Introducing Nairobi (Sept 10, 2012)

Introducing: Nakumatt Junction, your American-size grocery store carrying all the worldly goods you can think. Want cheese? Got that. Tupperware? A non-stick frying pan? Check, check. Electronics? Yup. Camera, smartphone, Lindt & Toblerone? Honey, we carry it all. And it’s all nested away inside a giant mall, complete with a food court, movie theater (with like 12 different movies playing!), casino, bakery, clothing shops, and more.

I’m slightly overwhelmed. Not because this is unfamiliar – I mean, I did just arrive from the U.S. today, but because this is unfamiliar to me in Africa. Nairobi – probably the biggest city in Eastern Africa – is like a miniature New York City. I swear, you could find almost anything here. For a price, certainly, but you can get it. It’s not entirely NYC though – it’s NY with an African flair. You pass a trendy shop displaying clothes and bags made from kikoi fabric… the food court offers chicken n’ chips with passion fruit juice. It has the familiar hints of Africa and the familiar hints of America, but somehow seems so foreign to me. It’s Afro-metropolitan.

Introducing: a traffic jam, brought to you by your friendly Nairobi bus driver! Traffic is something I am quite familiar with, having grown up in Los Angeles. However, the traffic in LA pales in comparison to the traffic here. I will just give you two numbers: 10 & 3. The first is the number of miles I had to go. The second is the number of hours it took. Yes, in retrospect, I should have walked.

But them I never would have made a new friend. I sat down next to an older British gentleman who had been living in Nairobi and working on project development for the last ten years. We meandered into a discussion on wind energy. I was of course very excited about the prospects of wind energy in East Africa. In fact, I was in the middle of a book about a young boy from Malawi who, after being forced to drop out of school because he couldn’t afford school fees, poured through books at the library and eventually figured out how to build a windmill out of scraps that he fished out of the junkyard and lit up his house and eventually his entire village!  (check it out: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind) But alas, my new friend informed me that the renewable energy industry was not the shiny pot of gold that I dreamed it to be in Africa. The bottom line: no one wants to pay for it. Investors just aren’t willing to harness the wind – he has a friend who has been trying unsuccessfully for five years to get a wind farm going just North of Nairobi. Sigh. Sounds reminiscent of my research into recycling plastic bottles in Tanzania several years ago. I’m holding out hope for green development though! “So where is the money?”, I ask. Construction. And raw minerals. Hm. I liked the windmill.