Kenya

I saw this yesterday when I was walking around Ngong Road, a stretch Land Rover limousine:

Stretch Land Rover limousine on Ngong Road
Stretch Land Rover limousine on Ngong Road

Besides the fact that this is ridiculous… it seems I always see something interesting when I’m on Ngong Road.

Kenya

Today, while driving up Wayaki Way to work, I saw a matatu driver reach out his window and wedge a folded up 50 shilling note under his door handle; he was anticipating being stopped at the semi-regular police traffic stop near Mountain View (about 10 kilometers outside of Nairobi).

As I imagine it’s quite hard to picture, I took a few minutes to recreate the scenario in the Sarit Center parking lot…

Alan with a 50 shilling note
Alan with a 50 shilling note

50 Kenyan Shillings is only about 75 US cents, but if you imagine that the cops stop hundreds of people in a day… wow. And that’s only at that ONE check point, out of hundreds of other ones operating on any given day in Kenya.

Kenya

A few months ago I was given a forty-shilling coin as part of my change in the grocery store. Cassandra hadn’t seen one before so she was really excited about it. Because they’re not very common we’ve started a little tradition of saving them.

At first it was just a joke… but now, just a few months later, we’ve amassed sixteen of them!

Stack of forty-shilling coins
Stack of forty-shilling coins

Unofficially known as the “ka Lucy” (little Lucy, after President Kibaki’s wife), these things were printed to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Kenya’s independence.

Update (March 14, 2012): We now have 23 of them!
Update (August 30, 2013): We now have 59 of them!
Update (October 27, 2015): We now have 103 of them!