That infamous traffic!

I think Nairobi is supposed to have dreadful traffic. I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard people complaining. I still think the worst I've experienced, though, is the "leave three hours to get to the airport" in Bangkok.

So last night we headed out to dinner, a bunch of folks from the workshop piled into a couple cabs. Me and my colleague Mark, a prof from USC and his wife, a public health professor from Kinshasa, and a woman in the aid community in Zambia. And Ouko joined us later. It was 7ish, and rush hour was full upon us. So was darkness. (One thing about being basically on top of the equator; the days are pretty darn short when compared to summertime in Seattle.) The cab took a detour off the main road to avoid traffic, a quick right turn across incoming traffic (left side of the road drive in Kenya), up what looked like a residential road that climbed a hill. And there were two men with guns (as Mark noted, very large guns, looked like machine guns) waving the car over, and there were spikes in the road. Traffic police, I assumed. The cab driver started to pull over then thought better of it, maybe not wanting to risk a possible "fee" request. So then he pulled back into the road and accelerated. The man with the machine gun ran after him, yelling something. The cab driver laughed and yelled back, waving his arm. The police officer was impressively persistent, reaching into the car through the open window to grab the driver as he manuevered the car back on the road. The cabbie shook him off and drove, still laughing. The debrief Mark got in response to his questions was somewhat unsatisfying. Were they really police or not, he wanted to know. Consensus is that they were, and that they were there to help catch carjackers (common in Nairobi), but that they might have been looking for a salary supplement as well.

At dinner, still curious, I asked the public health professor what the conversation consisted of during those few moments. Apparently the police officer was telling the driver to stop or he would shoot. The driver was laughing and saying go ahead then, and shoot.