This is a picture of some wall sockets at my organization I am working at. If you look closely at the plug-in on the left, there really is no plug-in. There are only 2 wires going into the wall socket. Not very safe...at all. This is a really obvious fire hazard, but when I mentioned it to others I received a very typical Kenyan response, "It's ok! No problem! Not a fire hazard...very safe!" with a big smile.
I think within the first 2 days of being in Kenya, I realized that safety is not a concern at all. At the gas station right by my house it is common to see cars fill up their tanks with their motor running while the driver smokes a cigarette. Another day at my organization, I heard crackling sounds from the wall sockets with sparks flying but nobody seemed to even notice (again, when I mentioned this, I received the typical Kenyan response, "It's ok! No problem! Not a fire hazard...very safe!" with a big friendly smile). Another time, I was holding on for dear life on a motorcycle going 60 mph because I was on the very edge of the seat of a motorcyle carrying 5 people. I suggested that we probably should take 2 motorcycles, but again, the response was, "It's ok! No problem! It's very safe!"
Here is an up close picture of the wall socket above. As you can see all it is is 2 wires plugged in to the wall. One of the wires came out so they asked me to put it back in.
This reminded me of the time last week when I went to the barber (he gave me a horrible haircut-he gave me a fade-here's an example if you don't know what a fade is: http://v3.kevincarrollkatalyst.com/images/uploads/fade_Full.jpg) and when one of the wall sockets stopped working he jammed a screwdriver into the socket to get it going again. I asked him if that was safe and the response was, "It's ok. No problem. Very safe," with a big huge smile.
This is a picture of the van we took to Malindi. Malindi is a resort town 2 hours north of Mombasa. It is popular with Italian tourists. This is a result of a lack safety precautions. In this van, the driver (the driver was Ana, the Swahili teacher from my first post, she owns a travel company) thought it was a really good idea to go over a huge rock. Everyone (all of my fellow interns participating in my program) else thought it was an awful idea. Especially since we could hear the bottom of the van SCRAPING against the rock. After we went over the rock, we could all hear that something was wrong with the axle and the tire. When we mentioned this to Ana, her response was, "It's ok. No problem. We'll be fine," with a huge smile. The wheel came off 30 minutes later while we were on the highway.
I don't think Kenyan people have a sense of consequences. They truly live in the now. Coincidentally, the person that taught us that Kenyans have no sense of the future was our driver, Ana, during one of our Swahili classes. She taught us that future tense only recently came in to the language. She told us one of the reasons Kenya is impoverished is because there is no planning for the future. I think she proved herself right.
The van at a distance. The wheel that fell off is shown too. The pile of leaves are the road flares. Each time a car blew by the leaves would be swept aside and the driver would have to start a new pile of leaves so people would try to avoid hitting us.
After we waited for a while, we decided to take public transportation to our destination. We took a public bus (called a matatu-I will try to talk about these in a later post), which was about the same size as our van except that it had 23 people packed in (like 5 people were clinging to the van from the outside, riding on the bumper) to the van that comfortably sits 9 with very loud reggae music pumping through its sound system. Some guy brought some rotten fish aboard and it smelled awful, but the only people that seemed to notice was us white people...
The damage done to the road by the axle of our van. There was about a mile long scrape mark in the road from when our tire came off.
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