Maize in Embu
Before he left Tanzania, Joe Agoada told us that we needed to visit Embu, Kenya to see the Kenera Women’s Water Project. Embu is actually only about 250 miles north of Arusha, so we decided to visit the project. The community has a lot of maize, so they were very interested in what we could show them, and we were looking forward to getting more feedback from a very different demographic.
We met them in the morning to talk about the challenges that they face. Then in the afternoon, we visited the chairlady’s farm, where she had a pile of maize that she wanted help shelling. We worked with several members of the project to show them how to install the machine and then set to work on shelling. Unfortunately, the maize was not completely dry, which meant that it wasn’t going through the sheller as well as usual. The members admitted that they would have let it dry further if they were going to shell it using the traditional method (beating with a stick), but they had been a bit impatient to see how our machine worked. We left it with them for some further testing, and they promised us that if it worked well, they would go out to the surrounding areas and try to generate some publicity.
We also tried something new at the demonstration by showing them how they could use a small metal drum to turn the waste from their maize (the cobs and husks) into charcoal. They were very excited by this, since deforestation is a serious issue in the area. The demonstration went off very well and the audience seemed very interested in the two as complementary projects.
Unfortunately, since we couldn’t spend any more time in Embu, we had to figure out how we were going to do follow-up. Two of the members named Evan and Twiga (that’s a nickname, which is kiswahili for giraffe, since he is so tall) were especially interested and asked lots of questions. They are planning to conduct some demonstrations of their own and seem to be very serious about the project. We look forward to visiting them in a couple of months to see what progress they’ve made.
maize, maize everywhere
Testing the machine
Turning maize cobs and husks into charcoal
Successful charcoal production
Daniel | Kenya
