Kenya's catastrophic roads

Driving around Nairobi at the moment is a nightmare because of the state of the roads. Every rainy season wreaks havoc on smooth(ish) tarmac and when the rains have finished it is months before the fresh cracks and potholes are repaired. Narrow tarmac roads break away at the edges, becoming narrower and narrower until you have a strip only wide enough for one vehicle with steep drop offs on each side. It was precisely these conditions that caused my car to lose control on a wet evening in March, first tipping violently off the edge of one side of the road, then the next (bit too much over correcting), skidding into horizontal position then ploughing through a ditch, a hedge and almost into a field. My husband argued it was something to do with the sundowners that I had enjoyed at earlier the club but obviously I blame the road conditions entirely. Extracting the car out of its spot, wedged exactly halfway through the hedge proved a good hour and a half’s work involving tow ropes, kind passers by, security vehicles on standby, four wheel drive and a chainsaw.

One of the major problems here is the lack of proper roadside verges, pavements or drainage systems. The rain falls torrentially/tropically and eats into any available crack in the tarmac making ever increasing crevices. Rainy season is worst for pedestrians for whom no provision has been made by city planners and road construction outfits. During dry spells they must walk along dusty tracks by the side of the road, but in the wet the only option is to wade through what has become a veritable quagmire. It’s often necessary for walkers to remove shoes after a particularly muddy patch and wash them in a deep puddle in an effort to stay presentable. If a road happens to be running down hill, you get fast running streams on both sides. Walkers are thus forced to resort to road itself when possible, making it more dangerous for both themselves and passing drivers.

Bumping over ruts and holes in a car dislocates your spine. We all invest heavily in shock absorbers and suspension systems and renew them frequently. Near accidents occur daily when understandably cautious saloon car drivers veer unexpectedly into the centre of the road, straight into oncoming traffic, because they are overly preoccupied by smacking their bumper on a ridge or hole. When road works eventually begin the situation actually worsens. Men and ladies dressed in luminous bibs hold up green or red flags tied to long sticks and wave them and lower them without any attempt at communication with fellow road gang members. Drivers are left to make up their own mind over whether to stop or go, which invariably means that everyone just goes. It’s mayhem. The road workers then leave, having cut carefully drawn out symmetrical holes with sharp edges where once there were more organic, smaller shapes. The road remains in this state, as if carved out by the surgeon’s knife, for a good couple of weeks or so, leaving drivers to search desperately for occasional flat patches in amongst the rough. Finally, the road workers are back and the holes are duly filled in with spades and rollers and what we are left with, after year on year of the same old repair methods, is the ‘cobbled street’ effect, a wildly undulating road surface.

In Tanzania we bought our first car that came along at the same time as the first baby. It was a three door Suzuki Vitara. The backward facing baby seat could only fit in the front, as (ever mindful of safety) behind there was a severe lack of space and seatbelts. Each time I hit a pothole, the passenger door would fly open causing me to gasp and grab the baby’s leg, look through my fingers and hope there wasn’t a car coming the other way. The majority of roads were very good in Dar es Salaam; wide and smooth, all paid for by aid money and donors, but the dirt roads that connected the maze of expat houses were memorably bad. On some occasions our bonnets disappeared, spluttering under meters of water because the potholes were big enough to drive right inside then out again. A painful scraping sound as the underside of the car ran against rough ground was all too familiar.

Money has been thrown and thrown at roads in Kenya for years but that cash has somehow magically disappeared into the ether (or off shore bank accounts). I think that this country can honestly boast having the worst roads in the world. There are so few good roads here, that if you looked at each one on its own merits and then took a mean average, you wouldn’t get much better than a dusty donkey track. Duel carriageways have been planned, talked about and promised, sometimes graders appear and it looks like serious work is about to start but inevitably we still wind up with patchwork surfaces and makeshift solutions. No wonder so many get killed on the roads here each year and no wonder the politicians prefer helicopters.

*5,000 additional cars are currently registered on the roads in Kenya every month.

Flying to the Mara for lunch

On Saturday we flew to the Masai Mara for lunch, then flew back home in the afternoon. How decadent! I hear you cry. ‘It was!’ I answer, but just let me explain. We went along to lend support to a campaign organised by businessmen in Kenya who wanted to take a photograph of as many happy looking business people as possible standing in the Masai Mara with the underpinning slogan ‘Kenya is Open for Business!’, thus passing on the message that tourists et al are safe to return (which they most certainly are). The British Business Association of Kenya, the East African Association and the American Chamber of Commerce (Kenya) clubbed together to raise funds via corporate sponsorship for displaced Kenyans.

To quote from ‘Business Daily Africa’ last week, the BBAK chairman Stephen Mills said:‘In the last two months approximately 200,000 tourism and associated sector employees have been laid off or had their salaries cut. That means statistically, in an extended family culture with up to ten people relying on every worker’s salary, over two million people have been economically disadvantaged.’

I’m not sure how much money was raised last weekend. Before the event there were grand promises made by the organisers of raising millions of shillings for the charitable trust and of many hundreds of people attending to appear in the photograph. In fact we were around two hundred, which in my opinion wasn’t bad and is more than enough people to make a point. We paid a lump sum to the organisers and for that we were flown into the Mara by Air Kenya, welcomed by ululating Masai women, were split into small groups of four or five and taken on a leisurely game drive by banks of smart safari vehicles with open sides or roof hatches, then transported to the recently interior redesigned Fairmont Lodge for a fabulous lunch and the kids had a swim in their icy cool pool. We were very well organised and the whole day went smoothly and if I may say, rather stylishly.

Next were a few short speeches, most notable the one by Nagib Balala, new Minister for Tourism in the grand coalition government, ODM party member and supporter of the now Prime Minister Raila Odinga. He touched on events surrounding the December election and said something that irked like,
‘We had to take to the streets in our fight for democracy. Even I was on the streets.’
‘I know you were,’ I thought.
Immediately crystal clear TV images sprang to mind of Balala in January wearing his smart ‘dry clean only’ suede jacket, joining the throng of demonstrators in Nairobi’s city centre, then diving into a swanky black range rover with darkened windows when the tear gas came raining down. I also remembered the image of Nagib wearing white robes peeping out of the doorway of a mosque in Mombasa fleeing yet more tea gas clouds during another of the infamous ‘days of action’ that were held us in their thrall of terror for six weeks or so. At that point I decided that a final visit to the very nice loo in the luxury lodge was time better spent than listening to political spin. We are all thoroughly sick of politics now.

We posed for the photograph in t shirts covered with the logos of the corporate sponsors and the free red hats that had been allocated to us. ‘Hummer’ rather hijacked the whole thing, by having its logo printed in huge black letters across the front of our shirts, dwarfing everything else. Hummers are becoming so popular here in Kenya that they have almost surpassed Mercedes in street credibility around these parts and that’s saying something! Hummers were also provided to transport politicians, ambassadors and big wigs to the photo shoot. The hoi polloi did not get a look in.

We were happy with the free tshirts and hats. Handing out tshirts and hats is a very popular pastime in Africa as they are produced at every occasion and given out liberally. During the run up and after the election, I worried that the orange ODM and blue PNU shirts would have to be set aside because to wear them might provoke adverse reactions, but now with Kenya’s grand coalition firmly ensconced in power, Kenyans can get good wear out of their free tshirts and hats whatever the colour or slogan and they can be worn with impunity.

Gordon Ramsay - Get Back in your Box!

Gordon Ramsay has announced that restaurants in UK should be fined for not exclusively using local, in season produce in their menus. He's kicked up a bit of a media storm. UK farmers, unsurprisingly, are backing him whole heartedly. Of course they are. But where does that leave the Kenya export vegetable market?

If there was an ounce of sense in the argument that if we stop flying beans from Kenya now, global warming or climate change might be halted - I might understand what Gordon Ramsay was trying to do. I apologise to any readers who have already been exposed to my rantings on the subject - but this is maddening!

Farmers in Africa have a minimal carbon footprint. They recycle everything and own comparatively few possessions, leading simple lives (an example that people in the west would do well to follow). They don't own cars and vans, they don't have petrol guzzling machinery and they use the sun to grow their produce. They don't need artificially heated greenhouses either. The carbon footprint of a UK farmer who receives subsidies is vast compared to their African counterpart who is on the breadline - so tell me why is it so much greener to buy local?

Is 'buying local' in UK from farmers who distribute their produce uneconomically in mini vans, really preferable to buying African produce, packed efficiently onto an aeroplane (sometimes they fill the hold of tourist planes which would otherwise be wasted space). Please, somebody, lets do a carbon footprint comparison? In addition, don't forget the Kenyan farmers need a foreign market to sell to! We are supposed to be helping Africa remember?! Without a foreign market the developing countries will have no chance of attaining wealth.

It would be great if someone would do a bit of worthwhile research and finally settle this 'food miles' debate. The media loves to dedicate so many column inches to it, but they never make conclusions giving people like Gordon Ramsay the chance to wax lyrical on a subject that he evidently has not fully grasped!

BTW - quite funny that the media backlash was the instant discovery that GR's own restaurants are guilty of using non local, out of season produce. I wonder if he feels he has put his foot in his mouth rather? Lets hope so.

The house staff think I'm crazy

We are so lucky to employ house staff here in Kenya and we try to make it a good give and take relationship where we help one another – however, I can’t help thinking that often our employees must think we are absolutely crazy.

The main thing that must drive everyone mad is my forgetfulness:
‘Gladys, have you seen my sunglasses?’ I yell as I run out of the door late for the school run again. Or worse:
‘Florence, do you remember that top I wore once, grey with a yellow flower? Well I have looked and I can’t find it anywhere?’
When I get home Gladys says: ‘your sunglasses were where you left them on the dining table, only they were under the newspaper you put on top of them.’ Or she might say: ‘Madam, they are on your head.’
Florence will say: ‘I found your top.’ I will say: ‘where was it?’ She will say: ‘It was in your drawer.’

A couple of weeks ago I trawled around all the drycleaners in the area in search of my daughter’s school blazer that I was convinced I had taken in for cleaning, only to have Florence then find it (dirty) misplaced in my younger daughter’s cupboard at the beginning of the holidays. On consideration, I did have a vague recollection of putting it there.

The gardener will tell me: ‘We need more dog biscuits please’ or ‘fuel for the mower’ and it will strike me like a bolt of lightning a week later that I have totally forgotten to buy them. The night watchman will ask for new light bulbs and I’ll say: ‘OK I’ll get them now’ then get distracted by something and forget entirely leaving him, quite literally, in the dark!

Sometimes I come home with odd things I’ve bought from the antique auction, like very old dirty books, or a funny old chipped mirror, which must seem strange. Other times I buy things like a pretty fabric, then just put it away in a cupboard and never get around to making anything out of it. I horde newspapers inexplicably and the amount of frivolous things that are bought by me at times makes me quite ashamed. My husband spending all his spare time tinkering with his arsenal of motorised toys in the garage, wearing his oldest, shabbiest clothes surrounded by bits of metal, wood, tools and rubbish must be considered odd, especially as he's doing it for pure pleasure. The big birthday parties with food thrown around by small children and a bouncy castle hired just for them must seem the height of indulgence.

The gardener in Dar es Salaam simply could not grasp the concept of composting and when I introduced the system here because I had learned more about it on my gardening course, it was tricky to explain:
‘Add vegetable bits, but nothing cooked, newspaper, but only if it’s shredded, grass clippings and hedge cuttings, but nothing thorny.’ Etc. etc.
It also took time to explain that rubbish should not be buried or burned in our garden even though this is how it has always been done, especially not plastics. I guess that sadly, once officially collected, that the rubbish just gets burned elsewhere in Nairobi and creating toxic fumes for someone else to breathe.

Hosting the Hash House Harriers (the drinking club with the running problem), when I lived in Dar es Salaam was the strangest sight for those that worked in our house. Whilst a gang of foreigners setting out for a run at sundown may be nothing particularly unusual, the ritualistic drinking, singing in a circle and excruciating ‘down downs’ when we returned must have looked like we were utterly unhinged. In truth, I think we were.

The party we had in our garden at the end of last year ended at three am with a couple of surly lads getting involved in a drunken brawl (the cause of which is another story). I’ve since heard that only the best parties end in a fight and we blamed it on the Sea Breeze cocktail we’d plied everyone with at the beginning that tasted like pure fruit juice. Anyway, as these lads were enjoying fisticuffs in the garden, I gather that the night watchman was following behind, utterly bemused and picking up shoes and valuables that were flying in the fray. Perhaps he was wondering:
‘Whilst I’m trained to deal with armed intruders, breaking up invited guests who are fighting in the garden is harder to handle?!’

Kitchen Plumbing (in Africa)

Following on from my plumbing post, I have just had the joy of washing up (it’s a Sunday) with hot running water! The cumbersome 1980s hot water heater mounted at eye line over the sink has been removed. No more boiling the kettle, or boiling the water heater to wash up and no more thinking; ‘I would change this filthy washing up water, but I can’t be bothered to boil a fresh batch first.’

Last week, the plumbers fitted a little Italian electric contraption under the sink that heats water as it flows through ‘on demand’. Once the boiler was removed and the new taps fitted, there was a long debate over how to connect the small heater it to the mains electricity. The first idea involved taking nine more tiles off from above the sink (six had already been removed for the taps), chasing a channel into the stone wall for the wiring, then cementing it back and replacing the tiles. Having already endured half a day of knocking a huge gaping void into the stonework using brute force with much accompanying flying dirt, dust and noise in order to mount the taps behind the sink, my husband and I vetoed the above and sought another solution.

The whole process of fitting the heater took two full days with not less than three people working in the kitchen at one time. Lots of cups of tea were made. One of the small Italian heaters was blown in the process of fitting because it was run without water in it – so a new one had to be procured. I wonder if we will get billed for that?

We have finished up with; wonky, off centre taps, a kind of jigsaw of broken white tiles behind which are fitted haphazardly together with putty, a pervading smell of wet cement (a lot of cement was needed to fill the vast hole created behind the taps), kind of a white sheen over the floor where the dust has become imbedded into the brick tiled floor and sadly the piping hot water can only be described as ‘tepid’. We have to run the hot tap slowly to get warm water, but if it’s run too slowly it goes cold again. Also, if the flow is too slow the water trickles down the edge of the basin and falls just short of our washing up bowl. However, I am not really complaining – it’s a vast improvement to have warm water ‘on tap’ in the kitchen and I’m thrilled. We wanted to build an extension on our house one day but judging by this small plumbing saga, I’m not now sure that we’d dare risk it…..

Secret Wives in Kenya

The Sunday Nation front page headline last weekend was:
''SECRET WIVES' A quarter of Kenyan men are either openly polygamous or have a secret wife, 16% have a child that their spouse knows nothing about. And 45% say having more than one wife is a GREAT idea!'

Listening to 'Busted' on Easy FM radio station each morning bares these statistics out. It is sheer, compelling voyeurism! The number of spouses (men and women) who suspect their cheating partner's of bigamy is shocking. More often than not they are proved right. Men phone in to trap wives into admitting that they are raising a child from another man, though the wife has always tried to convinced her husband that the child is theirs. And so it goes on in ever more tangling webs of deceit.

It seems like the country is at a bit of a crossroads, where once it was acceptable to have more than one wife, now it is not accepted so much in modern Kenyan society, so second and third wives are kept in secret. The Nation reported that it is often at funerals that the real truth is shockingly exposed. The President's wife, Lucy Kibaki, slapped an official in view of the media when she was mistakenly referred to by the name of the President's lover/other wife at an official function last year. An embarrassing incident!

I do hope that after living here for some time and the fact that I am now thirty five years old (it's down hill from here), my husband doesn't go getting any funny ideas...

Living with the guilt (2)

There have been lots of interesting comments about the ‘Living with the Guilt’ post of a few days ago. It’s a tricky subject and I don’t have any answers, but I agree with ‘Nutty Cow’ that making your own staff a priority, paying as much as you can in salaries and then you take requests for extra help each time on its individual merits. Also, in our experience giving ‘loans’ when asked, then not being paid back a cent is a common problem when you are not directly employing someone and drawing cash for their salaries yourself. As long as you are aware of this when you hand the money over, it’s easier to live with.

After nine years of living in East Africa, coping with the feelings of guilt has definitely not become easier. I don’t want to become so hardened to life that I am comfortable blanking out all the appeals for help that you are hit with every day and the desperate situations that you could afford to help a little with. Perhaps if you live here all your life, you do end up only helping the people that you employ where possible – even just providing employment is a considerable contribution. If you employ a large number of people, just think how many those salaries will be benefiting when unemployment is such a huge problem here? Expats who do not become emotionally involved and leave the country after a short posting without arranging future employment for their staff are irresponsible and thoughtless because falling out of the employment loop can have tragic consequences. Hopefully this does not happen too often. Most people I know go out of their way to secure jobs for everyone they employ before they leave town, however the new employment does not always work out and then there are frantic texts sent round to find a new position for the person in question.

Having said all that; I don’t want to become a total sucker to every sob story either, especially when you see one hawker trying the same old stories on other harassed housewives day after day. I think that ‘Ben’ hit the nail on the head saying that living here (or indeed anywhere in the developing world) means that you have to face many more tough decisions on a regular basis than perhaps you do in the West. It was interesting that he feels that as a Kenyan he has been ‘softened’ by years of living in the UK. I was also interested to read about Jennifer’s similar experiences in India, who said she ended up spending twice the amount of money than her college mates because of being asked more frequently to give handouts than the local students were.

To sum up (and for fear of rambling on) I guess that dealing with guilt is another part of the puzzle that is living in the developing world.

P.s. Talking of puzzles, the plumbing adventures in the kitchen are continuing apace – new post to follow!

VIPs and Motorcades in Kenya

I often see the Vice President’s motorcade passing as I am heading out on the school run in the morning. This comprises of a police car with blue flashing light filled with ‘tooled up’ special police with AK47s, then the VP’s Mercedes with small Kenya flag flying and the man himself (Kalonzo) flicking through the morning papers in the back behind smoked windows, followed by a third vehicle filled with as many plain clothes body guards dressed in dark suits as you can cram into a small saloon car. Sometimes they are hanging out of the windows. I assume that the escort for the President and Prime Minister are equally large if not larger. I think they get to ride in a shiny new four wheel drive Toyota VX or Lexus.

Apparently, when the President went to the Karen club to make a short speech at the end of the Kenya Open golf championship in March, one hundred and sixteen people of the ‘President’s men’ were mobilised to make this possible. There were twenty guys to lay out red carpets, scores of body guards, police, you name it, each one indispensable no doubt!:
‘And at then end they all wanted a free meal and a soda too’ – my insider source said.
This number does not even include the hundreds of traffic police lining the roads to ensure the way was clear for the VIP. I wonder, does Gordon Brown need 116 aides to accompany him whenever he goes off to make a speech?

Whilst Kenya now has a very important President, Prime Minister and Vice President (in that order) who are bickering and bitching over privileges and power divisions; the rest of the country is a little down at heel. Stocks in the shop are looking low, the price of food has sky rocketed, the Mombasa port is clogged with a backlog of containers waiting to be cleared, shop keepers, tourism and safari companies are barely scraping by and struggling to pay their rents, all as a knock on affect from the disastrous Dec 2007 election. This week, the 150,000 odd Internally Displaced Kenyans (IDP’s) are finally being returned home in what is called ‘Operation Rudi Nyumbani’…. And at gun point no less! I read that the guns are for the protection of the IDP’s on arrival back home who are understandably fearful of facing their formerly machete wielding, murderous neighbours of differing tribes. They are reluctant to go back to the scene of crimes committed but there seems no other solution, problems of ‘fake’ IDP’s who have been sneaking into the camps at dawn, collecting daily rations, loafing about then returning home at night, has been rife. Now the thousands of plastic tents just have to go and it is still unclear whether any displaced Kenyans will receive Government compensation for their losses.

Living with the Guilt

When you move to Africa, nobody warns you about ‘the guilt’. It may be pure self indulgence on my part, but I feel horribly guilty living in Africa as an expat because of the huge disparity of wealth, a yawning gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ that hits you smack between the eyes every day. It’s hard to avoid. I must be careful over how I describe this as blog readers may well misinterpret my meaning, but I think it’s an important subject to tackle and very relevant to the expat housewife experience.

When you move to the developing world, you might go about enjoying a lifestyle that’s not dissimilar to the one you left back home in the ‘first world’, often it's a little better, sometimes worse; however the lifestyle of the majority of those around you is always vastly, vastly different. Whether you live in an apartment, a compound of town houses or a lovely old house with a big garden you are confronted by poverty every day. The guilt pangs come when you see a lady bent double carrying heavy firewood; when you pass a man pulling a homemade handcart filled with scrap metal along the potholed roads whilst behind the wheel of your four wheel drive; when you see tiny uniformed children walking to school unaccompanied; when street kids push paper wraps of peanuts at your car window and beggars, some disabled, appeal to you from the pavement with open palms. I'm not a missionary, volunteer, doctor or nurse but simply a 'dependant' on my husband's passport and a trailing spouse, so there are no good works to assuage my guilt.

Most of us find ourselves peeling price labels off olive oil, chocolate, bottles of wine and cheese when we get home because we are ashamed of the fact that these items cost more than the average daily wage. We prefer secure shopping centres because there we are not hounded by (sometimes drug dependant) hawkers who pull tatty pieces of paper from their pocket and spin us a tale of woe and desperation:
‘I need drugs for an illness, here is the doctor’s prescription.’
‘Give me 500 shillings to pay to the guard company who guarantee that I will then get a job. If you give me the money it will change my life.’
The hawkers at the local shops become familiar faces and before long you have heard all the stories before and however much money you give their situation stays the same. While the more canny hawkers try to memorize your children’s names to catch your attention, you might meanwhile gradually become a cynic. Others try to sell random goods that they carry about such as fruits, flowers, an iron or a pair of windscreen wipers and unfairly, it’s easier to say; ‘No thank you, not today’ to them. For an expat woman like me, who is usually preoccupied with manhandling her child out of or into a toddler car seat, carrying bags and trying to ensure her other children are not about to be run over in a busy car park, it is generally not the opportune moment to start discussing finances with a stranger.

Those in your employment will ask you for personal loans, request help with their medical costs and money for school fees. Sometimes you feel that whilst you can put up with: potholed roads, tropical illnesses, extra vaccinations, family and friends living thousands of miles away, less choice of goods to buy in the shops, political unrest, risk of armed burglary, car jacking and street riots, you simply can’t face being asked for more money because your patience has run out completely. If you say ‘No’ to someone who is asking for your help whilst you are in a stressed moment, you will drive off and be dogged by guilt thinking:
‘But look at me, I have so much and I’m refusing to help someone with so little.’
Yesterday, in the supermarket, two very smartly dressed young boys aged around seven and ten asked me to buy them bread – I was bemused.

I suppose the very wealthy Kenyans who live in our area just focus on helping their own family members rather than considering every appeal for money that is thrown at them whilst going about their business? The rest of us perhaps get along by taking each request on a case by case basis. Everyone does their bit to help someone. Perhaps others get hardened to it over the years and stop feeling guilty. Harsh experiences show that you cannot trust everyone and that helping those less fortunate does not necessarily translate to loyalty. My friend who has just paid out for school fees for her house helper whilst wondering how she will pay the fees for her own children asked me today:
‘How do you cope with the guilt?’
I replied:
‘I don’t, even after nine years it’s just always there.’