Stranger no more

Nairobi is one city I tried to understand since I joined NMG in January as a trainee and still I’m going out of the city green but lighter.

The streets are a crossword word puzzle. Why the complication? There is a lot of mathematics, what with most streets being parallel to each other. And the names are way too many even for the shortest of streets-which are numerous.

Jeremiah my best Kenyan Lab buddy thinks some streets should be merged like Banda and Mama Ngina but then again he says they help combat over crowdedness in the city.

It’s amazing but even the residents have not mastered all streets. There are way too many corners which just tire the mind to master. Only advice I ever got was to cram the two major streets Moi Avenue and Kenyatta Av that is if I desired to find my way back to Norfolk towers-my residence. Advantageous though is that I have been staying near Nairobi University and Central Police Station.

Let’s get to the details of how I got misplaced with a colleague in this very big city. It was after a visit to the tax collectors’, KRA that the streets decided to give a colleague, Flavia and I an unwanted tour which left us lugubrious.

We only needed to find Central Police Station, Nairobi University and Nation Center, not necessarily in that order. One minute we were on Haile Selassie Street, the next we were in between streets and with each step, we got deeper into the other dirty side of Nairobi. I forgot to mention that Nairobi is the cleanest town I have ever been to save for Kigali but if I tell you that I saw the dirtier side then know that I did get lost.

As we went deeper, we felt like it was Kampala as there were many vendors with different commodities. That was a joy because we never thought we could get to see a market place in Nairobi. Consolation was in buying some cheap shoes though they weren’t off budget but the anger dissipated.

To cut the story short, we snaked through the long alleys and in fear of being robbed we asked few people for directions. The few that we talked to made our already unplanned tour even worse because all they could do was speak in Swahili. However much we declared our adherence to the Englishman’s language, the locals never wanted to subscribe.

It was a real horror which reminded me that I had to learn the language because it is hard to have a lengthy conversation with a Kenyan without them routing into Swahili. Well, now after 10 months in the city “ninaongea Kiswahili vizuri.”

We spent two hours in that other side of Nairobi until a kind English-Swahili speaking lady told us to keep going “juu” to Nairobi University. The experience came in handy when we went to explore Ngara market from where we did excessive shopping. We had to take notes of the streets and matatu numbers to our destinations.

For sure I am going to miss shopping from Ngara where almost every item is KSh100.

I have just discovered the street on which we got lost after trying to conjure mental intelligence to my rescue but I had suffered temporally amnesia when it came to that particular part of town.

But come to think of it, I should have acted like the journalist Media Lab has groomed me to be and written down the street names but all intelligent thoughts had escaped me.

If I had gotten out of Nairobi after four months, I would have continued believing that it is indeed the half London of East Africa, but at least the myth of robbery is gone, I can no longer call it Nairobbery – maybe the city of big money corrupt officials.

Now Kampala is calling – I have to heed the summons.