Dave's East Africa Blog: Day 3 Nairobi May 11, 2011 part one

Hi all,

What an adventure today was. Today I learned what happens when the President of Kenya is in your vicinity. Traffic is an unbelievable nightmare to begin with in Nairobi but when the Head of States moves into an area nothing moves. Started our journey at 7:30 sharp thinking we were going to beat the traffic. After many side streets and who knows where we were type of journey that should have taken less then an hour took almost 4. We made it to the UMC Happy Days Faith Academy before noon for a brief stay before we headed over to Huruma UMC church just before 1 pm. We stayed at Huruma for about an hour and a half before we started another journey for an hour or so to Matopeni UMC church. We wanted to get back to Ngong hills around 5 pm so we cut off our fourth visit of the day at 4 pm and started the journey across Nairobi. We finally arrived back at the Le Motel Camp David just after 8 pm.

If any of you has ever been to Nairobi I bet you have experienced a traffic circle. No they are not like the ones in New Jersey. At least Jersey got smart and started to get rid of them. Anyway we sat at the entrance of a traffic circle for 35 minutes while a police officer held up our lane from getting into the circle. Between her and her partner managing the circle they allowed all the other lanes to move but ours. People were honking their horns. She would just turn around look at the backed up traffic turn back around and continue to wave everyone but our lane through. Finally our driver asked the cop if we could make a left hand turn so we could bypass the circle. We were allowed to proceed and many hours later we made it back. I assume that the lane was still backed up to at least the end of her shift.

Earlier in the day at another traffic circle I was able to witness a foiled crime. We were stuck in a traffic circle right behind a truck. Three guys walked up to the back of the truck one of them jumped into the back and started to hand one of his partners a large steel grate. I do not know what these guys were thinking. There was a cop right there too. As two of them started to hand down the grate to the third the cop came up from behind and whacked one of them behind his knees. Kenyan justice is swift and painful. The cop escorted the three would be thieves to the side of the road. After traffic started moving again we passed the three smiling would be thieves and they waved to me goodbye. They must of noticed that I was laughing at them. I don’t know why I don’t have my camera ready when anything exciting happens. There are a couple of you reading this that remembers the Black Rhino that charged us in Nakuru NP. All of us had cameras but not one of us got a picture.

Thursday is a down day to review, write up these last two days of projects and tackle some logistical issues. So part two of this Wednesdays outing will be posted tomorrow.