Looking for the water

July 18: Today was a good day. We got out of the Center around 8:00 and headed back up to the headwater stream system we were sampling yesterday. According to the geological survey maps made ten years ago or so, the river we are focusing on has three major tributaries that feed it. We sampled two of them yesterday and today we had planned to sample the third. After an hour or so of driving over some incredibly bad "roads" - paths really in some places, we failed to find the river. Fortunately our research team includes a Maasai who works for the Center. Sapaya (I'm probably misspelling his name) grew up around here but was not familiar with this specific region.  As we drove along, we encountered some local Maasai who were very helpful. They looked at our maps with us and explained that the river was blocked and being piped to local farms. He got in the vehicle with us and we headed up to the spring that feeds this ex-river. On the way we passed numerous bomas (hut/houses) and farms including a farm where they breed camels - not something I had seen before in Kenya. We got to the spring, which was two concrete barriers with pipes sticking out. Two of the pipes let water flow freely and several local women were filling water jugs that they carried by foot up and down to their homes. The other pipes led away to storage tanks, thus denying the river of any water. We sampled at the spring and continued back to the river proper to pick up three more stations before returning to the Center. Processing has been tedious, but we are starting to see some interesting, if depressing results. The river where we see folks taking drinking water, and driving cattle and all sorts of other activities has a great deal of coliform (gut) bacteria. This indicates that sewage is making its way into the water. In addition, the water is very high in nutrients, likely from agricultural runoff. More importantly, there are very high arsenic levels which can result in some real health issues for the folks who live here. Tomorrow we continue downstream and will try to occupy three or four more stations.