Car trouble - sorry can't help you

Nairobi is supposed to be a friendly city right? Aren’t Kenyan’s in general known for being welcoming and affable. Well, unfortunately I was rudely disabused of this notion last Friday. It was 7.00pm in the evening and I was stuck on Uhuru Highway in parking lot type traffic. It was bumper to bumper without any movement for hours and I was listening to music with the car off and the lights on. You guessed it, when we finally moved and I tried to turn on the ignition – click, battery dead! The cacophony of blaring horns that descended on me was deafening. Someone even jumped out of his car and came round to my window to berate me for getting stuck in traffic. A mechanic in overalls and jumper cables appeared like a wraith out of the diesel fumes and began to help me push my car to the side of the road. Nobody would let us pass either as vehicles racing like Formula One cars passed us. No-one wanted to be in that traffic a second longer. Somehow we were able to dodge the cars chicken-like and push the vehicle onto the shoulder. It turns out this mechanic waits every evening at that spot for poor unfortunate souls like yours truly and then helps them (for a sizable fee of course in case you were thinking the man was doing this out of the magnanimity of his heart).

Once off the road, we couldn’t get anyone to help us jump the car. Even a man getting into his vehicle in the parking lot 8 feet away from me said he was in a hurry and drove off. We managed to push the car to a petrol station down the road where we were confronted by a petrol attendant incensed that we were not filling up with gas but looking for someone to help jump the car. The words he used are unprintable; suffice it to say we had to beat a hasty retreat back onto the road. There was bank of taxis up ahead and I had to negotiate another fee (300 bob if you must know) with one of the taxi drivers to simply lift the hood of his car and allow us to use his battery. Was it too much expecting people to go out of their way to help a fellow metropolitan or was I witnessing a general “decline in urban civility”. You be the judge