Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Welcome to Africa column: Road repair

I believe we live on the worst street in Nairobi. The combined surface area of the potholes, each wider across than your arm, is much greater than the surface area of remaining road, which is also a combination of cement and dirt. Add the speed bump that’s there (really unnecessary now), and coming and going from home, we get quite jostled if we don’t drive this stretch slowly. For most trips we make around town, we can drive along at a normal rate of speed on fairly good roads. But when we get close to home, we have to slow way down to a snail’s pace to navigate the last eighth-mile stretch or so. I joke with Sarah that we live close enough to her office so she can come home at lunch, but it takes just as long for her to drive most of the few miles to the office as it does to drive the last few hundred feet before our gate.

So we are always delighted to see when a random person takes the initiative to fill in some of the potholes on this stretch. Sarah pointed this out to me today, as she was the first to drive this road since a couple of repairs had been made. Only…our hopes we dashed to discover that the material used to fill in the holes is broken bathroom tiles, which I think creates a whole new risk of driving on this road – one of getting a flat tire on a shard of tile. Not only that, but this tile came from our neighbor’s bathroom that was demolished last week. Thanks - that's so neighborly of you to fix one problem only to create a new one!

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