Kiran Odhiambo’s gauges, five weeks in

Five weeks into the summer, the first hard numbers have come in from Kenya. Kiran’s gauges are now set on forty-two farms across the district, each one made from a cut bottle and a printed scale. Every morning a farmer reads the level and sends it by text message, and by evening the readings are in one shared sheet.

He has spent most of the last fortnight cleaning that sheet. People send numbers in different ways, with commas and spaces and the odd note about a goat, and he keeps every mistake in a column of its own so that nothing disappears. His mentor calls this the most useful habit on the project.

The first map shows a narrow band of heavy rain on a ridge that the official station, in the valley below, does not cover. That station sits several kilometres away and is a good one. It simply cannot see what happens on the slopes above it. Several farmers on that ridge told Kiran they had suspected as much for years.

He plans to keep the network running beyond the summer, and the trust has offered to pay for replacement bottles. There are still seven weeks of the fellowship to go, with one more mentor call a fortnight, and the guide he is writing for the farmers is half finished. We will say more when his fellows page goes up in September.