My husband is a huge fan of This American Life. He listens to podcasts of it every week. I love it too….contained and informative stories about things happening in this country (and sometimes other countries…not really sure about that name for the show, frankly….I digress). There’s always some humor in the stories, there’s always some …
The roof was tin, but I could not see it because of the newspapers cut into snowflakes hanging from it. The walls were of mud, but veiled with advertisements and colorful newspaper front pages. The floors also were of mud, but clean, compacted swept mud; you could walk barefoot and not get dirty. We talked with …
Continuing on with the structure of last week’s blog, I have divided this blog into two sections: social capital and financial capital. This division is meant to divide business from pleasure- or living from working in rural Kenya.
For those of you who are regular visitors to this site, you know that Nuru had a nationwide awareness campaign that had 1500 hundred people participate at 26 sites. But what you didn’t know was that there were others who were inspired to take part in their own “Be Hope To Her” events. San Antonio …
The Answer Was In Nakuru In our quest to improve our community water training program, I traveled with Nuru’s Water and Sanitation managers to Nakuru, Kenya to learn from the best: CAWST. Little did I know that our trip would have a second purpose: to discover the next step for our well buy-in program. (Learn …
Morpheus, “This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes…” …
I am undoubtedly on my phone more in rural Kenya than I am in Southern California. I use my Nokia here for more things than all the apps put together on my iphone at home. Most recently, I am looking at using phones for banking. In past blog entries, I have mentioned Nuru’s teaming up …
We have started the second week of Community Health Worker (CHW) training. We are now covering reproductive health. Their final week-long training will be in June, and then they’ll be officially certified CHWs! The scene reminded me strongly of medical school. There were lectures on healthcare (the head nurse, the public health officer, the reproductive …
Hello! Yesterday the three of our four GSPP (Goldman School of Public Policy) students who are here in the States presented the results of their semester long poverty-indicator projects. The presentations were quite fascinating for many reasons, one among them being the varying ways that each of the students approached the problem before them. Stephanie, …
As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I am not much of writer, but my job requires me to write blogs, so we are stuck with each other, so let’s make the most of it. While I am not much of a writer, I try to make up for it with an above average understanding …
There’s No Cheating With Phones Running an effective Water and Sanitation Program requires lots of data collection. We need to know: Are our staff and volunteer educators actually teaching Nuru farmers groups how to remove disease-causing germs from their water? Are people actually practicing the water treatment practices they’ve learned? Is the attendant at the …
The Scene: It was a beautiful day as Francis and I were walking the shortcut towards Taragwiti Primary School. We walked up the goat path into the woods when about halfway up the hill we turned and saw a big beautiful white building that stuck out like a sore thumb behind us. My initial thought …
Nuru seeks to empower impoverished communities to become entirely self-sustaining within five years. To make this happen, we focus on two main faces of sustainability in order to pass the walk away test: financial sustainability and leadership sustainability. Both are absolutely critical to enabling our communities to be completely independent of Nuru US within that …
Nuru CEO Jake Harriman and Agriculture Field Staff inspect the shamba’s of Nuru farmers’ maize. Shamba is the Kiswahili word for farm fields.
Recently Foundation Team 4 had the pleasure of welcoming Kelsey Timmerman, author of Where Am I Wearing to Nuru International’s pilot project in Kuria, Kenya. Kelsey is also a freelance author and currently working with World Vision. He spent the 3 days learning about all aspects of Nuru’s work, as well as interviewing some of …