Active Again

Back in Nairobi to try to raise some more money for Farmers Own so the bog will be more active over the next 3 weeks

Jocali on Saturday
Jocali is a Swahili word meaning hot sun but it is used in Kenya to describe the roadside fundis who maintain cars on patches of waste ground near petrol garages. These Fundis have usually worked with the big maintenance garages then set up on their own as a business. Usually there is one experienced and older guy and then several younger apprentices. Some of these Jocali are very good and Sam and I visited such a one on Saturday to sort out the Farmers Own pickup which was suffering badly from lack of TLC, especially for the steering. The Farmers Own staff have experienced two bad crashes recently and we definitely need to avoid another one. Also Sam and Laban had been stopped by the police for polluting Nairobi with black smoke from the exhaust. Not sure why they picked on us when just about every matatu and lorry in the whole country has the same problem.
The Fundis drained and flushed the engine, fitted new oil and air filters, new brakes, serviced the steering pump, filled the steering system with hydraulic fluid and welded on a new bonnet catch which had been missing since July. We had been having bad visions of the bonnet flying open and smashing the windscreen.
Now it is much better, I feel more confident driving round Nairobi.

Sunday
I went to East Leigh today to buy some trousers. Here there is an amazing concentration of shops big and small all selling cloth or clothing. There is a maze of unmade streets and now we have the rains most of them are either flooded or a sea of mud, the water smells dreadfully of sewage. The main street is tarmac but is narrow and constantly jammed with buses and matatus, the water in the side streets is constantly being sloshed all over the main street by traffic so the whole place is wet and smelly right now. East Leigh is also a transport hub where long distance buses lorries and matatus set off for the North. The place is so thronging with people and the hand carts which are used to move goods around the locality that traffic is constantly at a crawl. The people and the hand carts have to find a way through the buses and the mud so shopping in East Leigh it is a real obstacle course and quite an adventure. Best to buy 2 pair of trousers one of which should be brown