Muyundi Community 3

Ngalame Spring is located in Muyundi Village at the farthest end of Kakamega County, bordering Bungoma County.

A normal day in Muyundi Village starts very early in the morning. Residents wake up at 5:30am for different chores. Women prepare breakfast for the whole family before engaging in their routine work. Children prepare themselves for school and men take time grazing their cattle.

Stepping into Muyundi Village at around 10am, you are welcomed by community members busy tilling their land, planting crops, weeding, and harvesting.

Water

The spring is a permanent open water source which is high yielding and serves more than 300 people. It doesn't go dry, even in the driest seasons of the year, Mr. Abraham Ngalame said.

We found some women carrying water on their heads while walking back from a baseline survey at nearby Baraza's Spring. We asked the women where they fetched the water. One of them told us that they had fetched it from Ngalame Spring which is unprotected.

We saw that community members come with their containers to the open water source. They plunge the containers into the water to fill with the water until the containers are half or three-quarters full. They remove the containers and fill the remaining space by scooping the water with smaller jugs.

The gathered water is stored in the same container or a larger one, at homes.

The water source is absolutely contaminated. Simply because of its open nature and the human activities that range from stepping into the water source to plunging dirty containers into the source.

"We have suffered a lot after using water from this unprotected source. Most of our resource usually go to medication to treat waterborne diseases like typhoid, which is rampant," Mr. Ngalame said.

Sanitation

More than half of homes have pit latrines. Theys are made of mud wall, wooden log floors, and roofed with iron sheet. Some have doors while most do not.

We found other forms of sanitation facilities in homes without latrines, like dishracks and clotheslines. That indicates that people are open to taking steps towards improving the hygiene and sanitation status of their homes.

Here’s what we’re going to do about it:

Training

Community members will attend hygiene and sanitation training for at least two days. This training will ensure participants have the knowledge they need about healthy practices and their importance. The facilitator plans to use PHAST (Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation), CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation), ABCD (Asset-Based Community Development), group discussions, handouts, and demonstrations at the spring. One of the most important topics we plan to cover is the handling, storage, and treatment of water. Having a clean water source will be extremely helpful, but it is useless if water gets contaminated by the time it’s consumed. Handwashing will also be a big topic.

Training will also result in the formation of a committee that will oversee operations and maintenance at the spring. They will enforce proper behavior around the spring and delegate tasks that will help preserve the site, such as building a fence and digging proper drainage. The fence will keep out destructive animals, and the drainage will keep the area’s mosquito population at a minimum.

Sanitation Platforms

On the final day of training, participants will select five families that should benefit from new latrine floors.

Training will also inform the community and selected families on what they need to contribute to make this project a success. They must mobilize locally available materials, such as bricks, clean sand, hardcore, and ballast. The five families chosen for sanitation platforms must prepare by sinking a pit for the sanitation platforms to be placed over. All community members must work together to make sure that accommodations and food are always provided for the work teams.

Spring Protection

Protecting the spring will ensure that the water is safe, adequate and secure. Construction will keep surface runoff and other contaminants out of the water. With the community’s high involvement in the process, there should be a good sense of responsibility and ownership for the new clean water source.

Fetching water is predominantly a female role, done by both women and young girls. Protecting the spring and offering training and support will, therefore, help empower the female members of the community by giving them more time and efforts to engage and invest in income-generating activities.

Project Updates

July, 2020: COVID-19 Prevention Training Update at Muyundi Community, Ngalame Spring

Our teams are working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Join us in our fight against the virus while maintaining access to clean, reliable water.

Trainer Georgina passes out COVID-19 informational pamphlets

We are carrying out awareness and prevention trainings on the virus in every community we serve. Very often, our teams are the first (and only) to bring news and information of the virus to rural communities like Muyundi, Kenya.

We trained more than 17 people on the symptoms, transmission routes, and prevention of COVID-19. Due to public gathering concerns, we worked with trusted community leaders to gather a select group of community members who would then relay the information learned to the rest of their family and friends.

Handwashing training

We covered essential hygiene lessons:

- Demonstrations on how to build a simple handwashing station

- Proper handwashing technique

- The importance of using soap and clean water for handwashing

- Cleaning and disinfecting commonly touched surfaces including at the water point.

A mama washes her hands with soap and water

We covered COVID-19-specific guidance in line with national and international standards:

- Information on the symptoms and transmission routes of COVID-19

- What social distancing is and how to practice it

- How to cough into an elbow

- Alternative ways to greet people without handshakes, fist bumps, etc.

- How to make and properly wear a facemask.

Using the tippy tap for handwashing

During training, we installed a new handwashing station with soap near the community’s water point, along with a sign with reminders of what we covered.

Due to the rampant spread of misinformation about COVID-19, we also dedicated time to a question and answer session to help debunk rumors about the disease and provide extra information where needed.

Piece of cloth used during homemade mask tutorial

Community member Eunice Ngalame encouraged when she said that the practices being emphasized at training as ways of preventing the spread of Coronavirus were not hard to follow.

‘Things like washing hands, keeping social distance, avoiding crowded places, and wearing face masks that we will make the way we have learned here are easy to practice; even improvising the handwashing station is not really hard. Please let us do it so that we fight COVID-19," Eunice urged her neighbors.

Use the elbow to cough and sneeze

We continue to stay in touch with this community as the pandemic progresses. We want to ensure their water point remains functional and their community stays informed about the virus.

Trainers install the prevention reminders chart at the spring

Water access, sanitation, and hygiene are at the crux of disease prevention. You can directly support our work on the frontlines of COVID-19 prevention in all of the communities we serve while maintaining their access to safe, clean, and reliable water.

October, 2019: Giving Update: Muyundi Community, Ngalame Spring

A year ago, your generous donation helped Muyundi Community in Kenya access clean water.

There’s an incredible community of monthly donors who have come alongside you in supporting clean water at Ngalame Spring in Muyundi. Month after month, their giving supports ongoing sustainability programs that help this community maintain access to safe, reliable water. Read more…

October, 2018: Muyundi Community Project Complete

Muyundi Community is celebrating their new protected spring, so celebrate with them! Ngalame Spring has been transformed into a flowing source of water thanks to your donation. The spring is protected from contamination, five sanitation platforms have been provided for the community, and training has been done on sanitation and hygiene.

New Knowledge

We organized for hygiene and sanitation training with the assistance of Mr. Meshack Ngalame. We called him with proposed dates for training at Ngalame Spring. He proposed we postpone it until the following Thursday so that more community members would be available. We agreed with his advice, and he went ahead and informed other community members on the same.

We sometimes find it difficult to gather people for training. They'll wake up on the scheduled morning and go straight to their farms, and we'd have to move around the community asking them to please take a break. But Muyundi Community pleasantly surprised us. When we arrived, there were 16 people already waiting and eager to learn!

A portion of the training participants

We covered several topics including but not limited to leadership and governance (participants started a water and sanitation committee); operation and maintenance of the spring; healthcare; family planning; immunizations; the spread of disease and prevention. We also covered water treatment methods, personal care like handwashing, environmental hygiene, and hygiene promotion. These participants will become ambassadors of healthy living among their own families and their greater community.

Training participants at the spring (still under construction) to learn about management and maintenance.

Participants were really engaged with the handwashing session. They were able to practice the 10 steps of handwashing with the trainer. However, some of them felt this was much too cumbersome and time-consuming if they were very hungry. After we discussed what kind of germs their hands carry, the participants agreed to pay more attention to handwashing.

Handwashing practicals

"Waterborne diseases are preventable, but lack of information is another big issue. It has been said knowledge is power and indeed it is so," Geoffrey Wesonga said.

"From today's training, I have learned a lot of things which I didn't know with my age of 45 years. Solar disinfection is something new to me but it's something more economical to us than using firewood to boil water for drinking."

Talking about solar disinfection

Sanitation Platforms

All five sanitation platforms have been installed and make wonderful, easy to clean latrine floors. These five families are happy about this milestone of having a latrine of their own. We are continuing to encourage families to finish building walls and roofs over their new latrine floors.

Spring Protection

Construction at Ngalame Spring was successful and water is now flowing from the discharge pipes. There was only one small challenge on the first day when the artisans and community members had a difficult time uprooting some of the trees to make room for the concrete foundation.

"We are so happy for our spring. Drawing water from this water source now is so easy. Carrying a smaller container to use in filling the bigger container is now something of the past," Mr. Isaiah Kasemberi said.

"Water from the new source looks so much cleaner than before. We are more confident about drinking safe, clean water now."

Construction Process:

Community members provided all locally available construction materials, e.g bricks, wheelbarrows of clean sand, wheelbarrows of ballast, and gravel. Community members also hosted our artisans for the duration of construction.

Some children helping to transport bricks to the artisans so he can build the spring protection wall.

The spring area was excavated with jembes, hoes, and spades to create space for setting the foundation of polyethylene, wire mesh, and concrete.

After the base had been set, both wing walls and the headwall were set in place using brickwork. The discharge pipe was fixed low in place through the headwall to direct the water from the reservoir to the drawing area.

As the wing walls and headwall cured, the stairs were set and ceramic tiles were fixed directly below the discharge pipe. This protects the concrete from the erosive force of the falling water and beautifies the spring. The process of plastering the headwall and wing walls on both sides reinforces the brickwork and prevents water from the reservoir from seeping through the walls and allows pressure to build in the collection box to push water up through the discharge pipe.

Our artisan working on the stairs leading down to the discharge pipes.

The source area was filled up with clean stones and sand and covered with a polyethylene membrane to eliminate any potential sources of contamination.

The concrete dried over the course of five days. With this spring now handed over to the community, we will continue to follow up with the water user committee to make sure everything runs smoothly.

September, 2018: Working in Muyundi Community

Dirty water from Ngalame Spring is making people in Muyundi Community sick. Thanks to your generosity, we’re working to install a clean water point and much more.

Get to know your community through the narrative and pictures we’ve posted, and read about this water, sanitation and hygiene project. We look forward to reaching out with more good news!

Muyundi Community 3

Project Status

Community Profile