Never a dull moment

Life is never dull in Kosele. There’s usually something out of the ordinary to make the day more interesting or challenging. Today our borehole has stopped working. I’m sure it’s only a temporary setback but it’s more than a little inconvenient. (I had a rather bizarre spell check training experience when I first typed the word borehole into this installation of Word. It didn’t recognise borehole and suggested brothel as the only alternative. Makes you wonder what they put in the pizza at Microsoft). I digress.

The borehole issue has some far-reaching consequences if we don’t get it sorted out fairly quickly. (This would make a good scenario in a job interview). Feeding about 200 people twice a day means we get through a lot of water. The water we pump out of the borehole does not need to be treated before we drink it, which makes our feeding programme possible. The main tank we store the borehole water in is empty. Without the borehole we can’t refill it which makes cooking and drinking water a bit of a problem. There is, fortunately, a Plan B.

We have the capacity to store 48,000 litres of rainwater in large tanks on the end of our classrooms and the visitors centre. They were originally installed for irrigating our farm if there is a drought. These tanks are currently full thanks to the extravagant amount of rain that has fallen recently. It should be safe to drink and cook with so we shouldn’t have to shut the school as long as the engineer fixes the control panel very soon. (I did have a look inside the control panel but apart from re-setting a trip switch and checking that the generator was pushing out mains power I though it best to leave the repair to the professionals). To add to our woes the recent computer problems experienced by UK banks means we will have a cash flow problem if a transfer I made before travelling out to Kenya is delayed. This could make paying the technician an interesting negotiation.

You have to be an optimist to work out here. It can be very exasperating solving some of the problems but it’s always satisfying when a plan comes together. One of my key tasks while I’m here this time involves stepping up the training for our senior management team. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble in finding real day to day challenges to bond together over.