No hurry in Africa

They must be kidding, or maybe they contracted jungle fever. I do not understand it. There is no hurry in Africa. What Africa are they talking about? Maybe they are right, no one in Africa is in a hurry to handover power.

He was sited next to me. At the time, I was quite excited of the Huawei IDEOS phone, my first experience to own and play with the Android mobile phone operating system. I was seated just behind the drivers compartment and the engine of the Nissan 14 seater matatu, playing Angry Birds on my phone. On my left, he sandwiched me, a paper bag on his lap, next to the window, while she sat on left, next to the door. To have more space , I had lifted my feet and stepped on the top of the engine.

We alighted from the matatu in a hurry, it had stopped on the road, just on the entrance to the bus station, yet the entrance and most of the bus station was clear. They  could have dropped us off inside the bus station, but that was the past. My main concern was to cross the road  in a hurry before City Council of Nairobi askaris apprehend me for alighting in a non designated area. I had barely crossed the road when it hit me, my pocket was lighter. I was sure I had not left it at the office. I slowed down as I debated whether there was any point going back to look back for it. 


I had been in a hurry , I had jumped onto the next matatu without walking to the bus stop which was almost a kilometre up the hill. Near the Aga Khan Hospital, the matatu got stopped by a police officer, the driver, in a hurry, had picked up passengers on the road, and not the bus stop. We had to alight and catch another matatu to town.

A tout was calling for passengers to board  his matatu, and he only needed one more, me. The space was on a seat behind the engine. He asked the girl seated next to the guy with the paper bag to  switch seats so that I could be sandwiched between them, the girl was alighting soon. As I played with my phone, I had noticed the guy on my left exchange phones with the guy behind me. The girl  had alighted at the bus stop. That is why I was not surprised that I could not trace the matatu I had come in. It had been a setup. 3 men had made a quick Ksh 1700, a leather wallet and my identification documents. Probably the girl  was one of them , or she too had been a victim of a hurried back.

The next time, he was running next to the matatu as it went round the round about. He pushed open the window, but it took longer. He lashed out my hand, but all he grabbed was my wrist. I had heard him opening the window and the phone had moved the phone to my other hand. The matatu sped off, a missed opportunity to snatch a phone off a moving vehicle and make another quick buck.

This time round it was closer. She stood looking down, waiting for me to pay her dues for doing my laundry. I pretended to look for the money, but I knew it had been in one of the trousers in the laundry. It was not in the trousers, I had checked. Then I asked her. She admitted taking the money, her full dues, and pretended that she was actually asking for more - the clothes had been more than the usual. I wondered whether she had done it before, whether it was a reaffirmation of the thoughts on some Mondays when I was sure that I could not account for some money over the weekend. She lost her job, in a hurry to make a quick buck, which I suspected her husband demanded a share of.

Today it happened, well, it happens every day to many other people in Nairobi. A driver had stopped at the round about, but decided that the approaching vehicles were a bit slow, and gunned for the exit. The result- a collision with an oncoming vehicle that the driver could not see. Now they have to spend time at the scene, the time that they were trying to save. The blocked lanes would now result in traffic pile up.

Reminded me of last week when I had looked up from the novel I was reading to see that the road was clear. I was therefore surprised when the driver immediately stepped on the brakes. I was more than shocked as I watched a saloon car swerve by, driving on the wrong side of the road at high speed. As policemen tried to catch up with the vehicle on foot, the driver hit a pedestrian. A mob joined the chase, as the driver soon found himself in a dead end as he could not get past oncoming vehicles, ending up in a trench. He escaped on foot as the mob set upon the passenger, who was soon rescued by police. The car itself was a different story, in less than a minute, all accessories inlcuding tires  had been vandalised off the car. Makes you wonder how fast the people of Ngara can change a vehicle's tyres. The driver had probably been in a hurry , evading traffic, but ended up injuring an innocent pedestrian and benefiting those out to make a quick buck.

Matatus will not admit that they cause traffic jams in their effort to save time by stopping on the road, rather than off the road to pick passengers.

Buildings that are being built in a hurry occasionally collapse, trapping the builders.

All this happens in Africa, where there is no hurry.

God is not mocked

"God is not mocked", this were words told by a black man, time and time again. I had them in the 4 years I spend in High School. I don't think that I ever thought about them. Maybe one of the other 1100 students in the institution though of the words that Geoffrey William Griffin kept saying.

Recently, though , the words have come time and again, as I read about world happenings, happenings that mostly involve scientific creations that have gone wrong. It is occasionally in the news, well learned scientists come up with a fail proof invention, then it fails. At times it takes us years to understand how it could have failed. At such times, i wonder, is God showing us that no matter how much we harness nature, we can never overpower it?

The Titanic is one such case, the story of an unsinkable ship. Or maybe we should blame it on the marketers. Why? well, guys in the technology industry will tell you that marketers have the ability to distort facts. They over sell the product. That is a story for another day. As for the Titanic, it was sold as unsinkable, probably misleading the crew into speeding in a sea strewn with ice bergs. Well, the Titanic was not unsinkable, but was designed to be hardy enough to withstand a normal disaster, where 4 of its compartments could be flooded without the ship sinking. The crew was driving so fast that when the ship hit an iceberg, the ice berg bend the hull and tore through 6 compartments. It's even sadder that there were ships nearby which ignored SOS requests from the Titanic, the first one to respond was 4 hours away.

Then there is the bewildering case of Air France flight 447 from Rio De Janeiro to Paris. Before the night of May 30th 2009, its had been unheard of for a whole passenger jet liner to disappear off the sky, but it did happen. More bewildering was that the remains of the plane could not be found, until exactly 2 years later, when the mostly intact remains were found on the floor of the Atlantic ocean. While information from the plane is currently under analysis, most experts are blaming the accident on what they call 'pitot tubes'.

Pitot tubes are small holes around the plane's nose that are used to measure the speed of the plane. The planes computer uses the information to fly on auto pilot. For this case though, its is suspected that they got blocked. In the mid Atlantic, water does not behave the way they taught you in science class. Instead of freezing into solid ice, water droplets remain suspended in the air as a liquid, and will instantly freeze into ice when they come into contact with a solid substance, like when they get trapped in the nozzles of a pitot tube. If you defined this as an answer to a question posed by Kenyatta University lecturers, most of them will mark you wrong for not giving what's in the marking scheme, no one likes a smart ass.

When pitot tubes get blocked, the plane disengages and can not be flown in autopilot - it can't tell its speed. It s interesting to note that once a jet has reached cruising altitude, it becomes difficult to manually fly it. There is a narrow window of speed where the plane can fly - a bit fast shifts the weight of the plane and it flies out of control, a bit slow and the plane stalls in mid-air and drops out of the sky. At cruising altitude, it is almost impossible not to fly on autopilot. It is been mulled that Air France 447 might have entered the 'coffin corner' when it's pitot tubes got blocked, and that the pilots may still have been trying to take over when it crashed.

 Interesting enough, Air France is been blamed for putting a monetary value to life - it was known that pitot tubes had a problem working in ice, and the manufacturer had developed a newer model that worked better in icy conditions. Before the crash, it is claimed Air France had decided it was 'too expensive' to replace the pitot tubes with the newer model. After the crash, it replaced all the old models across its fleet.

Then there is the quite safe nuclear energy. I do not believe nuclear and safe can be used in the same sentence.

Chernobyl was one such instance. The USSR had declared its atomic energy industry as safe, and was quite proud of it. Chernobyl was one safe power station. As the story goes, one of the reactors was under going scheduled maintenance - ironically, a test to check its safety limits. Then hell broke loose, the test went out of control and the nuclear reactor became an atomic bomb, and one which blew furiously. The explosion was so intense it created a new mineral called chernobylite. That was not even the problem, Wikipedia says that the clean up of the radioactive spill out was the biggest civil engineering task in history, involving more than 250,000 workers who all reached the radioactive limit for their life time. More than 5000 metric tons of sand, ballast and boric acid was used to cover the exploded reactor.

The Red Forest, is a pine tree forest next to the Chernobyl
plant whose explosion and resultant radiation turned
vegetation red  (image : http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu )

As a result of the accident, Prypiat - a city of about 50,000 had to be evacuated. Infact, the USSR had managed to keep the incident a secret until workers in a Swedish Nuclear plant , 1100 kilometres away, were discovered to have above normal radioactivity on their clothes. The clean up involved more than 500,000 workers, a majority of who risked and lost their lives in the clean up. Other than working for up to 40 seconds a time to clean up the mess - the 40 seconds were still proved to be over exposing them to radiation, there are cases including that of 3 others who had to swim in radioactive water to open blocked valves to prevent second explosions. 350,400 people had to be relocated, direct and indirect deaths are estimated to be between 4,000 - 200,000 by various institutions. Contaminated land from the fallout is estimated at more than 162, 160 kilometres squared, including wild plants , wild boars as far as Germany and domesticated sheep as far as north Ireland which were all found to contain above safe limits of radioactivity in them.

Who said that people die for their country in wars?

Then there is the recent and ongoing incident of the Fukushima power plant. Unlike Chernobyl , Fukushima had newer, designed-for-safety reactors which were up to 3 times smaller than the Chernobyl one. Japan had anticipated earthquakes affecting the plant, and had built this in to the safety measures. No one ever anticipated that nature can be so merciless as to follow up an earthquake with a 10 metre wall of water from the ocean. Mind you the Japanese had factored this in with protective sea barriers which I think went up to 3 metres, but 10 metres was unheard of, till recently.

A cow in the Fukushima evacuation zone. Is the cow lucky
that it will never be slaughtered, or unlucky from radiation
exposure? (image - Wikipedia)

Nuclear plants are a source of power, but also require power to cool them. Power runs from secondary locations in case of a failure. Back up generators kick in in case of total power failure. The earthquake resulted in the reactors shutting down as they are planned to, but the tsunami damaged the reactors, secondary power backup lines and the generators. The reactors , with nothing to cool them, heated and started melting down, a step away from a Chernobyl like explosion. The Japanese moved in first to control the situation, and they are still mitigating it to now. This has not stopped "steam explosion" from occurring with a tenth of the amount of radioactivity released by Chernobyl escaping the Fukushima plant.

Science- it can never foresee all eventualities. It looks like we can only tame nature to a certain extent.

We still need to believe and trust in God, there is nothing that we will ever do that will exceed his ability.

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The Girl Next Door

It was about 8 O' clock, and the matatu had one passenger seated next to the divers seat, and the conductor who was seated in the matatu, probably tired or masquerading as a passenger in a bid to make the matatu not look empty. Outside , was a girl leaning along the chips shop, furiously blushing as a man about my age talked to her. I sat on the second row from the driver's seat and the engine, I have never liked seating behind the engine.

I missed her age by almost 10 years. You cannot blame me, she was dressed in a flowing jeans skirt that went down to her ankles, and though I can not remember the top, it was either a jacket or sweater. Not the manner you would expect a 17- 18 year old to be in. In addition, her handbag was not the the large type that was common with ladies in their early twenties. It was just the right size that a handbag should be. Probably a lady coming from work, it skipped me that it was Labour Day, the workers holiday. I was anxious to get home, to get to bed, and been in a matatu this late was usual on my work days.

I opened the car window as the tobacco smell wafted in my nose. I found it strange that no one was smoking, not the lone passenger and there was no one around the matatu smoking . The Matatu was not getting any fuller, it would take a while. A while later, a woman came in , with two children and luggage in the form of a small gunny bag, which was carried on the shoulder of a man accompanying them. They sat behind the engine, as the mother instructed her children to share one seat, and the man bade them good bye till the next school holiday, asking them to study hard. The man did not accompany them. No sooner had they settled down than the girl  alighted. She did not go to the nearby alternative bus stop, she went the opposite way, and stood a few meters from the vehicle, probably waiting for someone.  Just as the woman and her children were finishing settling, a Somali man came in, carrying a 10 litre jerry-can that once had cooking oil.

The yellow jerry can was placed next to me, the lid screwed on with a piece of polythene. It strongly reeked of kerosene, as the man pushed it under my seat, and moved in to sit behind me. He was followed by a teenage girl and a younger boy, probably his son. The girl caught most of my attention. Not withstanding her wavy hair under her loosely tied scarf, she was a beauty, this one would grow into a jewel. I was still ogling at the girl when she came back in, the girl who had alighted. This time she sat next to me.

I opened the car window, slightly. "Am I affecting you?" she asked, as she fumbled in her handbag, in the process exposing a matchbox. "No," I responded, as I explained to her it was kerosene smell coming from somewhere. The Somali man confirmed that the jerry can had kerosene, as I debated whether it presented a risk big enough for me to alight the matatu.

This matatu had kersoene as part of luggage on the carrier

Just over the weekend, a matatu plying the Nairobi - Mwingi route had been engulfed in flames along the Thika - Garissa highway. Reports indicate that passengers saw fire running down from the vehicle's carrier. They had run out of the vehicle, a woman throwing her baby out of the window. They stood aside and watched as the  vehicle  and the luggage on the carrier, including a jerrycan of kerosene and what another Somali man said was a stack of United Sates dollars inside a suitcase were reduced to a shell. For this reason, I am not comfortable with travelling alongside with fuel in a vehicle, unless the fuel is in a fuel tank. Even the ferries down at Likoni ferry petroleum tankers alone with no other vehicles and passengers across the channel.

I decided to stay the risk. I could jump outside the window. The girl was now applying lotion up and down her arms. She then asked if I could smell cigarette off her, and I replied negatively. The girl having taken liberty to smoke the ice out, I closed my copy of Purple Hibiscus  in anticipation of a conversation.

I asked if she stayed alone. She stayed with her parents, but why did I want to know. Its because of the great length to which she was taking to get rid of the cigarette smell.

Her parents did not know that she smoked, she had been smoking since her first year in secondary school. She did know whether the wheezy touch to her voice was as a result of smoking or not, smoking from an early age made it hard to distinguish.  Her parents knew that she drunk, they had been called to school several times when she got caught. She did not smoke often, but she was afraid of becoming an addict, a chain smoker like some of her uncles.

She did not want to stop smoking, the feel of the cigarette in between her fingers , the feeling of smoke as it went in, and out in slow puffs, was ecstatic. Once a while, they came, the headaches. Smoking one stick made them go away.  About three days a week she smoked, and every week, she drunk. She had not graduated to hard alcohol, and did not plan to, but she had an urge to drink weekly.

She never smoked at home, and she never stayed for long without smoking. A long break and the urge would come in hard, so hard that she have to smoke at home, something she had to avoid.

I asked which friend of hers had introduced her to smoking, research shows that most smokers catch the habit from their friends. Her boyfriend had introduced her to smoking and drinking. He had not insisted that she try cocaine and the other hard drugs he did. He was a first year student at the University of Nairobi then. A few years later, the police had caught up with him, trafficking drugs, and he swallowed them. Unluckily, they packaging burst in the intestines, and he overdosed to his death. His death did not stop hid father from dealing drugs, and occasionally calls the girl, offers her anything she wants, she declines, but she takes the cigars.

I tell her that she was lucky not to have tried out heroine, it takes no prisoners. One shot of heroine is one more heroine addict. Once, and you never stop feeling the urge.

The matatu arrives at our estate, the drug dealers estate safely, the estate where the drug dealers son once lived. We are lucky to arrive without the matatu bursting into flames. I no longer have to struggle to whisper as I talk to her, there are no passengers to over hear us, the kids behind with the Somali man are no longer catching snippets of our conversation.

She limps out, and continues limping. She fell off her heels, five girls fell off their heels as they rushed and jostled to be the first to buy cigarettes at a shop. It's a game they normally play, today they had to buy spirit for their bruises.

Did I know Allan? No I did not. Allan was a neighbourhood youth in the estate, who overdosed to his death, she tells me.

Her parents would be disappointed if they found out that she smoked. "What do you want, " was the dreaded question her father would ask.

By the time she has finished telling the above, we are outside her house. Her father is home, his SUV is parked in the drive way. She bumps into a friend who then takes over the conversation.

A couple of steps and am home.

She is the girl next door, in the quiet neighbourhood with barely any crime incidents.

This is a true story.