Engineers Without Borders is a great organization to work for. They provide comprehensive pre-departure training, mostly good medical benefits, and lots of support while you are overseas. In addition, you get to attend two regional retreats, which are always a highlight of people’s time overseas. During these retreats, there is an event called the Night of Inspiration. This is where the fellows gathered from all over East Africa, both Canadians and local East Africans in our Kumvana program, are encouraged to share something with the group. Could be a song, could be a poem, could be a story, could be a game, could be anything that you feel like sharing. At the second retreat I attended in July, I decided to share a series of short stories outlining some of the silly or funny things that happened in my first few months in Nairobi. I decided to write some of them down for here the entertainment of my readers. So without further ado, I give you an excerpt from my Tales of Nairobian Nights:
1) The Night of Napkins
When I first moved to Nairobi, people stressed the relatively high risk of getting robbed in this city a great deal. The reality is that as long as you modify your routine a little bit, and don’t be an idiot, Nairobi is easily navigable without being mugged at every corner. After 10 months here, I have only been robbed once, and that was by a pickpocket at a very popular concert. But rewind to my first couple of weeks here, and I was still jumping at shadows in every corner.
On this particular evening, I was still living at the office before I had found a place to live. The office is quite near a supermarket, maybe a five minute walk down lighted, major roads. It was getting dark, possibly about 630pm, and I needed to go to the store for some things. Still being nervous, I asked my Kenyan bosses whether it would be okay to walk the 275 meters by myself. “Absolutely not,” they said, “it wouldn’t be safe!” Feeling discouraged, I gazed out our office windows at the dusky sky and decided to be rebellious. “Screw it,” I thought, and walked to the store anyway. Five minutes later, I arrived at the establishment unmolested and went about my business.
I was feeling pretty proud of myself as I exited the store, even though it was full dark. I had survived the walk there, and saw no reason why I shouldn’t survive the walk back! But first, I needed to take out some money from the ATM and put it onto my Mpesa. (For those unfamiliar, Mpesa is mobile money on your phone. No need for a bank account, just give cash to an agent and it will magically appear on your phone, where you can use it to pay for anything from an egg on the street, to your rent.) So I go to the ATM and take out 40,000 Kenyan Shillings (400$ USD), since I had to pay for both rent and deposit on the place I had found to live. Little did I know at that point that there is a limit to how many shillings you can put on your Mpesa, and I had reached that limit in my zeal to have enough money available for first and last month’s rent. Suddenly I was stranded on the corner of a street in Nairobi, in the dark, with 30,000 shillings of money in 1000 Ksh bills. Now I suppose I could have ordered an Uber to take me the 275 meters home, but that would have felt like Nairobi had won. Instead, I investigated the contents of my shopping bag and realized I had a package of napkins that I had purchased for the office. Therefore I did the completely logical thing: I gently opened the package of napkins and started interleaving bills of Kenyan Shillings between them. That way if I got mugged on the way back, I could say, “of course sir, take my wallet. Just leave me my shopping! Especially these napkins, with which I will wipe away the tears of my shame.” Seemed like a completely legit route to take, but luckily I never had to test it, arriving back at home with no one trying to steal either my money, or my napkins.
2) The Night* of Linguistic Confusion
*Didn’t actually happen at night
After I had been here 4 or 5 months, we got a new roommate at my place, a very nice guy from New York who was here for a few short weeks on an internship. It turned out that the place he was working was quite far from the house, especially in Nairobi traffic, which can be brutal. After his first commute took him 1.5 hours to travel a few miles, I suggested that he might want to call a boda, ie: a motorcycle taxi. Motorcycles are kinda exempt from traffic laws here in Nairobi, and therefore can go around all the traffic that plagues normal 4-wheeled vehicles. I gave him the name of a guy who I had inherited through another roommate, but with a warning. “If you tell this guy that you are in a hurry, he will get you there. Fast. Very fast. So be careful what you tell him.”
Sure enough, the next day my roommate gets home looking a little wild-eyed. I ask him if he was okay, and he said, “So I called your boda guy, and I was quite late, so I told him that… and he drove like a crazy man! I kept on yelling at him to slow down, and he just kept going faster, even though I was yelling in Swahili!”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. Martin could be fast if you ask him to, but he wouldn’t ignore you if you asked him to slow down.
“Yes!” my roommate exclaimed. “I kept on yelling ‘pole! pole!’ but he wouldn’t slow down!”
Cue Cale sitting on the couch literally crying with laughter. Eventually my tears slowed enough to explain that in Swahili “Pole pole” means slow, whilst just saying “Pole” means sorry.
I saw Martin the Boda Driver a few days later, and asked how the drive with my roommate went. “Yes, he was very nice,” said Martin. “A very polite man. He kept on apologizing to all the people we passed!”
3) The Night* of the Hawk
*Also not actually at night, but it just sounds better that way…
EWB invests in a number of ventures around Sub Saharan Africa and, at time of writing, four of them are in Nairobi. My colleagues from Kwangu Kwako are working to build sustainable housing in informal settlements. They are located a few kilometers away from my office, and sometimes we meet them for lunch. One of my long standing goals for my time here is trying all the different possible lunch places within walking distance from my office. There are some that are cheap, like the little shop behind my workplace that sells rice and beans and chapatti for 60 cents American. There are some that are random, like the woman who makes delicious local food out of her living room, and you just need to somehow know that you can walk into this random house and buy food. But probably the best bang-for-your-buck is this place near KK’s office, The International Leadership University. Turns out their cafeteria sells very tasty and very cheap Kenyan food, and I understand fully why they constantly grace that campus with their presence. On this fateful day, a month or so after arriving in Kenya, we met the KK crew at their office to walk over to the University for lunch. Cedric, one of the EWB Fellows at KK, had to turn back to get their phone at the office, a fact which his colleagues seemed surprisingly happy about. The reason became clear as we got to the University. “Cedric’s not here,” said Chris happily, “that means we can sit outside!” Myself and my colleague from FarmDrive looked at him in confusion, until he explained that Cedric didn’t like to eat outside, because he was afraid of the hawks. To be fair, there are a lot of big hawks in Nairobi, but the fear seemed a bit silly, so we all had a good laugh about it, and went to get our food and sit outside on some benches. A few minutes later, Cedric arrived to see us sitting about eating our lunch in the sunshine. With an annoyed glare, he fetched his food and joined us outside, flinching every time a shadow passed over the sun. We joked with him good naturedly, teasing him a bit about his insistence that the hawks were out to get him.
Then, suddenly, out of the blue, a giant hawk came down and DIVE BOMBED Cedric. It ripped a piece of chicken right out of Cedric’s mouth and flew away. It happened so damn fast that we barely realized what was going on before it was over! One second Cedric was eating chicken, the next he was just sitting there with a stunned look on his face, asking what the hell happened, with just a single small feather gracing his upper lip as proof that the thievery had happened. Needless to say, we all thought it was the funniest thing to have ever happened in the history of the world, and it was a LONG time before any of us were able to stop laughing long enough to be capable of physical speech. Then the REAL miracle became apparent. Somehow I happened to be taking a picture just as the hawk was coming down, and Google sometimes does this thing where it captures an image right before or after you actually take a picture and offers it up as an alternative. Usually it’s to grab a picture right before or after someone blinks, but in this case it captured the craziest picture I might have ever taken. The quality is very bad, because of the lighting, but here it is in all of its beautiful glory:
Needless to say, despite being completely vindicated in his fear of hawks, Cedric never ate with us again.
I hope you enjoyed these random tales of Nairobian adventures. I have a lot more where these came from, and maybe I’ll start going through them here when I get a chance. In the meantime, stay safe and so will I.