Pancake Day Maasai style- Making friends across the world!

Give a child (or adult) of any age one pan, one pancake, and tell them to get tossing.... and defy them not to have riotous fun....

We certainly had an afternoon to remember at Kimanjo Primary School to celebrate Pancake Day. Our noble chefs Rebecca, Chris, Paulina and Rose cooked 620 pancakes.. enough for all children and staff with quite a few left over for the tossing competition... 

Enormous thanks to all our friends at Leamore Primary School in Birmingham who raised the money for all students here  to be able to have a very good   lunch... ...followed by pancakes for all. Leamore raised the money through their ‘pancake  and chapatti cafe’, which  gave all Leamore pupils a good deal of fun too... and thanks also to their own noble cooks...

Leamore are part of our Become a Friend network of schools who partner with Primary and nursery schools here.. always looking for creative and fun ways to make links. Food of course is near to everyone’s heart  and this was a great idea from Leamore to make an educational, fun sharing experience. Pupils here all know about Lent from their Religious Education lessons, but the idea of Pancakes and Mardi Gras was a new one. In addition Leamore pupils learnt how to make Kenyan chapattis.

 We began this learning experience two weeks ago with a  cooking session for the teachers and  senior pupils.. we made chapattis (Kenyan style )and sent the recipe and videos  to our Leamore friends, see   and pancakes (English style) following the Leamore recipe ...as an added bonus Leamore school got to see us taking photos and videos on their ‘old’ Leamore video cameras.. and we have been able to   display these on the  ‘old’ Leamore laptops for the Kimanjo pupils and teachers to view. 

 Become a Friend aims to  expose children to different cultures whilst focusing our learning on healthcare and conservation messages: but always remembering  that learning can be made as fun as possible.

Neglected Tropical Diseases on Aljazeera

Following on from our blog on NTDs last week, this is the broadcast from the Al Jazeera news channel publicising and explaining the partnership between Pharmaceutical companies, governments and the public. What are your thoughts, readers? Positive or negative?

How to give sanitation sex appeal??

It’s hardly surprising that the building of pit latrines in the poorest countries is one of the least funded and most overlooked areas of health development. A vast amount more sex appeal will be found in other highly worthy public healthcare needs- malaria bed nights, for instance, undoubtedly save thousands of babies lives and are easy to distribute... in addition to lending themselves to great marketing opportunities to photo peaceful sleeping babies.  Yet 2.6 billion people  do not have access to a safe  latrine and this includes half of people in sub Saharan Africa. 

4,000 children die daily from preventable water related diseases- more than die from malaria, HIV and measles combined. Diarrhoea is the second biggest killer of children under 5.

Improved sanitation could prevent 1.5 million deaths from diarrhoeal diseases per year. The environmental rewards would also be enormous as currently 200 million tonnes of human waste go uncollected and untreated each year. It is estimated that every dollar spent on sanitation would save nine dollars in days lost from work plus the cost to the local health services. As much as  5% of African GDP is lost to illness and deaths caused by dirty water and lack of basic sanitation.

One of the Millenium development Goals is to halve the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015. Currently sub Saharan Africa will be at least fifty years late with this MDG unless the health agenda rapidly decided to focus money and effort here.

The added improvement to quality of life is probably larger than any other public health intervention. Whilst a good immunisation campaign will save millions of lives...it does nothing to improve the daily life of its recipients. Yet it doesn’t take much imagination to see that if you offer an adolescent girl an opportunity to use a safe,  private latrine  you have improved her life beyond measure. Certainly give girls access to education and books... but how many campaigns focus on giving her access to a childhood and adolescence where she can enjoy the basic human  right to personal privacy.

Of all the public health interventions we have undertaken this is the most universally popular one with the community.  Whilst it is very hard to evaluate whether families using pit latrines are accessing health care less, it is at least  easy to assess how much they are used : in every case the take up in use of the latrine amongst school age children and adults is virtually universal: if a latrine is there it is used by all but the youngest children and a few of the very old and infirm. In addition we have not yet come across a manyatta across the group ranches who have turned down the opportunity to have a latrine. 

But it is an expensive intervention. After we complete this year’s agreed building programme we will be working  with the micro finance project to see if they can help us with low interest development loans for pit latrines and looking to ways of cost sharing with families. But still it will remain expensive ..... and of course it is the poorest families who probably need the latrines most as their family numbers are generally higher and their health education is generally lowest. It is good to see some NGOs also focusing on latrines in Isiolo district- but here the problems remain the same; most NGOs will fund only basic materials, building and adding materials has to be added by families and consequently  they are out of the reach of the poorer families. In addition, not unnaturally it is the village ‘centres’ and schools which are generally targeted , where the need is highest, but again the poorest of the poor will miss out.

Hummingbirds in kenya.....?

I was sure that I had seen a hummingbird on the lavender bush outside the office.... 

Since that would not only be the wrong country, but also the wrong continent, (humming birds are only found in the Americas) .... I had to go out with the camera to look closer.

This Humming-Bird Hawk Moth (macroglossum stellatarum-  a species of Sphingidae) is an amazing insect, and I doubt I’m the only one who has mistaken it for a humming bird...

It beasts its wings so fast that they are just a blur- hard to capture on camera and it can feed while hovering,  like a hummingbird, by uncoiling its very long proboscis.  The speed of the wings even make the humming  sound .

 Unusually for a moth it flies during bright sunshine, as well as at dawn and dusk. Obviously its a fan of lavender!

Saw these African Wild Dogs this morning...

Saw these beautiful painted dogs out hunting this morning. Part of a pack of 24, one of four packs of these endangered Wild Dogs that hunt across the conservancy. This  pack here is collared so they can be tracked more easily by the two Wild Dog Rangers at Lentille who have radio antennae which can track up to 3kilometres, although in this very rugged terrain it can be very  tricky. 

Laikipia lost its Wild Dog population in the seventies and 80s and it was generally thought then  that they had vanished from the area. Happily they have made a huge comeback- Laikipia is unique in that the population is now thriving again and is now a globally important number  of well over 300. It is also unique in that Laikipia has no protected game park or properly gazetted reserve land, and, whilst much of the area is privately owned ranch-land, a large area of Laikipia is Group Ranch land so that the Wild Dogs are having to coexist with the pastoralist nomadic Maasai and Samburu people and their cattle, goats and sheep. Since Wild Dogs are very efficient and fierce hunters this is not always easy.

Pastoralists and ranchers have reason to fear most wild predators including lions, hyenas, leopards, cheetah and Wild Dogs. As a result of this they have frequently killed Wild Dogs in large numbers and it was this extermination that was a prime cause of the population falling to less than 5,000 throughout Africa. Another danger is the threat of rabies. and other canine diseases, spread largely by local domestic cattle herding dogs. 

Studying Wild Dogs is made difficult by their behaviour-they can travel more than twenty five miles in a day over very difficult terrain. In addition, in order to protect their young, they den in the most rugged terrain, impossible for researchers to get to by vehicle and often very difficult even by foot... we have one pack that generally dens half way down a near vertical cliff face. Trying to humanely trap and collar them is therefore a lengthy and hazardous process.

Charcoal, wood and cook-stoves- best fit for Maasai women?

Undoubtedly charcoal burning is a major problem across the semi arid and arid lands. The destruction of trees and vegetation leads to erosion, land degradation and a reduced water table, decreasing grazing land and increasing the cycle of poverty.   Without a licence of course it is illegal to burn charcoal but the only people with a vested interest in enforcing this are the landowners themselves. The local Group Ranches that are involved in conservation all have a good understanding that charcoal burning is not in their interests. The picture shows a charcoal operation carried out by local Chiefs and Ol Lentille rangers, with the backing of the police, to confiscate sacks of illegal charcoal. Such operations have to be ongoing to keep on top of the problem, and these operations need excellent organisation to be successful and are expensive to perform. The vast majority of illegal  charcoal is sent out on trucks to towns where the money obtained is ten times what is given to the local charcoal burner. 

Some charcoal is sold locally and used by ‘wealthier’ women on cook-stoves, where it is more efficient and less smoky than the traditional open wood fires.  These women will be those  in employment who  have less time to collect wood. In the last few months there has been something of a technology shift: the price of charcoal has rocketed and women are finding it harder to purchase. The wealthiest of these women are now buying 6kg gas cylinders and the trucks coming up to the two weekly market are bringing refills. So far the number of women buying is very small, but this seems to be something very much market driven and, with access to small ‘development’ loans from the local micro-finance project odds are on that 2012 -13 will see a larger shift. All forms of development are, for better or worse, aspirational: the more women who have these gas stoves the more will want one.

Still, this is going to be well outside the budget for poorer families- especially since it is likely to be these families with more children and greater fuel needs.

We have been working over the last year with selling subsidised low smoke stoves to households. But undoubtedly there are very real challenges with the current stove designs. Still too much wood is required for the busiest employed women and the stoves are too slow to get hot. For each mealtime or tea time the cook-stove has to be re lit- whereas the traditional open fire will stay hot all day, and adding another piece of wood and a pan is a quick process . In addition the stoves are too small to cook meals for the larger family sizes. Additionally the stoves give off a fair amount of smoke whilst lighting- leading many ladies to consider that the health benefits we are so keen on touting ‘less smoke- less smoke’... are not quite realistic.

So for those families who are unlikely to be moving to the gas generation any time soon we are looking for some ways forward.

Taking lessons from the pit latrine building programme – behaviour can be adapted only when the benefits can be clearly seen. And of course then there is the critical mass phenomenon - once enough latrines have been erected the ball takes on its own momentum. But the fit has to be the right one. Our health campaign work  badly needs to help enable  women to find less smoky cooking solutions. The younger educated women know this and are concerned but the design of the stove has to be the right fit for the community. Only when the younger women have a stove design they can work well with will the older women jump onto the bandwagon too.