So it turns out the refugees down the street are refugees and they do sleep there on the side of the road. Call me naïve, but it wasn’t always obvious to me (and nobody has explained any of this to me). I’ve seen bunches of them come and go pretty regularly since I moved to this part of Nairobi a year ago—a handful cooking dinner here, a few in sleeping bags there, but never for more than a couple days at a time. The latest bunch has got to be at least twenty people, though, and they’ve been there for at least a month now.
In the last couple of days I’ve accidentally talked to a few of them… I’m just so used to bumbling along Church Road talking to everyone that it was bound to happen eventually. The first guy was from Burundi, and the second guy was from Congo. This would definitely explain why they speak Swahili. And whattaya know, I speak Swahili! Enough, at least, to figure out what’s going on.