Street names and structures

I had thought I was fairly at ease with organically developping, just busk-it situations, but 18 months in Kenya has shown me my GANTT chart project-plan, structure-bound shadow side. 

Filling in the employment forms at BigCorporate I was startled by the last section.  Please draw a map of how to get to your current address and to your permanent address in your village. Please include directions from Nairobi, and local landmarks.  Well, though not a great map drawer, I was ok with the Nairobi one. But decisions galore for the UK address - should I start at Heathrow airport, or at Welwyn Garden City train station?  Was this testing my visiospatial ability (as in a recruitment test) or was this so the security team could find me if I ran off with the office printer?  The latter I realised. But in this country largely without streetnames, you do need a personalised map to find someone again.

Picking SecondBorn up from a playdate some 30 minutes drive and at least 10 miles away through highly residential areas, I asked the hosting nanny where to go.  'Well, there isn't a street name, but basically you drive straight on from here on till you find the acacia tree, and then you turn right.'  Aaargggh, will I ever clasp SecondBorn to my bosum again? 

Friends give directions spliced through with potentially moveable instructions: 'Then you turn left at the house with diamonds on the gate. You know, just after the duka selling rhubarb.  You follow the road down the hill through the coffee plantation, and then turn where the matatus are being washed.'   My early days here were full of chatter-brain thoughts... what if all the rhubarb has been sold.... what if the matatus don't need washing today... and now I have settled into a more laid-back Kenyan 'unknowing', try it and see, coupled with a new wild U turn in my driving technique.

And 'Follow that taxi' isn't the useful catch-all it is in the films.  Many are the times that visiting friends have leapt into a taxi at the airport, and then had to phone for directions by installments as the taxidriver drove to the end of his mental map.  A bit like an airtraffic controller, talking in a difficult landing, one has the sense of visitors circling, getting closer, 10 minute gap by 10 minute gap, until at last they stagger in, scared and harrassed-looking.

It's not just for the foreigners that these things matter.  My mate K who helps out at two local remand and children's homes regularly returns with bloodfreezing stories of children lost and found.  Of pre-verbal children who've been lost and don't know their way home.  The homes don't have the money to advertise the child's location, so parents may search for several weeks till they find their child again.  And, sadder still, of other children who've been abandonned.  The dire impact of lack of - or poorly publicised - formal social security structures.  Another school mum who helps out at the local school describes the pressures on the kindly headteacher. 'I've got to find somewhere for this child to stay.  An orphan, arrived at school, but with nowhere to stay the night.'  And also the untold stories, of those families, themselves on minimal incomes, who scoop up a child in extremis and add her to their own brood. No fanfares, no fostering allowance, no forms filled in, but impressive, loving, long-term kindness.

Crossing Waijaki Way, the hell-for-leather Topgear dual carriageway is always taking your life in your hands.  To get to our local shops you have to accelerate down the slip road (avoiding three matatus stopped dead on the sliproad), and immediately cross three lanes of fast speeding traffic, to take the next right sliproad off, up a hill, doing a U turn to join the speeding fast lane of traffic in the other direction.  For one week last year there was a family, mother and five year old child, living in the corner of the right hand sliproad off the dual carriageway.  They sat crouched on the road, where anyone could hit them, on the passenger side for the oncoming cars, so a passing driver couldn't even slip them some money.  In the UK, seeing anyone doing that, let alone with a small child, I'd have phoned emergency social services.  And here? Well here I passed some money to a friend's housekeeper who walked that way twice daily, to pass on.  Hardly the same level of support.

Here there's rarely someone to reliably refer things on to. Uncover a problem and its all yours, till solved.  I was chatting to a Kenyan friend recently who works in education.  He described children phoning him regularly at midnight to tell him their problems and difficulties.  'I do my best, I try to help, but in the end I have to focus on the things which are happening when they're in my care.  The rest, well I could spend all my time on this alone.'  A loyal, dutiful Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.
And then there are the policies which MEAN well, which seek to do good in this land without reliable computerised systems, but which don't seem to get their focus quite right.  BigCorporate has an employment policy which blocks staff from relationships with or marriage to another staff member.  It's ostensibly to prevent collusion or fraud, - but is near impossible to enforce I'd guess. Friends talk of partners who are married, who have children together, but arrive at work separately and use different surnames, to maintain the single fiction.  Surely more risky to have policies under which many people have something minor to hide, than to incentivise honest openness, and to monitor behaviour?

I've been trying to open a business bank account, and again, the banks' attempts to keep their funds squeaky clean are tortuous.  One bank, - which insists on a major balance kept in the account and refuses overdrafts - insists on an introduction from another business account holder at that branch.  Surely if I were a pirate or a money launderer, this wouldn't really be a problem, I'd guess I'd have a money launderer friend who would help out.  But as a relatively upstanding foreigner, with bank accounts here and in UK, but who doesn't really want to use school mum friends to underwrite a business account, well no, nothing doing.  You can't use the funds in account 1 to guarantee account 2, you have to have a letter from an account holder.  Hard to see how this protects anyone, but there we are.

To here's to street signs and social workers, credit checks and rhubarb sellers.... and to those exemplary Kenyans, who go out of their way to help others, in the absence of the labour saving tools and formal state-sponsored support structures we have in the West.