Matatu entertainment
on Kenya VSO (Kenya), 15/Oct/2009 05:41, 34 days ago
Looking back over my blog I see that I have written a lot about the matatu in Nairobi, perhaps this is because I spend a lot of time on them. Last week I was very unlucky and set a new record of more than three hours for my trip home, which included a scrum to get on the bus at all when it finally arrived. No one seemed to know what the cause of the gridlock was, one suggestion was to blame the President, I am not sure if this is fair but if you want the top job then be prepared to be blamed for everything.However, one part of the matatu experience that I have not touched on yet is the‘entertainment’, Some matau have a DVD screen and they nearly all have a sound system of varying quality, normally I can experiment to adjust the volume by tilting my deaf ear towards the speaker, as to what they play various adjectives come to mind, none of them complimentary, not to my taste.Fortunately the hard disk of my computer contains a large stock of music files, ones that I have chosen.In the mornings it is normally a local radio station which styles itself as‘number one for soul and great hits’, I am not a huge soul music fan and on top of that comes the repetitive daily patter of the dj. The one time that I got on a matatu blasting out ‘I love rock and roll’ it was enough to make my day .The full bus sized matatu usually display a notice saying‘No preaching, no hawkers’. However, I have had experience of both and they do liven up the journey continuing their efforts in spite of being greeted by a wall of indifference.One way of passing the time is reading and I have just finished a Star Trek paperback . For the genre it was well written and diverting as Kirk and the crew cruise the galaxy. However, reading it here in Nairobi what struck me was how absolutely not alien the alien bad guys were. Apart from an odd skin colour they thought and acted in a completely familiar way. There were no translation problems, no cross cultural misunderstandings, no problems interpreting emotions and motivations… heck there are human societies more alien this one!