Drowning in Happiness?

So last Friday I went to the salon after work to have my hair done. Ya’ll know I can’t be seen looking shabby, especially not at 23 ….you know spring chicken age and that.

Anyway it’d been raining for the past three days and like every Kenyan I was quite pleased. Mostly because the rain caught me safely tucked away in a building. This particular evening a really heavy shower is pouring and I’m thinking to myself there is no way ‘m going out in this rain. Eventually the rain lulls to a drizzle and I rush out to catch a mathree.

Yaani I hadn’t even fikad Afya centre from Standard Street and the rain had resumed with a vengeance yaani lightning, pathetic visibility the works. As fate would have it, there were no mats going my way. So here I am getting rain all over my new hair and basically hoping that a mathree shows up before I catch a cold (darn investing… I should bought that car)

Anyway, I’m pretty chatty and soon I’m in conversation with a similarly affected woman named Mercy. She’s just done her hair and need to get home in time for a date with her husband who coincidentally had asked to pick her up from town but she’d insisted on taking a taxi. Now the cab fare which is normally 500bob is hiked to 1000bob. I’m just desperate to get home so I offer to pay half.

Rain is worse now and I hurriedly buy and umbrella from the street vendor and brave the rain. When we get to the cab that had offered to take her home, the guy kataaz (refuses) to take us home. Wow. Bummer anyway we get another cabbie to say yes and start our journey. The jam is a mother and the cabbie decides to take Jogoo road. Jam is bad there too and we are in some water. It’s a fun chat and we talk about having the cab stall on Jogoo road as a result of all the water and how messed we would be. P.s the reason I took a cab was coz I was really pressed to go to the loo and couldn’t wait to get home. We laugh it off but I’m silently saying my prayers.

Since I don’t see the point of going all the way to GM just to come back down msa road to my house I ask the driver to use Bunyala road. Halfway home we are in a river. No kidding about this. The water is almost at the window and I’m thinking this car had better not stall here. Mercy is busy narrating stories about her sons and how a mathree she was in had stalled in a flooded zone and the tout had to carry them all the way to dry land though he charged them 20 bob each. We are in good spirits.

At this point I was really asking myself if Kenyans were really clever. All the time God had held back the rain, we were too busy asking for it instead of rebuilding our infrastructure to cope with the rain. I guess God must have been giving us a chance to prepare for the rain by giving us such a dry period but we were too busy thinking of what we didn’t have to appreciate what we did have.

Still in jam water up to our windows almost and guess what…..The cab stalls…. Worse still….water has sipped into the cab. I mean my feet are in the water, and I’m thinking oh heck. I came al this way to drown in a cab….no way. Some Kenyans can smell money in any situation so they show up to push the cab onto dry road all the while shouting about how it will cost us 1000bob. I’m thinking oh my God this is just unbelievable. Just when I though I could stop spending money. Oh well. While they are pushing us out, the water levels in the car have risen so high it's no longer making a difference that my feet are on the armrest, as my bum is getting wet since the seats are now soaking

Thankfully the guys accept 150Ksh thank God for Mercy coz I woulda parted with that k. I’m not street savvy like most.

I get home a few minutes later. So glad am I to be home that I had forgotten my bladder condition.

I enjoyed the experience but it really got me to thinking, what do we do between what we want and when we get it? Are we preparing ourselves to be able to accommodate it or will we be overwhelmed like Nairobi’s drainage system?