The Kenya I Love 9(hit list)

I decided to finish the 'The Kenya I Love' series with a cliche list of things you may experience when in Kenya. Here goes.

You know you're in Kenya when:

1. The policemen ask you to drive on when the traffic light is showing red.

2. There's a sign at the airport that says 'No guns beyond this point'.

3. The driving instructor who is off duty is found driving in the city while talking on a mobile phone.

4. The sign above the sink in a restaurant reads "Please do not spit or wash your face in the hand wash basin".

5. The fire brigade gets to your house 4 hrs after you call when you house has been razed to the gorund.

6. The government destroys your 20 million shilling house to build a road and then never builds it (even 5 years down the line).

7. When you ask for a glass of water at a restaurant the waiter asks you if you intend to drink it.

8. The price of commodities varies depending on your nationality, how you're dressed and the language you speak.

9. Receiving telephone airtime is considered a romantic gesture during valentine's day.

10. Police ask you to pay them a bribe so they do not arrest you for trying to bribe them.

The Kenya I Love 8(au revoir)

It was an exceptionally fun holiday. It would be difficult to summarise it so instead i'll write the experience i went through on my way back to Austrailia.

The trip to the airport was funny in itself because i kept receiving calls one after another and my pals were sending hilarious messages on the network group-texting service. Once on the plane, the journey became even funnier. I had promised myself that i'd have a heineken on the flight which is normally a bad idea when you at a high altitude because alcohol hits you like a brick. Despite knowing this, a heineken was the first drink i asked for when the air hostess came by. the fellow sitting next to me seemed to be disgusted by my request and stared forward in utter annoyance over his humongous beer belly. Having flown a number of times it's not that hard to spot a rookie on his first flight. The man sitting next to me with the bad stare was definitely a first-timer.

As soon as he had sat down he asked me how i was doing and i thought that was a pleasant thing to do. It's good to sit next to someone social.

Soon after, the stewards were serving dinner and they only had a selection of wine and soft drinks on the trolley. I hadn't planned for this and since i do not take soda i asked for red wine (right after my heineken). As it tends to happen after taking alcohol i became rather giddy after dinner and when the stewards comes again asking if we'd like another drink i don't hesitate to ask for another heineken. The air hostess comes back to me and delivers some dreadful news: there's no more heineken on the flight. So she gives me a budweiser instead!

One budweiser later and i am laughing to myself after remembering moments from my holiday. My movie soon ends after my beer and i am a bit too tipsy to consider sleeping it off. So i remember my social neighbour and shake him up from his concentration (i think he was watching something) to ask him if he plays chess:

Kev: Hey, do you play chess?
Random dude: No.
Kev: (scrolling down the game menu on my screen) How about checkers, do you play checkers?
RD: What?
Kev: Draughts (other name for checkers)? do you play?
RD: No.

It's at this point that i consider maybe i was just being an annoying drunk but the fellow begins to lean forward as if he is air sick (HA! Justice, he refused to play games with me) and soon enough, he excuses himself from the seat and disappears for a while, possibly to vomit. Poor fellow.

We arrive at Dubai without any further incident where i sit down to write this post after discovering that the famous Dubai airport does not sell Absynth because it has too high an alcohol percentage....we obviosuly need some Kenyan entrepreneurs up in here.

The Kenya I Love 7(total unrecall)

Being the smart person that i am i decided that since i was not driving last weekend i'd make sure i get really drunk. Which normally isn't a bad idea because i don't drink that much even when i do want to get drunk. This time it was a different issue. I somehow got into my head that i'd be able to finish a bottle of Kenya King and still walk out in a stable state of mind. YEAH RIGHT. Half an hour after finishing the KK i can't remember a thing. I have total memory loss between 11pm and 6am. 7hours of my life that i lost. What happened between those 7 hours will be mentioned on the blog as soon as i find out when i meet my friends again for the full story.

What i want to write about today was the conversation that i had with my parents when the result of such blatant consumption of cheap liqour revealed itself to my parents when i up chucked my previous nights endeavours in front of my father at the Tanzania-Kenya border customs office. My mother was sorting out issues with the customs officials and our passports so she never got to witness the horror that my dad did. My dad, however, didn't say a word but simply handed me the car keys so i could get tissue from the car to wipe myself clean. The conversation was picked up when we all got back into the car to continue our journey into Tanzania. Expecting to be given a lecture i treaded carefully. This was the conversation that followed:

Dad: How are you feeling now? Still feeling sick?

Mum: He was feeling sick?

Kev: (taking the plunge) Yeah, i vomited outside the customs office.

Dad: This is is why you should not drink on an empty stomach. (What?) Did you have anything to eat yesterday before you drank?

Kev: Yes i did eat. (Slighty surprised to hear the concern in his voice)

Mum: Maybe, it's coz he mixed drinks. Did you mix drinks.

Kev: Yes. (how much more honest can i be) I mixed a few drinks.

Mum: (nodding her head) That's why. Anyway, you learn from your mistakes. Next time you won't mix drinks.

Kev: OK.

I was just happy that there was going to be a next time.

The Kenya I Love 6(remixed)

Amidst all the hullabaloo in the media about the rigged election, there was a story that i found of particular interest which was sidelined. The news reported that an extended family of 56 people was planning on committing suicide because they were unhappy about their level of poverty. The family of 56 has unanimously decided to commit suicide because they were tired of living in poverty and were hoping to bring the situation to an end because nothing could be worse than what they were experiencing.

I'm willing to bet that this extended family is religious and they were hoping for getter things in the afterlife after spending the majority of their lives on earth struggling. It seems like a very sad story if you saw the clip on the news and it would warm most people's hearts, wouldn't it? Was that what they wanted? Maybe they came up with this mass suicide as an attempt to get media attention (which worked) and then eventually get rich people with a soft spot to send them some money and end their poverty.

The story wasn't covered at all in the later days and the people who missed it the first time would not have heard the rest of it. Well, lucky for me my ex girlfriend is a journalist and the news article came up when we met to catch up. I asked her what the latest on the story was and she told me that 2 weeks down the line the family had managed to finish digging 7 graves.
Let's get some mathematics into this issue. Assuming that 20 of the 56 family members were below grave digging age (which is a very generous assumption especially considering that child labor laws are non-existent in Kenya and the poorer the family is the younger their children begin working). That leaves 36 family members. Now let's say half of these were ladies who's job was to source food and water for the hard working men digging the graves. We now have 18 men digging these supposed graves.

THIS IS WHY THE FAMILY IS POOR. They are outright LAZY! If you're going to dig graves then get to it. 7 graves in 2 weeks with a workforce of 18 men doing nothing but digging graves is just a poor show!

The Kenya I Love 5 (fluffy and friends)

Despite the wanton theft of votes by the government that resulted in one of the worst new years celebrations ever, the holiday has still been a blast. Can't really structure a full story now so I'll put in some conversations I've had with the boys since coming back.

Now this is a funny one. We were going out for the rave (what Aussie's would call clubbing/going out) when my friend Nick makes a very valid point. This is the scenario: I've just come from picking Nick up from his house and we are leaving Nyari estate (one of the 'posh' estates in Nairobi) and the song 'I'm so hood' by DJ Khaleed plays on the CD player. There's Nick, his brother Mark and I in the car and we are all gangster rapping along to the lyrics of the song coz cool guys know the lyrics to such kind of music. Halfway through the song Nick reaches towards the volume knob and to the protests of Mark and I, he reduces the volume. This is the conversation that follows:

Mark: What did you do that for?
Nick: Ebu (please) just skip that song.
Kev: Why?
Nick: Coz there's no one in this car who is hood at all! We're rolling out of Nyari in a BMW about to spend a lot of money on getting drunk when people around the country are killing each other because they are upset that their votes were stolen on election day. NONE OF US ARE HOOD!

Well, he does have a point.

******

Another conversation i recently had was a discussion over lunch with my ex B who has a morbid fear of mangoes. Not quite sure how the conversation started but we ended up talking about fruits.
B: I don't like bananas, do you eat bananas?
Kev: (getting my mind out of the gutter) Yeah i do. How about oranges?
B: Oranges? Oh my gosh. I've never tasted a sweet orange in my life...EVER! They are so bitter.
Kev: What fruits do you eat then? Do you like durian's? I hate those fruits. They even have an ice cream flavour of the damn thing in oz. It's disgusting.
B: The one that's soft and white inside...ewww.
Kev: Do you eat fruits? At all.
B: Of course! I'm just a bit picky.
Kev: (raising eyebrows) A bit? How about mangoes?
B: Don't even mention mangoes in my presence. Do you know that if you eat a mango you'll get a cold?
Kev: I ate a mango yesterday and I'm feeling fine.
B: Then you're just lucky. Every time i eat a mango i get a cold.
Kev: What like a flu? Runny nose and all?
B: Yes.
Kev: Question, every time you eat a mango do you happen to be eating it while standing naked in the rain?
B: No. Mangoes are evil! I don't trust them.

The Kenya I Love 4(conclusion?)

(conversations are translated from Swahili)

Previously on 'The Kenya I Love'

Tired of the entire fiasco i decided to come back later and sure enough i as back at the station at 1:45pm. I walk in to find a different lady at the reception desk. The police station was still empty.

It gets even funnier! I walk up to the reception desk to talk to the new lady sitting there possibly in for the afternoon shift (and yes she is also a plus size lady).
Kevin: I was told to come back at 2 o'clock for an abstract for a lost drivers license...
Ladycop4: Have you already reported it?
Kevin: Yes (i pull out the strip of paper that had my very important reference number on it and show it to her)
Ladycop4: (looking at the paper for much longer than is necessary) The lady who writes abstracts (ladycop3) has not come back from lunch. Come back at 2 o'clock.
Kevin: 2 o'clock is 15 minutes away.
Ladycop4: Yes, come back at 2 o'clock.
Kevin: Can i sit in the reception for the 15 minutes?
Ladycop4: (making a face like i have just revealed my secret fifth nipple despite the fact that the place was totally empty except for me an her) Ok.

Now before i continue this i need to try and explain the layout of the police station. The building is basically a rectangle with an open area in the middle that i am sure used to be a leisure area but was converted to a dodgy holding area for minor offenders. So the place basically has a corridor that loops around the holding area with offices to either side of the corridor except around the holding area.
The windows around the walls of the holding area are above regular height and you can therefore not look through them from either side of the wall....or so i thought. I'm sitting there minding my own business when this crook, who was probably arrested the night before, jumps up in the holding area, grabs the bars on the window above standing level and hoists himself up to look through the gap. He looks straight at me and smiles. Looks left down the corridor, right down the corridor and seeming satisfied he drops back down to the holding area.
I stifle a laugh as a very sad lady walks into the room. Very meek, she approaches the reception desk and talks to Ladycop4 in a voice to low for me to hear. Ladycop4 seems experienced in dealing with this kind of behavior so she listens to the lady and after a few minutes of talking in hushed tones she disappears into a door behind her later on emerging with a short man in her wake. The fellow steps into the room in a manner to suggest that there's a tiger around the corner and he's very wary of it. He pokes his head in and surveys the area. Sure that the tiger must be hiding, he walks in slowly and acknowledges the new lady who i am guessing is his wife or a loving sister.
They talk in hushed tones under strict supervision of Ladycop4 who intercedes when a thermos is produced with a hot drink brought for the man who seems to have missed out on a lot of sleep the previous night. At 10 past 2pm exactly Ladycop3 walks in and drags me to her office once again. I wish i could put another funny conversation here but nothing of the sort happens. She quickly writes up the abstract asking a few questions here and there, asks me for my money and gives me a receipt. The process takes a total of 6 minutes which brings the question 'Why did it take me a day to get this piece of paper when it would have taken 6 minutes to write up at the reception desk?'

I Love Kenya.