and water data along the route, as well as snapping copious amounts of photos and video footage. All in all we walked for 8 hours that day. We were EXHAUSTED. Mezack, our ever patient friend and translator, stayed with us the whole way, teaching us more and more Kinyarwandan along the way. I think we are all going to get the hang of the basics of the language soon!

Follow the leader! 

After carb loading at the local buffet, we spent the rest of the evening (nearly 4 hours), play copious amounts of camp riddle games (Johnny Whoop, Indian counting sticks, bang bang, etc.), until we could laugh no more! It was so incredibly wonderful to act like 5 year olds for a night :)

Michael is going to make a great dad :)

As always, after the first day of work we have a to-do list a mile long! For now, we need to identify whether the best option for the community is going to be a pipeline extension, or a communal rainwater catchment system. Ariana and Kara drafted a community water usage survey, and will be interviewing 5 different umudugudus (villages) beginning tomorrow. We will also go ahead and build a map on ARCGis Map of the area’s government building, roads and potential pipeline route, research potential rainwater catchment solutions.

Current tap stand in Cyanika. The line was incredibly.

Ruhengeri (now called Musanze) is BEAUTIFUL! The village is at the base of Muhabura Volcano, lush, and full of life! Life is good here in Rwanda – Great community, great team friendships, and plenty of goat to go around.

With love from the Land of One Thousand Hills,

Jordan