for Kenya, my friends in Letterkenny had been joking that I would either be eaten by a lion, speared by a Maasai, die of hunger, be shot by guerrillas, or succumb to some tropical disease. I dismissed it all as nonsense born of stereotypes. They were nearly right, even more so if they had mentioned road accidents. Kenya was indeed more dangerous than I had envisaged. They were also well aware how my cavalier attitude tended to attract trouble’s attention everywhere I had ventured in the world up to then.
The ‘open highway’ of McBride’s song represented one of the greatest threats to a long life in Kenya. A typical journey on a Kenyan main road between cities is heart-stopping. It could involve three vehicles abreast; two overcrowded buses passing on either side of a lorry (on this occasion with me standing on the back), and two other buses coming towards us at breakneck speed. Add in a giant crater or two, a few people walking on the road and some donkeys in the middle of it all, with the bus driver lighting himself another cigarette from the one he is already smoking. The buses were all brightly painted with slogans like ‘In God We Trust’—and I would be thinking to myself, whatever about God, I would not be putting much trust in the driver anyway.
In the second half of October in Kitui, I had the experience of being in a thirty year old Lada taxi, with nine other people somehow squeezed inside, driving up a deeply rutted dirt track towards Sr. MM’s. Suddenly the door was flung open, leaving me hanging out for about thirty seconds—it seemed like an eternity—before the driver even noticed.
Sr. MM was not there, but a blond thirty-year-old man with an almost incomprehensible Cork accent and a pronounced limp opened the door to me.
‘Howya, Kevin’s the name.’
Introductions over, we nicked a few bottles of Tusker beer from Sr. MM’s storeroom, and sat chatting for hours on the wicker chairs under the welcome shade of the verandah. Kevin told me he had been a social worker for the past two years in the slums of Nairobi.
‘Sr. MM is like my Kenyan mother,’ he explained. ‘I come to Sr. MM’s to get away from the hubbub of the city.’
‘I come to Sr. MM’s precisely to get a bit of hubbub,’
I replied.
I was delighted to have met another young Irish person, and the conversation quickly switched to the Premiership, of which I had heard nothing at all. When I asked him what the slums were like, he regaled me with a flurry of stories in the singsong cadences of Cork. He was a volunteer through the V.M.M. organisation in Ireland, and he spoke a lot of sense about what volunteers like us could realistically achieve. The next day, he invited me to stay with him and see the slums for myself. With my curiosity whetted by his stories, I readily accepted his invitation.
The following weekend, the last weekend of October, was my first weekend in the capital, Nairobi,—or ‘Nai-rob-you’ as it is disparagingly known. It is home to nearly three million people and counting, the largest city between Cairo and Cape Town. It is officially the most dangerous city in Africa, and with good reason. On our arrival just after dark, as Kevin and I were opening the door of the taxi outside his building, we witnessed a carjacking at gunpoint about a hundred feet further down the road. The car sped off, its tyres screeching.
More recently, things are improving on that front, but you still need your wits about you. I met one Dutch volunteer in the city centre that weekend who had been slashed in the back with a sword by a random African in broad daylight.
‘A mob nearly stoned my attacker to death before the police escorted him away,’ he told me.
Early the following morning, I was introduced to a friend of Kevin’s named Kyalo, an articulate, well-dressed twenty-five year old Akamba who grew up in Kibera slum but had gone to university and educated himself out of it. He took me on a guided tour on foot
The ‘open highway’ of McBride’s song represented one of the greatest threats to a long life in Kenya. A typical journey on a Kenyan main road between cities is heart-stopping. It could involve three vehicles abreast; two overcrowded buses passing on either side of a lorry (on this occasion with me standing on the back), and two other buses coming towards us at breakneck speed. Add in a giant crater or two, a few people walking on the road and some donkeys in the middle of it all, with the bus driver lighting himself another cigarette from the one he is already smoking. The buses were all brightly painted with slogans like ‘In God We Trust’—and I would be thinking to myself, whatever about God, I would not be putting much trust in the driver anyway.
In the second half of October in Kitui, I had the experience of being in a thirty year old Lada taxi, with nine other people somehow squeezed inside, driving up a deeply rutted dirt track towards Sr. MM’s. Suddenly the door was flung open, leaving me hanging out for about thirty seconds—it seemed like an eternity—before the driver even noticed.
Sr. MM was not there, but a blond thirty-year-old man with an almost incomprehensible Cork accent and a pronounced limp opened the door to me.
‘Howya, Kevin’s the name.’
Introductions over, we nicked a few bottles of Tusker beer from Sr. MM’s storeroom, and sat chatting for hours on the wicker chairs under the welcome shade of the verandah. Kevin told me he had been a social worker for the past two years in the slums of Nairobi.
‘Sr. MM is like my Kenyan mother,’ he explained. ‘I come to Sr. MM’s to get away from the hubbub of the city.’
‘I come to Sr. MM’s precisely to get a bit of hubbub,’
I replied.
I was delighted to have met another young Irish person, and the conversation quickly switched to the Premiership, of which I had heard nothing at all. When I asked him what the slums were like, he regaled me with a flurry of stories in the singsong cadences of Cork. He was a volunteer through the V.M.M. organisation in Ireland, and he spoke a lot of sense about what volunteers like us could realistically achieve. The next day, he invited me to stay with him and see the slums for myself. With my curiosity whetted by his stories, I readily accepted his invitation.
The following weekend, the last weekend of October, was my first weekend in the capital, Nairobi,—or ‘Nai-rob-you’ as it is disparagingly known. It is home to nearly three million people and counting, the largest city between Cairo and Cape Town. It is officially the most dangerous city in Africa, and with good reason. On our arrival just after dark, as Kevin and I were opening the door of the taxi outside his building, we witnessed a carjacking at gunpoint about a hundred feet further down the road. The car sped off, its tyres screeching.
More recently, things are improving on that front, but you still need your wits about you. I met one Dutch volunteer in the city centre that weekend who had been slashed in the back with a sword by a random African in broad daylight.
‘A mob nearly stoned my attacker to death before the police escorted him away,’ he told me.
Early the following morning, I was introduced to a friend of Kevin’s named Kyalo, an articulate, well-dressed twenty-five year old Akamba who grew up in Kibera slum but had gone to university and educated himself out of it. He took me on a guided tour on foot
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