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.

Nuns, protests and buses in Tanzania

Visiting a friend in Southern Tanzania last month turned out to be quite an experience. After a great few days relaxing in Mombasa, including a poor attempt to kayak around the island, we boarded the bus to Dar, dollars in hand hoping we would get a visa at the border. 9 hours, two visas and a very bumpy Tanzanian road later we arrived in Dar-es–Salaam (Haven of peace) on a bank holiday weekend to find pretty much the whole city shut. Then began our ridiculous attempts to continue our journey on to the very south of Tanzania to a town called Mtwara, during rainy season and assisted by an array of characters much more adept at conning the mzungo than those in Kenya.

So it goes:
5.30 am, arrived at bus station with tickets bought the previous night and then waited, and waited and waited. About 4 hours later the penny finally drops with our fellow Tanzanian passengers that no bus is coming and the crowd gets angry. Several phone calls to the bus company and finally a representative arrives.
‘ No bus today’ we were told. Then, a sudden change of heart
‘A bus for some of you who bought your tickets here’
‘What bus?’
‘The small Chinese hopper bus over there’ which had just driven away for fear of being mobbed by angry passengers wanting to get on. Then a little while later…
“Go get on the bus’
‘What bus this time?’ The same hopper bus now hiding behind some trees to avoid said angry mob.
Soon enough this bus is discovered and a scuffle for seats is followed by a protest of people we’d never seen before claiming they had been thrown off the hopper bus. A short while later and we are on the move, hurray! But wait a minute, where’s that we are headed? The police station! Justice is then done as the police oversee the reimbursement of all fares (though we get back less than we paid as we had been overcharged in the first place).

Actually never been this far away from home

‘Great now we go to Mtwara?’
‘No now we go back to the bus station, no bus today’
‘Er hang on, why is that man winking at us and saying you two mzungo will go to Mtwara?’
So arriving back at the bus station some savvy passengers realize that the bus company still intends to take the bus to Mtwara, possibly with only us on it
‘No-one leave the bus’ they say (or at least I think they do as this whole episode is in fluent Kiswahili and we haven’t a clue!)
They refuse to get off so we decide to and as we leave a police man comes after us
‘Where are you going this bus will take you two to Mtwara’
‘Just us? When and how much?’
‘Well what you have to understand about transport in Tanzania is that it is very very expensive………………’

Later that same day
‘Hello are there any flights to Mtwara tomorrow morning’
‘Yes there are’
‘Can we book them’
‘No there are no flights tomorrow morning’

Absolutely worth all the hassle

Next morning as we turn up at airport at 6am on our friend’s advice‘Are there any flights to Mtwara this morning’
‘Yes’
‘Can we book a seat’

‘No the flight is full’
‘So we can’t get to Mtwara today’
‘No’
‘Ok, thank you’
‘But you can go at midday if you want’

Virtually a private beach at our disposal

So after a frustrating day trying to leave Dar we finally arrived on a ‘blown our budget’ flight into the beautiful little town of Mtwara where our friends Adrian and Caroline hosted us wonderfully. Staying at a beach house which took us right out onto a pristine beach which only us and the fishermen used, swimming, snorkeling and eating gorgeous fresh fish, drinks at sundown overlooking the bay, taking in the slower pace of life and slowly becoming enchanted by the town. On our third day we were joined in the beach house by a group of nuns (the house belongs to the Benedictine order) with whom we struggled to find appropriate conversation but shared a lovely breakfast of hot chocolate and stodge.
All in all well worth the hassle and we can’t wait to find an excuse to go back.

The Lord provides 5 star accommodation

Kenya vs UK - six months in

Today marks the sixth month anniversary of our arrival in Kenya and to celebrate we thought we would do a quick comparison of things we like and don’t like here and at home. It goes without saying that we miss family and friends but other than that there are some things which surprised us:

The things we love about Kenya
1. Never knowing what the day will bring - seeing a camel walk down our street or monkeys in the trees near our house, rainstorms so violent you think your house might wash away
2. The taste of the fruits
3. Finding out what Kenyans know and like about the UK; the Premier League obviously, Top Gear (strangely), the Royal family
4. Colours – it’s like a different spectrum
5. Having ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ holidays every month – Kenya is a stunning country
6. Having a sense of perspective; the relative ease and privilege of British life, the sense that there is more to life than work, but also of geography. We can’t believe how many people we haven’t visited on account of how far away they live in the UK. The island is tiny!
7. Giraffes, warthogs, elephants and hippos-our favourites of all the amazing wildlife we have seen so far
8. DVD Derek and his latest pre-release titles

The things we don’t like and won’t miss about Kenya
1. Food, especially ugali. The carb based diet, augmented with chewy meat, is not the greatest
2. Traffic - the chaos of the matatus and the amount of time you can be sat in queues breathing in the foul black air
3. Dust - the feeling that you are never truly clean in Nairobi
4. Prayer - having to adhere to it in meetings, having to listen to the call to prayer, having to nod in agreement about the merits of organized religion
5. Bugs and flies
6. Shouts of ‘mzungo, mzungo' in the street, for no apparent reason other than to remind you that you are white and not black it seems
7. Being overcharged for all sorts of things because you are a mzungo and in particular being told ‘what you have to understand about xxxx in Kenya is that it is very, very expensive…..'
8. Kenyan politics-much more about personality than ideology but you get the feeling that they are all screwing the country over
9. Attitudes to women and homosexuals
10. Plugs which hiss at you, showers which ‘make you dance’ and the general quality of electrical fittings
11. The absolute disregard for customer service

The things we miss about the UK
1. Proper cups of tea made without boiling a vat of full fat milk
2. Cakes that have sugar in them
3. Dressing gowns-mornings are quite nippy now in Nairobi
4. Being able to walk around freely after dark
5. Good roads
6. Nice bathrooms including a bath
7. The NHS and public services- truly what sets Britain apart from the rest of the world
8. Cheese
9. 5-a-side football and the Championship
10. Clean fingernails
11. Bus timetables
12. Queues
13. Sandwiches
14. Being paid each month

The things we don’t miss about the UK
1. The weather
2. Incessant complaining about how hard life is in one of the richest countries in the world
3. Having a TV
4. Celebrity obsessed culture
5. Health and safety culture- if there is a river at the bottom of your playground just teach children not to play near it.
6. Waiting for transport-you may have to queue once you are in it but you never wait long for transport in Nairobi
7. Watery tomatoes
8. Pessimism