First night… African Journey Pt. 3

I woke with a start. All I could hear was barking, all around. Dogs, moving around in the streets and roads and constantly barking. It took a long time for me to get back to sleep. I read later on that dogs are a huge problem in Nairobi, especially at night when they travel in packs around the city looking for food, but at the time I was amazed at the sound.

Another first for me was sleeping in a sleeping bag in a bed… Because of the mosquitoes. Or “Mozzies” as they were affectionately called. Before coming to Kenya I’d loaded up on every wives tale there was. Ate loads of carrots, took vitamin B, C and any other I could find. I bought industrial amounts of insect repellent too. The room’s their apartments didn’t have any netting and they weren’t about to buy any when a cheap sleeping bag would do the trick! So before getting into bed the bag was liberally sprayed with insect repellent.

The next morning I woke half expecting to have been eaten alive by the Mozzies but to my surprise I wasn’t touched at all. So there ya go. Sleeping in a sleeping bag stopped the little fellas. I learnt from the girls that on the first few nights they were bitten quite a few times and that one of them came up with the sleeping bag thing by mistake. But it worked for them so they all used it.

I was excited to get out and about, but the girls having been here for a while couldn’t stand my early morning enthusiasm! So I sat down to get some research done and to take a look through the local paper that was on the table to see what was going on in this part of the world…

Well, it was certainly interesting. Corruption committees, the complete application list of 900 people for 20 jobs, and talk of the world cup. One of the most interesting though was a report for a teacher union election meeting. Now in most places I can say with confidence that this probably would be a boring affair that might get a column inch. Here though, during the balloting there had been a bit of name calling which turned into a fight which turned into the main groups of supporters launching the furniture and whatever else at each other. The police were called and then when they couldn’t restore order with baton charges, the army arrived and settled the dispute with tear gas. This would have been headline news back home. In fact it would have created such a media storm that it wouldn’t have been out of the papers for about a week. This article however, only took up the bottom third of the page, and was on page 9.

<< Part 2

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