Tuesday 28 April 2026
Still raining. But not as much.
We have been lucky enough to get a meeting with a VIP within Child Fund Africa, to see if they might be able to help DECIP and Felista.
I have arranged to meet Felista and Jane (marvellous woman) at Corner at 9am. 30 minute briefing then leave for the Child Fund HQ at 9,30. At 8.45 I get a call asking if David can pick Felista up at DECIP. No. 9.30 David and I leave, min us Felista. Google maps is, to be frank, a bit shit in Nairobi. I end up – having spotted the place across a teeming dual carriageway – sprinting across each carriageway and then running down it until I find a place where there is a plank of wood across yet more of the teeming drainage channels of mud.
Mr Child Fund could not have been nicer. Thoughtful and positive. Felista is 40 minutes late, by which time the meeting is more or less over. I am incandescent with anger. To have the chance to meet someone at this level makes a pound and a half of hen’s teeth in a bag look run of the mill.
I will move on.
Around an hour of taxi-ing Felista around later, David and I head to Kijabe Street market, to kick off the restocking of the Emporium-ette of Densely Packed Loveliness and then (in theory) head back to Corner. This journey usually takes around 30 minutes. Tonight it takes four hours. FOUR HOURS. We even have to refuel the Davidmobile at one point. Picture, if you will, the kind of random pile-up of cars that you see on a stock car racing track when it all goes a bit horribly wrong. Now imagine that in slow motion. Extremely slow motion. So slow that the cars and trucks and busses are barely moving at all, just jammed together at odd angles, no sense of any right of way, just miles and miles and miles and miles of vehicles like a game of Jenga played in hell. People are coming out of busses and matatus and just walking, because it is faster. Then it rains. Huge rain. Then thunder and lightning. When we move it is maybe three feet. Every so often David gets out the car to go and tell other drivers what they should be doing. Matatu conductors are everywhere doing a not entirely dreadful job of trying to move things along, while their customers just get out and walk.
Four hours to Corner. What a day.
