Good day, bad day

It’s a good day in Nairobi. You wake up to a beautiful clear morning, wind your way past the cockerels in the yard and board your matatu with no hassle. You dance to the reggae vibes as you breeze through the traffic and the driver volunteers your change without being asked. You arrive at work to find a colleague has done a proactive piece of work and told you how you really helped them. At chai break you share a mandazi or some bread with colleagues who always offer you some of the little they have. You see another colleague sporting a fantastic new hairstyle that seems to have changed her personality as well as her image. You spend a day busy at work and feel you have made some real progress, people respond to your emails, you have an encouraging meeting with the management team, you have a plan of action for delivering capacity building. At lunch time you go and eat with colleagues, laugh with the lady in the food van who keeps asking if you are cold yet (in the mild Kenyan winter) and share stories about life in the UK. Colleagues insist you come to their house and they will cook Kenyan food for you. As you head home you walk past monkeys swinging in the trees and observe the hustle and bustle of the city. You have an encouraging exchange of Kiswahili with the vegetable stall holder and practice slang words with the children outside. You see women in beautifully coloured outfits swaying past you, followed by a man herding his cattle through the city streets. You go out into the Nairobi nightlife for drinks with friends at a nearby trendy bar that could be anywhere in the world, except it is still warm enough to sit outside. You remember why you love this city…..

It’s a bad day in Nairobi. You wake up to discover the milk is off (no fridge) and hear on the radio about the latest corruption scandal in Kenyan politics. You wait for ages for a matatu and then board amongst hysterical pushing and shoving. You then sit stationary for ages in the traffic, cursing the thick black smoke your lungs are forced to inhale. You get overcharged, for the journey, for a paper, for a soda, anything really, because you are a mzungo. You are reminded of this fact several times during the day when people randomly shout the word at you in the street, some with happy smiles as they say it, but not all. At work you have nothing to do, no-one has given you any work and you can’t think what to do next to move things on. No-one seems to care. Then the internet stops working and you wonder how you will make it through the day. Your boss recounts terrible stories of disabled children being locked in houses by their families in a very matter of fact way, you ask him what can be done and he shrugs ‘we keep trying to educate people’. Over chai break a colleague tells you how his house was burgled last week. ‘How horrible’ you reply ‘Its ok’ he says ‘because I know who it was and I told the police and they have killed him’. You have a meeting in which you don’t understand how colleagues are talking and talking but not saying anything. Nothing is decided and you head back to your desk, frustrated, to do battle with the strange insects that have accumulated there in your absence. As you leave work it begins to rain, you get charged more again on the matatu and the jams are awful. As you travel up the street however you see why, the worst car accident you have ever seen a few metres in front of you, mangled vehicles but no sign of the passengers who you presume have already been cleared away. Everyone on the matatu tuts and you drive on, passing five more ambulances on your route home as Kenyans drive as carelessly as ever in the rain. You arrive home soaking wet to find no electricity, so you try to make a phone call but oddly there is no reception in your flat today. The power returns and you settle down to watch the latest knock off DVD bought round the corner and discover it doesn’t work, and then the power goes off, again. You have no idea where your candles are and so you go to bed. Then you really miss home.