Lots of Lead

Apologies are in order. I made it to Nigeria on Wednesday and thought
I was updating this blog via my cell phone but it appears I am doing
something wrong. So I will forward emails to my wife who will transfer
the email into the blog. I'll keep the personal stuff out of it.

So Wednesday in Abuja was interesting. Our driver was great and the
hotel was comfortable. The city however was very loud and busy. The
exhaust from the cars was everywhere. It was really horrible. We
didn't spend hardly any time there so my own judgment is not fully
informed.

The next day we flew into Sokoto where we met our driver who took us
to our staging area. We have a fenced compound with two nice
buildings, flushing toilets and full showers. The water is the same
temperature as outside so a "cooler" shower at the end of a day in the
village is just awesome. We have a kitchen with a cook, security 24
hours a day, launderer, and drivers. As far as nonprofit field work,
this is the Ritz.

My first two days were spent in a small village not far from here.
There are about 90 compoumds in the village with about 2000 people
total. The process for cleanup includes hiring local villagers for the
work and managers from the regional ministry in charge of the cleanup.
An advocacy group goes in first to instruct each compound in what will
happen and what they need to do to make things easier. The
excavation crew goes in and digs the soil. Then a disposal crew picks
up the bags of soil which were just dug up. Then a clean dirt crew
brings in clean soil which is the "topsoil" which is collected and
stored during the digging of the landfill. It was very hot work but
things went well considering the logistics of everything.

Today was sort of a day off for us but there isn't much to do in this
part of Nigeria so we went to a village that was not identified in the
original scope and looked around.

This village is larger than all of the others by quite a bit and it
actually had an area they called the Ore Market. Here we found samples
of ores from seven different mines in the region. We collected samples
and shot them with the XRF back at our compound. One was galena and is
likely 50 percent or more lead. The next lowest was 28000ppm, then
12000, then three around 2000 and two below 300ppm. Basically we can
use this info to help identify the sources.

The sad things today was that all the kids were following us around
playing on the piles of processed ore which looks almost like sand. We
saw a man sluecing in the area even though the govercment shut down
mining operations a couple months ago. We estimated about 10 acres of
land have been impacted and the average concetrations are over
50000ppm in this area with lots of waste piles and other fun things
for the kids to play on. There is no context for them to understand
the severity of the issue although they know about the one family
which has lost 11 kids to lead poisonong in the last year and five
more in the village died two weeks ago. It is heartbreaking.
Despite all, today was a good day for the group in that the village
head was very helpful, supportive, and thankful.

Tomorrow we will continue cleanup in the village I was in earlier this
week. However I get to move to another village to help construct a
landfill. Actually, I am only going because the heavy equipment crew
(which is currently made up of unemployed miners...) basically won't
listen to a woman even though she has the PE. At least I have
experiance with heavy equipment so I can speak that language.