I saw this yesterday when I was walking around Ngong Road, a stretch Land Rover limousine:
Besides the fact that this is ridiculous… it seems I always see something interesting when I’m on Ngong Road.
Stretch Land Rover Limo
Money
Corruption in Our Midst
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…
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.
All the 40 Bobs…
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!
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!