On 2008-10-09 Steve Muriithi, Morokoshi Founder wrote:

Thanks for your encouragement; i got 51.5 dollars … and added the money and bought ten tables. the are big enough for eight children. and can also be used by student who come to morokoshi to study they costed me 323.5 dollars. my juice bar have been of great help and contributed the money (272). The rest was donated by cameroun. the school is doing great and have been able to tap other talent like the one you can see … and now most of the kids can now read and write, is that not great?

This have been possible through hard work of the teachers and the management. when the fund is available we shall have 80 chairs which can be enough for two classes. one table is big for 8 children and 5 of them can be enough for a class. I believe by next year i will have a new class.

Lastly the solar and the library are doing great. cameroun our six month plan we have achieved!

– field making.
– desks.
– improvement in stardard of class work.and this you bare me witness from Amos.
– taping of some talent from the kids.

Although we may not have achieved much; but we have done our best.

Lastly id want to thank you for your concern on morokoshi and all you have done to see a change that we can believe in. though life have become so hard in kenya but we are trying our best to see that our heads keep up floating, and make sure that we move. welcome back to kenya.

The fruit of innovation
Just off Kenyatta Avenue in downtown Nakuru is the Top Market, a delightful assembly of fruit and vegetable stands interlaced with hand-made baskets, tobacco, and spices. At it’s center is stall #169 where the Morokoshi Juice Bar serves an uncommon array of fruit smoothies. Promoted in a fashion familiar to those in the Western world, this Kenyan original offers concoctions made from mango, passion fruit, papaya, banana, orange, lemon, avocado, and sugar cane. All are made fresh on the spot with the use of electric blenders, served in clean glass cups.

Stephen Muriithi, Top Market chairman and owner of this fruit stand has broken the commonplace repetition of selling the same thing, stall after stall. Instead, with the assistance of his sister and dedicated staff, he has combined his two years university education in the Culinary Arts and Health with an innate business sense to not only run a successful fruit and juice stand, but to also fund a nursery and kindergarten school on his farm land, just outside of Nakuru.

From sweet corn to classroom
Initially motivated three years prior by the enthusiasm of a Japanese tourist who volunteered at Steve’s fruit stand, Steve’s vision for a holistic school in the rural farmland was given form. The following year, another set of Japanese tourists were moved to help him and initiated the Nakuru Family Project. And this year Japanese SPAN volunteer Rie Haga serendipitously found Steve, the fruit stand, and the Morokoshi School.

The first classes were held in the living room of Steve’s humble mud wall home, the concrete floor serving a dozen children. Construction of the first classroom, also a mud wall building currently without door, wooden frame nor glass for windows, was completed just last year. A second building on adjacent, rented land serves as the kindergarten classroom and orphanage for two children without parents.

Now, in its second year of operation, Morokoshi (from the Japanese word “tomorokoshi” for “sweet corn”) is a center of enthusiastic learning for fifty pre-school and 25 five to six year old children who walk as far as a few kilometers every morning. They carry backpacks or shoulder bags with notebook and lunch, arriving between 6:30 and 7:30 am, class starting promptly at 8:00 am.

SpanAfrica Director Cameron Dunkin met Steve just before the school opened, in 2005, and has maintained communication with him since. Cameron worked this spring with Morokoshi teachers to share his formal experience with teaching methods and materials. SPAN is pleased to have Morokoshi as a Partner Project site and welcomes new volunteers to work with Steve, the teachers, and students in this beautiful, rural setting.

Let there be light
Last year my former high school physics professor Dan Heim, from Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix, Arizona, donated eight photo voltaic solar panels, used originally to power Dan’s water pump at his New River home. Beneath the car port of my parent’s home in Phoenix, my father and I built sturdy wooden shipping crates which served well in safely transporting the panels to Nakuru last year.

As a kid, I played with basic electrics, disassembling my parent’s alarm clock and pocket calculator to build a simple remote controlled car or robotic arm; some powered by batteries, some by solar panels. Having built one and remodeled two homes and worked closely with the electrical engineer who built-out the 3000 sq-ft high performance computing facility for Sony in the summer of 2006, I am confident with my electrical wiring.

But a completely self-contained power generating station was new territory for me, and so I asked Dan to guide me through the basics of solar system design. He delivered an email which I translated into a spreadsheet to calculate the number of run-time hours based upon the quantity and power of PV panels, quantity and capacity of batteries, conversion to 110V or 220V A/C, system efficiency, and appliances attached.

The first evening at Morokoshi, we filled the new battery with fresh acid, nearly topping off each cell with one bottle each. I then began instruction for the use of a multi-meter to test voltage. We also connected the inverter, my laptop, and Steve’s cell phone to demonstrate the basic function of the system. It worked flawlessly!

The next morning we dove into the design of the wooden frame which would hold the panels and secure them to the corrugated roof of the office, located neatly between the house and school. The frame needed to be ridged, shed water, and enable air flow beneath the panels to keep them from overheating (which reduces the effective conversion of sunlight to electricity, the potential thermal difference a significant factor in the potential electrical difference from silicon semiconductor to conductor backplane).

Steve, Cameron, Rie, and I walked three or four kilometers to the local lumber yard. After some seemingly complicated communication over a relatively simple order, we were granted freshly planed timbers which I cut to length by hand during a power outage. We carried the lumber back to the school, on foot, and after lunch rapidly built the wooden frame and secured the panels with two screws each. With the help of a local boy Brian, maybe eight years of age) and his younger brother, and through the loan of a good bit-n-brace and handsaw by a willing neighbor, we managed to get the frame completed in just one full day.

I showed Steve, Cam, and Rie how to wire the panels in parallel, maintaining 12V D/C but increasing the Amperage. Steve, Cameron, and I located the ideal position for the batteries in the office, built a shelf, and then mounted one of the masonite panels (from the shipping crates) to the wall, a clean slate for the power management station.

The next morning, we hoisted the frame and panels to the roof and ran the wire into the office through the gap between the roof and the wall. The system came together nicely, the charge controller performing its functions of both monitoring the low and high voltage of the batteries while determining when to pass power from the panels directly to the inverter or to charge the battery, or both.

Steve was a quick study, eager every morning to enter the office and learn that even as early as 6:30 am, the charge controller’s green LED signified that the batteries were charging. Less than ten kilometers from the equator, at greater than 5,000 feet elevation, the cool nights are met with early sun and a good ten hours of charge time each and every day. Even during the afternoon rains the panels were in fact generating some electric flow, ample to satisfy the charge controller.

In the course of just five days, two with the assistance of Cameron before his return to Canada, Rie and I wired the entire school and office. We included a proper breaker box (called a “consumer” in Kenya) so that as the system grows, and the inverter provides not just 300W, but 1200W, eventually 2400W and the appliances draw more power than that of a cell phone charger or light bulb, the system is able to accommodate.

And at 7 pm the final night of our work at Morokoshi, I asked Steve to come to the classroom. I flipped the switch and instantly four compact florescent bulbs came to life, gradually warming to their maximum 20W power. His eyes and face too lit with a bright smile and warm embrace, “Oh! This is, … this is something wonderful. You have brought light to Morokoshi. We thank you Kai. Thank you.”

I chose the higher Wattage bulbs (over the more common 11W units) for their softer light, a glass shell around the otherwise harsh, naked tube. The spreadsheet showed that even when we doubled the energy consumption, the 200W generation at just 6 hours each day into 100 Amp-Hours of batteries more than compensates for two, maybe three hours of lights each night.

Download a spreadsheet to help design a Grid-Tied or Off-Grid solar PV generation system, including a calculation of Return On Investment (ROI) calcuation for Grid-Tied systems. These spreadsheets are the result of a foundation initially developed as an educational tool while at Morokoshi in the spring of 2008.

Ultimately, it is Steve’s goal to gain donation of one or more computers so that he may grant his young students a more comprehensive learning environment with interactive DVDs, educational documentaries about their own and foreign countries, and basic computer skills. He is currently researching how to bring the internet to his rural school, via satellite or cell phone.

How do you measure a year in the life?
Those five days at Morokoshi were days that gave me a true sense of calm, a needed balance to the failure in negotiations with Pistis to bring an end to corporal punishment. I found a place in my heart where I truly believed in the work I was conducting. And I found I was more comfortable talking and eating by kerosene lantern in Steve’s mud home than in the four-star hotels in India just three weeks prior. I needed nothing more than those basic comforts, bringing me back to my childhood on a farm in rural Iowa.

I have spent my adult life seeking, striving for those moments when life just pauses, when time is no longer important and there is a sense of belonging to the moment more than it belongs to me. I have experienced this a few times in my life, when backpacking, climbing, and laughing with friends while hiding from the rain beneath a boulder at 10,000 feet; when playing piano, painting Christmas cards by firelight, sharing deep breaths with my lover, and just recently, an evening at Morokoshi, Kenya.

On a particularly cool, crisp night, the kerosene lamp illuminated the interior of Steve’s mud wall home while outside the stars overhead were nearly as bright as when I was a kid on my grandparents’ farm. Cameron and I sang to the musical Rent which played on my Sony-Ericsson Walkman. Steve’s companion and her assistant cooked in the kitchen over a coal stove while Steve studied the owner’s manual for the charge controller, and sleep found Rie while she sat upright on the sofa.

I remember when I was impressed with the sensation of capturing that moment. It settled into my body the way a cat curls up on your lap and falls into a deep, safe sleep. I looked around the room and experienced everything in a freeze-frame, just for a moment, as though someone had flipped a switch. Life paused. And I paused with it.

By day Steve’s radio was tuned to the local EZ station which played ’80s love ballads and soft rock. Phil Collins, Air Supply, and Fleetwood Mac accompanied the lunch time pleasure of ugali and greens or a simple noodle dish always accompanied by chai (hot tea, fresh whole milk, and cane sugar). The sheep cried for attention and the chickens walked in and out of the living room, cleaning the floor of those morsels which fell from our plates.

These are memories that will last a lifetime. Thank you Steve, Cameron, Rie … and Morokoshi.

Blackout at Kenyatta International
True to the spirit of Kenya, the power was restored at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport after a two hours blackout (which I later learned affected not just Nairobi, but a good portion of the country). The hundred or so travelers who sat in near dark of the restaurant at the end of the terminal expressed their relief. But when the power died again and the interior lighting returned to emergency fixtures only, the crowd erupted into laughter for the true humor of the situation. It’s Kenya. The power comes and goes with the apparent will of the rains, a nearly daily event which may last for a few minutes, or several hours.

At 9 PM the power returned and seemed to be content to remain on. I enjoyed a little more than two hours battery with my laptop, catching up on email which had evaded my attention for the past two weeks. Nearly thirty written and placed into cue, to be sent via the cyber cafe 8 exits away.

I sit here now, just an hour before boarding my flight to London Heathrow and then to Munich, Germany for a Power.org conference. This, the final leg of my nearly three months round-the-world tour: three weeks in Japan, three weeks in India, a week in Singapore and the Philippines, and then three weeks here in Kenya.

Welcome home
Arrival at Pistis and reunion with the children was wonderful. Handshakes, hugs, smiles, and laughter–I felt as though I had never left. A hot plate of ugali and spicy greens eaten with fingers from the bottom of a frisbee or simple metal dish, and I was again in my Kenyan home.

It was my intent to spend very little time with physical projects and more time helping CMD-Pistis improve its business management. I met with the Bishop, Gladys, Leonard, and their new CPA to listen, learn, and share how they may integrate cashflow management as a look to the future, proper book keeping as a record of the past. Leonard and I collaboratively built a project management spreadsheet to help guide the many daily, mid- and long-term projects at CMD-Pistis. It is such a joy to give someone a new tool, a hammer, drill, or spreadsheet. Leonard and I are very similar, both in age and mindset with too many ideas to execute in a single lifetime. Therefore, what I offered him was more than just a spreadsheet, but a new way thinking that I had discovered only a few years prior.

I feel really good about the work I did with them, offering my experience as an entrepreneur who has made every mistake possible and yet pulled through, time and time again for nearly a decade. I wish sometimes that someone would have guided me more carefully when I started Terra Soft, perhaps helping to avoid some of the larger pitfalls. But experience avoided is wisdom lost.

But things were not quite the same.
Through conversations with Wycliffe, Jacintah, and Leonard, I learned that during the January skirmishes entire families took shelter and lived in the bath house, the stalls providing a place to lay down bedding and sleep in relatively safety. Stephen the architect, with whom I worked extensively last year, fled his home with his family, all living in the same bath house that he designed and built just a few months prior. How ironic. How humbling. Only one month ago did the last family move out.

But two weeks prior to my arrival, twenty six or twenty seven students were taken to the hospital with dysentery, pointing to high density, unhealthy living conditions.

My first day in the compound, I noted and took charge of two outstanding projects: completion of the bath house plumbing and complete cleaning and repair of the kitchen stoves and pipes. Apparently, the cleaning job I paid for last year, initiated the morning I left, was incomplete. The fundis had done little more than beat the sides of the pipes with one of the wooden paddles used to cook ugali, rice, or beans.

I solicited a young man who worked at a local metal shop just around the corner from the school to provide an estimate for proper repair. Last year, their price was too high. But this time he worked under the table for less and in just one Sunday morning and afternoon skillfully disassembled the kitchen stove pipes, cleaned them properly, and built a new metal lattice that holds the wood off the bottom, enabling airflow beneath the burning wood.

The bath house required only two afternoons of adjustments and parts replacements by two plumbers hired at the recommendation of Charles, with whom I worked last year. The walkway to the school remained in fairly good condition, the stones that lined the drainage trench reset in a stronger configuration. The food storage system remained strong and clean, the mice population for the most part no longer mingling with the bags of corn, beans, and rice. The outside of the compound wall had been painted with large, fun “ABCs”, a colorful animal associated with each. Someone directly funded this project, and so even at a time when food was scarce, the schools aesthetics were enhanced. This was later a topic of conversation with Leonard, Gladys, and the Bishop–what to do when funds are directed by a remote donor but other needs are more pressing.

The funds we raised in January were put to good use, food on the shelves, some shoes on feet, new beds. Thank you again to everyone who so quickly contributed. But not ample to fully support the needs of Pistis. Too many remain without shoes. Too many who do not know how to hustle to makes ends meet. Too many who do, carrying forward the skills they learned on the streets with behavior that undermines the school’s organization and rules.

With nearly thirty new orphans, the compound is noticeably at its maximum occupancy. A new girls’ dormitory was recently constructed from an existing steel frame structure, the fifty odd girls moved from their former, highly congested quarters of a single classroom where many had been sleeping in adjacent classrooms, their bedrolls returned by morning.

The ash of wood and bone.
No one can prepare for what happened in January. Having been in Nakuru both before and following the skirmishes, I was but a visitor to a scene of the crime, stories told by the remnants of homes, by the ashes of wood and bone mixed now with soil, and by the voices of Jacintah, Leonard, and Wycliffe.

I remain in horror with the knowledge of what humans can do to each other in times such as those, war at any level so easily toppling the structure of organized society into fear, self-preservation, and chaos.

At the same time, I am in awe for the spirit of humanity, for the desire to press ahead, to pick up and continue. If I were unaware of what transpired just a few months prior, I would not have known. My own sense of “something is not quite right” was due almost entirely to my knowledge of what had transpired. I could not help but look at the faces of those who passed me on the streets, those who solicited me for a boda-boda or matatu ride to town or for the sale of a trinket I did not need, and wonder what role they may have played. Did they stay home and protect their family? Or did they sharpen a machete and take to the streets?

Through the stories I have received, and through my own experience, I have learned that the definition of “friend”, the construct of trust is not consistent from culture to culture. Integrity is not given the same value. Even “value” carries a different meaning when values themselves may be a luxury unaffordable to those who just barely survive.

The Value of Time and Materials
Last year I had dinner with an electrician and a seamstress, a newly married couple who lived in the compound across the alley way from Pistis. We spoke briefly of business, of the frustration I had experienced in the seemingly ill-founded quotes I received on a regular basis when working with local contractors.

I asked the young man how he conducted his quotes. He looked down at his feet, laughed lightly, and said, “I offer a quote for what I need that day, and what I believe my customer is willing to pay. If I need a new television, then that is what I charge.” He was uncomfortable in sharing this with me, but not ashamed. It is not the only means of doing business, but where price tags exist only in super markets, bartering is the cultural norm. I quickly provided a description of a proper time and materials estimate, and he honestly stated he had never conducted such a thing. He thought it was a good idea, but did not think it would work in Kenya. I had made it work last year, but yes, it was a struggle.

At first take, this seems absurd. I drew judgment. But when I stopped to think about it, to place the conversation in the context of this country and not my own, at a time before Western commerce was introduced, there is an elegance in this system. I considered that the electrical wire itself, the sockets, the switches, the bulbs, even the labor carried no intrinsic value, much in the same way that the native Americans saw no value in the European settlers buying and selling land–for it was not theirs to own in the first place.

In this mindset, this cultural norm, the accepted means by which value is applied to a job is not necessarily based on the work itself, but on the value that either party perceives to be appropriate and eventually agrees to exchange. One may find honor in this. And if it were not for the fact that mis-quotes result in unfinished projects due to materials which do in fact carry real value in the market place, this style of barter and commerce is in many respects balanced and fair, those who can afford more, pay more.

But when building foundations are laid, and then left to crumble, or when a series of bids are so completely off that the contractor finds himself borrowing funds from a new job to complete an old, the web of dishonest stories invokes mistrust. Who will complete the project and who will change their cell phone number when the funds run dry?

In this circular story are often indirect answers given with diverted eye contact. I experienced the same Kenya as I did last year, but my perception has changed. While handshakes, smiles, and warm brotherly greetings continue to penetrate my cautious exterior, inside I know that a true friend in a place such as this must be earned over many, many years, or perhaps, never found.

Goodbye, for now.
Cameron, Board member for SPAN and I delivered a notice of termination of funds and volunteers to the management of CMD-Pistis for reasons I am choosing to not share here, in this public forum. The document was well researched and sincerely worded, but in retrospect too harsh in its demands, a cultural lesson learned. The debate that followed escalated. Friendships fell to confusion, family bonds were broken. Cameron and I left Nakuru with tears in our eyes for a level of innocence replaced with reality. I remain confused for who and what to believe. I continue to process what transpired and try to understand with an open mind–judgment a tool for justice, not a bridge to reconciliation.

These people have been through hell and back and we will never understand what that means. We know only that as an organization, SPAN must draw clear boundaries for what we support and what we do not, we look forward to a time when we can again come to Pistis to be greeted by the laughter of children whose futures are forever uncertain, but their ability to move ahead without parents nor family to fall back upon, unwavering.