Category: <span>Essays</span>

Mombasa. What a great name. Mombasa, Mombasa. I like saying it out loud. It conjures up exotic mental images of African sheiks and sultans, of clove tea and British sailing ships. We are packed into a matatu, one of the ubiquitous and careening minivans that the Kenyans use for public transportation. There are comfortable seats for nine people. This morning, we have twelve passengers. My Kenyan friends tell me that oftentimes the matatus hold as many as thirty. I try to imagine thirty sweating people crammed into this Nissan minivan.

So there’s this beastie called a blue centipede that’s about seven inches long and is probably the most horrifying creature I’ve ever seen and it just crawled under the rug…

My Kenyan friend shakes his head when I tell him about my “special treatment” during the visa application process at the Nairobi airport. For the past several minutes he’s been ticking-off all the ways Kenyan government officials extort bribes from the citizenry. Some of the complicated schemes he’s describing have made me suspicious about my own odd treatment at the Nairobi airport, where my wife and I were whisked through immigration without filling out the required paperwork (see my previous post titled Profiled).

The way to the mountain camp is along a treacherous mud path that hugs the inner wall of a river gorge. I creep the Toyota RAV4 along the path, dreading…

They are waiting in front of the house as our tuktuk arrives from the airport, lined up along the driveway in identical poses, backs straight, hands clasped gently at their waists, smiling. Two women and three men. One of the women is wearing a smart business suit, the other is dressed in a housekeeper’s smock. One of the men is in a blue security uniform, one is wearing a high-collared white chef’s uniform, and the third is dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. None of them are sweating, despite the oppressive humidity.

When the car’s headlights flicker and go dark, I panic. “Shit!” I yell. The Moroccan girls in the back seat giggle and echo, “Shit! Shit!”

An insistent lorry is tailgating me. I lean forward and desperately try to follow the tail lights of the car in front. SLAM! We hit a deep pothole and muddy water splashes over the windshield. I fight the steering wheel so I don’t veer into the oncoming lane. Motorcycles with no lights whatsoever crawl on the verge like dark phantoms. People dart between the moving cars. And, it’s raining—raining so hard that with every stroke the windshield wipers fling a gallon onto the curbside pedestrians. What are all these people doing out in the pouring rain in the dark?