Police Escort & Sunrises

I traveled on the night bus to Nairobi on Monday night. It’s an eight hour bus ride that’s usually a ride from…you know what. Thankfully, I didn’t get much sleep the night before and the roads have gotten much better en route to Nairobi, that I was able to sleep most of the way (which is so unlike me).

There is one section of the trip that requires a police escort for the buses at night. Apparently, there are thugs/thieves that wait on the side of the road for those poor buses to chug up the hill, where they then make a roadblock, force the people out of the bus or fight their way on to the bus and rob everyone of their valuables (i.e. money, cell phones).

So we waited at the police check before the dangerous section. We were the first bus to be pulled over and the police told our drive that we wouldn’t get a police escort until there were 15 buses to convoy. So we were told that we would have to wait….and the driver said it would take up to about 2 hours to collect that amount of buses. The passengers on our bus (and a few that ended up coming up behind us) started getting angry and shouting. Now this was after only 10 minutes of waiting. People were suggesting the strong men on the bus should go and confront the police…demand that they take those buses that were waiting NOW, even if there were only a few. There were a few people who even recommended sending the mzungu (white person – and that would be ME) out to talk to the police. They thought since I was a white girl, I may have better luck at swaying the police officers. Thanks for sending me out to the lions!!

After much arguing and shouting from passengers of the buses waiting, we got the police escort. There were about 12 buses in the convoy. And as we approached the area of the thugs/thieves, I realized the police escort wouldn’t have done much good for our bus anyway. All these different bus companies went zooming by us as we approached “the hill” and yes, we were the last bus, chugging up the hill, the rest of the convoy far ahead.

As we approached the top of the hill, there were about half a dozen boys that came out of the darkness onto the side of the road. I heard a lady say, “oh no…” softly. The man across the isle from me clutched the arm rest, all of us staring out the window. Excitement, seriously, came over me….I like adventures….ones where no one gets hurt obviously….but there’s something about the risk. Sick, I know!

And as we approached these boys, the only sound you could hear was the sound of the engine of the bus, fighting to get up the hill. The once angry, shouting passengers were quiet. Then we drove by the boys…and they threw a couple things at the bus. Yep, that was it. We heard a couple of ping-ping sounds off the side of the bus but we kept on going. There was relief from everyone as we kept chugging along the road. After that, it was lights out for me. I fell asleep for most of the trip…not a care in the world.

I was to pick up our intern, Andrea at the airport for 6:30 on Tuesday morning. I got to the airport and saw that her airplane was going to be arriving a half an hour earlier. I was happy about that; it meant I could get home faster. But after 8:00am, the plane landing and the entire luggage being collected and still no Andrea, I got a little worried. I called Daniel and he called Andrea’s home. Andrea wasn’t getting in to Nairobi until the next morning. She had given us the wrong date of her arrival in to Kenya. So I went and got a hotel room back in the city and spent the day sitting in a park or in my hotel room, reading a good book that I bought at a book store by the hotel.

In the evening, I wanted to take a shower because at the hotel, in the evenings and in the early mornings, the water is hot, whereas during the day, it’s cold. I went to take a shower but there was no water….nothing! So I went down to the front desk and they said that there was a problem with the water and that it wouldn’t be fixed or ready until about 3:00 in the morning. I had been on a bus all night, all over the place during the day and desperately wanted to be clean. So one of the staff members said that he would have water heated for me and brought to my room in a basin.

About 40 minutes later, he knocked on my door and I opened it just a bit. There he was with a bucket full of warm water. I put my hand through the door to grab the bucket and then he said, “Its okay, I can bring it in for you.” Then I replied, “No it’s okay, I can take it from you. I can carry it just fine.” He tried to insist on carrying it for me; I then said firmly, “I don’t want you in my room. Just give me the bucket.” Maybe he realized at that moment, I wasn’t giving in or that I was thinking the wrong thing and all he wanted to do was be a gentleman and carry the bucket in. Either way, there was no way I was letting a man in to my room, especially being by myself.

It was hard to sleep that night. Being in a hotel room, hearing people walk by your room at all hours of the night, having some European guy outside your hotel room talking on his cell phone, etc. made for a bit of a crabby Meredith when I woke up for 4:45am.

I got in a taxi outside the hotel (the same taxi driver I used when I was in Nairobi picking up my cousin Sarah and also Sean – we both remembered each other. “You’re back again!” he said when he saw me) and headed for the airport…this time knowing Andrea was going to be there.

As we drove out of the centre of Nairobi and towards the outskirts of this massive city, I spent some time talking to God.

And then I noticed it…the sky. It was absolutely gorgeous. It was the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen (and I’ve seen so many in Kenya). The sky was covered in red, orange, yellow, purple and blue, the sun’s rising rays, shining between the colors. It was as if I was looking at a rainbow. It was so beautiful, it gave me goose bumps and tears welled up in my eyes. I was completely in awe of it and then I heard, “This is for you, Meredith.”

I forgot the rest of the drive to the airport; I just stared at the sunrise for as long as I could, mesmerized by its beauty, thankful that I got to experience it’s beauty. I wondered how many other people were staring at this same sunrise and appreciating what they were seeing. I wish I had had my camera to take a picture of it, but a picture wouldn’t have even captured an eighth of the beauty. Maybe it was just a moment of beauty to be shared between God and me.