Musings on a Matatu

Rural Kenya is cohesive. As Debbi commented 'the worlds are so scrambled in the city, it's hard to know which you are in.' The first and third worlds collide, juxtaposing development and poverty, luxury apartment towers and odoriferous slums, Prados and bodas (with equally abominable drivers). The contrast in jarring. The poverty which is Reality for most of the world's population attenuates to statistics by the time it penetrates the economic bubble of the US. Here the bubble usually ends at your car window.
I'm constantly reminded of my privilege, and the distance between my existence and that of the children yelling 'mzungu!' as I pass. Nairobi is a city of over 3 million, without the systems that make a city livable in the US. Sure there's healthcare, electricity, and water (most of the time) and people usually urinate all in one place. But from road drainage to banking systems things don't just work. So everyone hurries, clawing their way through traffic and bureaucracy (with no help from laws or shared understanding). Governance is superior to most in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it still seems to exist primarily to line the pockets of the Mkubwa at the top. And when it's in no one's best interest to work within the broken system, they waste their striving like the donkeys pulling at 90 degrees from each other while hitched to the same cart, and thereby causing a five kilometer jam on the new superhighway.

Outside the city the world is different. There's perhaps a greater gap between me and the pedestrians I bike past on the 'rough road', but I know what to expect. People are working, eating (or not some days), laughing (especially at me), and passing through time at the same rate. But unlike me, 'they are on friendly terms with time, and the thought of beguiling or killing it does not enter their heads.'* I suspect the concept of seizing it is similarly foreign. And it fits together: the clear air, hot sun, strong bodies. Life is hard, the rains haven't come in two years for some people, but there's always a way. Relatives help out, school fees are eaten (classes will be there next year), cows are sold, and life goes on.
Until it doesn't. Some parts of Kenya are experiencing severe famine, and people die. But somehow that fits too. African culture does not share the crippling western obsession with continuing to breathe. Death is sad for the people left, but it's a part of life. And life means hanging hand-washed clothes on the bushes before walking to church along dusty roads. It's the driver of the motorcycle carrying 150 kgs of charcoal, piled on the back and hanging off the sides. It's the mama who tills, plants, and weeds by hand, in hope of a harvest to provide for the child tied on her back throughout the process. And the older brother who sits watching the family livestock isn't pining for the end of the day, he is living.

* From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, the pen name of Karen Blixen, an early settler in the Nairobi area