Last Friday I took a day off and took the opportunity catch up on some sleep and on some washing. Then in the afternoon I went with Gary into Nairobi town centre: he wanted to collect his residency card for his one year working visa and I wanted to have a look around.
I stepped off the matatu minibus in downtown Nairobi to discover that in getting off I'd scrapped my foot against a jagged bit of metal and I now had a bleeding gash on my left toe. Gary wasn't having much luck either. He collected his residency card, which had already been delayed by 3 months due to various bureaucratic delays, only to find that it is due to expire in two weeks time, and not in August as it should have done. He was not best pleased.
Depsite this unauspicious start, I had an enjoyable afternoon in the centre of Nairobi. My first impression of the city is your average big bustling metropolis with loads of cars, buses and people jostling each other to make their way from a to b, but maybe it will grow on me with time. I bought some football socks for my first Jesus Cup game the following day and we met up with some of Gary's German volunteer pals.
To get home in the evening, I got on a matatu which was headed towards Karen. When it was my stop, the bus didn't actually stop but just slowed down enough for the two women ahead of me to hop off gently. When it came to my turn, I hesitated for a split second, thinking that the bus was really going a bit too fast for me just to 'hop off' onto the roadside. Then I decided that I'd better just go for it before the bus moved off any quicker and I missed my quote unquote stop.
Unfortunately for me, at that exact moment, the matatu driver decided that he wasn't going to bother waiting for this dithering mzungu and put his foot on the accelerator, hard. By a staggering coincidence, hard is also the word I'd used to describe how I hit the tarmac, along with other adjectives such as scraping and painful.
The bus drove off and I was left lying on the road, the headlights of the traffic shining into my eyes and the blazing of horns in my ears. I limped off to the side, assessed my condition (hurting) and then did the last thing in the world that I wanted to do at that moment: get on another matatu to get me back to Bosco Boys.
Fortunately, I had been wearing my rucksack when I fell which soften the blow and although I had various bruises and pains down the right side of my body I was left relatively unscathed from the incident. Even so, I'm going to be much more careful next time!
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