Nairobi, Kenya
Kiran Odhiambo
Rain on the Upper Slopes
Kiran set up forty-two cheap rain gauges with local farmers and mapped where the storms really fall.
The official station is in the valley. The rain was falling on the hill.
Kiran Odhiambo
The summer
Kiran Odhiambo started from a complaint he kept hearing. The only official rain station in his district sat on the valley floor, and farmers higher up said the rain often fell on the ridges and never reached it. He wanted numbers that matched what they saw.
He built the gauges from bottles and a printed scale, then walked the district recruiting one farmer per ridge to read them each morning. He cut the first batch himself over a fortnight, and a hardware stall supplied waterproof labels at cost. Several farmers asked to keep the offcuts for seed trays.
Readings came in by text message, and he spent evenings cleaning them into a single sheet. Typing errors were constant: a missing decimal point, a day reported twice. His mentor, a hydrologist, told him to log the mistakes in their own column instead of fixing them quietly, and the habit paid off when two ridges seemed to disagree. Within six weeks the map showed a band of heavy rain that the official station, in the valley, had never recorded.
Not everything held up. One gauge blew off a fence post in the third week and was replaced by the farmer’s daughter before lunch. By the end of the summer only two of the forty-two had been lost, both to goats. He finished with a one-page guide in two languages, handed to every farmer who took part.
Rain on the Upper Slopes now has a map, a sheet of readings and that guide. The farmers still send their numbers each morning, and a printed copy of the map hangs in the agricultural office in the district town. The guide and the map are on the fellows page.
