Posts Tagged ‘Water and Sanitation’

East Africa: Sphere Standards at Work in the Field

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Debbie DeVoe, CRS’ regional information officer for East Africa, is currently attending Sphere training in Nairobi, Kenya. She describes a field visit in this post.

Sphere training

More than 500 Maasai people benefit from the 16,000-liter water tank that supports both domestic use and livestock watering. Photo by Debbie DeVoe/CRS.

Yesterday it was time to apply our Sphere training in the field. Ideally we would have visited an emergency response site, but instead we visited a water development project. This decision helped to avoid raising expectations or creating a disruption at a camp for Kenyans displaced earlier in the year by post-election violence.

We traveled in buses three hours south to a community near Kijiado. This semi-arid region is populated primarily by the Maasai—a nomadic ethnic group that herds cattle, sheep and goats as their primary source of food and income.

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