8:33pm As our matatu pulled up to the matatu flipped over in the 10 foot ditch, my heart skipped a beat and I only thought of the worst. But thank God that everyone had escaped safely and many people were already taken to the hospital. The car was on its side, the driver side landed on a huge rock that had smashed through the window, it looked like the driver would have been seriously injured. The observers pointed out to me the driver sitting on the side of the road holding his leg. I went over and talked to him, he said his chest hurt but he had received pain medications from the hospital. “[the car] just slipped off the road,” he said. That could’ve been any of us. There are usually 8-14 people in those matatus. But this is just an average day here on these roads. I was kept awake all night long listening to funeral music. You know the noise that kids make when imitating an Indian call, hand over mouth – that’s the sound that people make when someone dies. We heard it a lot.
We went to Kisii today (the 3rd largest city in Kenya). The matatu ride there was hilarious, we stopped probably every mile or so whenever someone was on the side of the road and needed a ride. The conductor hangs out the window yelling at people as we drive by. We also stopped many times at police checks (this consists of the matatu pulling over, a police with a machine gun walking around the vehicle seeing that there are way too many people shoved in there with not enough seatbelts, and then the driver paying off the policeman to avoid a ticket, and us driving away). It’s a very corrupt system, just ridiculous.
Rachael takes us to the Kenya/Tanzanian border so we can see another country. People are casually strolling past the guards into the bordering country. But of course they stopped us, 4 muzungus. And because we didn’t have our passports on us so we weren’t allowed to cross. They told Rachael that she could go but we would have to stay behind. I looked around us and saw a police with a machine gun in one hand and a long black rubber whip in the other hand (as if the gun wasn’t enough).
