Yesterday, we had off for midterm break and so my kids asked for playdates. Like our old school, HOPAC draws students from a great distance all around the city, and so sometimes these requests involve quite a bit of effort. Although Charlotte's friend lives within a 2 minute walk of our house, Josh's friend lives around 20 minutes away (without traffic, which is never a guarantee here!)
Thankfully, I made good time, I wasn't stopped by police, and the car didn't stall. Although it was a hot day, there was cloud cover and so I was only sweating a medium amount in our car without working AC.
As I was driving him to and from his friend's house, I was reflecting on all the unique things that I saw outside my window, trying to see them through new eyes:
* A goat drinking from a drainage ditch
* A group of about 10 men, walking purposefully against traffic, carrying tire irons and machetes (thankful for no stopped traffic at that point!)
* A police checkpoint where all the police were sleeping under a tree in the shade (as I said, it was a hot day)
* The Million Hairs hair salon
* A dump truck without a safety gate, leaking dirt and small chunks of rock as it drove. Disturbingly, the back was painted, "Born to Kill" along with pictures of Che Guevara (he is really popular here for some reason) and a Muslim fundamentalist (possibly Osama bin Laden). I kept a little distance from the back of the truck, as I didn't want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
* A bus painted with the words Obama Trans. There's also another bus painted as Air Force One (which I always thought was an airplane...)
* Street cleaners - which here mean actual women brushing dirt from the streets with large brooms in the hot sun, with only a couple of flimsy traffic cones to shield them from speeding cars.
* A variety of roadside vendors including the watermelon guys who have a huge pile of melons with one cut on the top to show what the insides look like. As with many things here, there are about 4 vendors of the same thing in a row, as opposed to the diversification strategy found in the West.
* A cow grazing in a field of garbage.
* Women in brightly-colored kangas carrying unbelievable loads on their heads.
And then there are the smells:
* The roadside area that sells manure in small bags.
* The unique scent, possibly of sewage, that permeates the road called Africana.
* Thick black smoke emanating from a truck in front of me (there are no emissions laws here).
* Burning trash in piles along the road
The sounds:
* Trucks blaring music combined with religious propaganda (these are in Swahili, so I'm never fully aware of what they're saying...I hear "God" "Satan" and "hell" for sure.)
* The unique sounds of African street music (to get an idea, listen to Paul Simon's album Graceland)
* Bleating of goats as they scramble up the hillside alongside the road.
* The call to prayer as I passed a mosque.
I thought about how different this drive is compared to a 20 minute drive in the U.S. Way more stressful in a sensory-overload kind of way, yet also so many more interesting things to observe. Although I'm trying to enjoy the moment and embrace the culture, there are definitely some days where I'm nostalgic for the bland efficiency of Route 287.
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