Enivronmentalist, me?

Over the years I have visited many friends that live in mud homes.  Each time I am amazed and secretly admire the simplicity of a life in a home made from the earth.  If my friends and their families can thrive in such a place, so can we.

Jim, James, and I visiting the home and family of Sonko,
our head of security.

One of the challenges I cannot wait to tackle is living smaller.  Hmm, that can be read two ways, can't it? Well, for this post I am talking about our environmental impact.

Many of you know that our first project when we arrive in Kenya will be to build our own house.  This house will be built with mud.  Here is a quick lesson on building a mud house:  first, a hardwood post goes into the ground every 3 meters and those posts are connected by sisal poles that have been split in half.

Sisal is a remarkable plant, the pole is harvested and split in half.
The plant does not die when the pole is harvested, it just grows another!

When that is done the mudding process begins.  It takes a while to mud, many different "coats" are applied but wait until you see the completed houses, they are pretty sweet.

In our house we will be choosing NOT to attach to the electricity grid.  The IV has 3-phase electricity throughout but our house will be set up with solar panels.  This will be a challenge because it will not be as bright as we are used to and we will actually have to think about our usage but it will save us money and help us be environmentally conscious.

Next, we will be setting up a gutter system on our roof to collect the rain water.  Kenya can be very dry at times, but there are two rainy seasons: the "short" rains and the "long" rains.  We will set up gutters and rain barrels to harvest the water.  How we are going to use that water has not been figured out yet, I am hoping to find a way to safely drink and bathe in the water, but I have to do more research first.

Cooking food, boiling water, and pasteurizing milk will be done with a biogas system.  This system is remarkable to me.  It is a large flexible rubberized bladder that is UV treated and has a small protection tent over it.  It is filled initially with cow manure from our cows and within 7 days will supply enough cooking gas for the entire IV.  After the 7 days the bladder will be set to take in any organic material such as other animal dung, plant matter, and food scraps.  This system will harvest the gas for cooking and create a safe and powerful fertilizer that will be used in our food garden and tree nursery.  Notice the cycle:  Grow food in garden, humans and animals eat it, food gets processed and poo'd (is that a word?) out, poo gets put into biogas harvester which cooks food and creates fertilizer, fertilizer put back in garden to help grow more food.  Cool!

Another thing we will be working with is a neat contraption called an evapocooler.  Think of this as a refrigerator without electricity.  An evapocooler is built and through evaporation keeps the items inside cool.  Cool, does not mean this is a refrigerator, but it will be better than keeping things outside!

Our food will be mostly grown at the IV in our garden (kale/carrots/tomatoes/onions/etc), from our chicken coop (chicken/eggs), and our cow shed (milk/butter/cheese/cream).  We will work to expand that when we get there.  We will also be working with other local shamba (farm) owners to buy our food local whenever possible.

In addition to this, we are hoping to plant 100 trees for each day that we are in Kenya to help in the reforestation efforts.

This will be a phenomenal learning experience for our family.  I cannot wait to work on these projects with my them and document our learning to share with others.