Clogged

We returned to Mathare today for some more UW training. Naturally, it took us forever to get there. Literally forever. In fact we're still on our way. I'm posting this from an internet cafe inside our car as we're driving. Obvious falsehood, but it did take a while. Our pastors training went very well, and we even packed a few more pastors into the little church than we had the day before. Again, I was simply astounded by how many people are crammed into the slum, in such horrific circumstances. We've been warned not to roam around alone, because when these people see white faces, they see money, and some of them just can't resist the temptation to attack in hopes of seizing whatever valuables they might get their hands on. Of course this didn't stop me from venturing out a little bit. Art is a dangerous business.

After the pastors training, it was back to the insanity - the school, I mean. Today, the field was packed full of even more kids than yesterday. We did have a little more help, because yesterday we had notified the pastors that they ought to wear more comfortable clothes (they all dress very formally), so that they might participate in the sports camp and get some hands-on training. So it was back to bible stories and athletic drills. In Kenya, basketball is primarily a girls' sport. They call it netball, and there are some variations, such as the lack of a backboard. As expected, there are real basketball teams consisting of men, but Kenyan boys all want to play football when they grow up (football being soccer), so the basketball playing is left to the girls. Today we taught defense, and we had 150 schoolgirls in uniform skirts doing defensive slides on the field, kicking up clouds of red dust. So now my lungs are clogged full of dust, and that in combination with the shouting over the awful din, has caused the loss of my voice.

The drive home was... eventful. We had anticipated friday evening traffic being even worse than it had been previously, but we had anticipated stop-and-go, not just stop. For a while we were inching along next to an old Toyota Rav4 with a spare tire cover that read "The car in front is always a Toyota." "So we have a Toyota to blame for this traffic," I thought. We sat still for over an hour. Literally over an hour. This time I'm not spouting falsehood. Workers were doing construction off to the side of the road with one of those enormous asphalt pavers notorious for their lethargic speed, and they were paving the road faster than we were driving on it. In Kenya, pedestrian traffic and vehicular traffic merge and flow together in an amoebic matrix of mayhem, so we didn't feel culturally out of place getting out of the car and walking around for a bit. Of course, we were out of place, but for an entirely different reason. I decided to walk up to the head of the gridlock to see if I could discover the source. After almost half a mile, I discovered that ahead of us on both sides of the freeway were four lanes of oncoming traffic, just as locked up as our lane. All four lanes in both directions were being diverted onto a two-lane dirt side road running perpendicularly into the city. Shitemi, our driver (the same who came to pick me up from ACK my first night at ByGrace; his name is Stephen, but we already have a prominently featured Stephen, so we normally call him by his Kenyan name, pronounced shhTEM-ee, or frequently, just shhTEM) came running after me to call me back to the van. Dan had taken over driving for the moment, as traffic began to inch along again.

When we finally reached the point where traffic was being diverted down the dirt road, there were no longer any cars headed toward us in our lane, and we had open freeway ahead. We sped down the open stretch hooting (which, coincidentally, is how the Kenyans - thanks to the Brits - refer to honking their horns) and hollering, rubbing traffic's nose in what it had done. Our victory was short lived, however. Ryan commented as we were speeding away from the gridlock, "There's probably a reason no one else is going this way." Sure enough, less than a mile later, our hubris confronted us in the form of a giant impassible pit. The giant hole we found at the end of our section of freeway where construction had not been completed was at least six feet deep, 40 yards long, and spanned both lanes. Dan's one saving grace was that he didn't drive us right over the edge. Good job, Dan. Shitemi reclaimed driving responsibilities and got us turned around to head back from whence we came. When finally facing the other direction, we discovered that we had led hundreds of other commuters astray. A line of headlights in all shapes and sizes shone an accusatory spotlight upon us. Shitemi said it was "Like two blind people leading each other around." That's not quite the expression, but close enough. Since we were leading the pack (proof that the car in front isn't always a Toyota), and now the pack needed to go the other way, we found ourselves once again in the back of the pack. It took quite a while for everyone to get turned around - especially the numerous large trucks that had followed - and so we waited some more.

By this time, we had been on the road for nearly four hours, and had already missed dinner, so we decided to stop for an all-American meal. Pizza. As with my quesadilla and Mike's burger from a few days before, it wasn't as all-American as expected - it was just a little bit different - but it was still very good. They make it with very thin crust, and not much tomato sauce, but there's plenty of cheese (which I haven't had much of lately) and toppings. I had three pieces of steak pizza, two pieces of hawaiian, and one of barbecued chicken (which was the best, but we didn't order a second, and it went pretty fast). With arteries sufficiently clogged and stomachs sufficiently filled, we got back on the road and headed back to ByGrace for another late night preceding another early morning.