Oh, who do I think I'm foolin'? I've spent the past few posts whining about existential angst, when all my psycho emotional challenges of late are directly related to these three yellow slips of paper.
They are all package delivery notices from my friend Simone, and the first one landed on my desk at Nation Centre in June. As I've mentioned, Simone is one of the dear friends and family who've pledged to support PCEA Muniu Primary, the school I've helped adopt near Nairobi. Remember? I've been so caught up with travel, and work, and navel contemplating these past few months that I'm totally guilty of putting that project on the back burner.
The good news is that all your generous financial contributions helped keep the school open and serving lunches for students during the August break. For most of those kids who live in an Internally Displaced Persons camp, that school lunch is the only meal they get each day.
Anyway, back to these infamous yellow slips of paper. Simone's big, loving heart led her to gather up all of her own two boys' old clothes and toys and books, box them up and ship them to me 7,000 miles away. When that first box arrived, I trotted over to the appropriate Kenya Posta office, innocently thinking I could just flash my ID, pay a small fee and take it home. After waiting about an hour for somebody to locate the box, I was directed to a rather large, scary woman wielding a junior machete of sorts. She gutted the box like it was a Lake Victoria tilapia and ordered me to take everything out and count each piece. Then she directed me to a man with a calculator who spent about 10 minutes sizing me up to determine exactly how much he could get away with bribing me for, jotted down that figure and then sent me to an office in another room.
The woman in that room typed some figures into a computer, printed out a form and then led me over to a window. That's where she leaned out, pointed to a building about 2 blocks away and advised me to go there, pay the fee, and then come back and pick up the package I'd just endured the rigors of the damned to locate.
I swear to GAWD, It took me 3 days and two bottles of wine to recover from that mind-numbingly pointless exercise. I mean, it almost made me long for the days when a trip to a US Post Office was fraught with the ominous risk that Postman Pat would snap and spray the lobby with automatic weapon fire. An instantaneous death seemed so much more preferable than standing in another long-assed line in a hot, airless bank building, paying the bribe and then coming BACK to where I'd started from to begin with to pick up the freakin' boxes.
So you can understand why I put if off. And put it off again. Then, for good measure, hid the slip and tried to pretend I'd never received it. But when I started emerging from my mid-life crisis cocoon recently and decided it was time to check on my PCEA Muniu kids, I dug out that slip from June and vowed to find or make the mental fortitude required to descend once more into the 9th Circle of Kenyan Postal Purgatory.
Guess what? That's when two MORE slips from Simone arrived! So last Thursday, I went through the first part of the drill for those two boxes. The machete-packin' mama took pity this time and just weighed the parcels after she'd savagely hacked them open, instead of making me remove and count every item. My bribe payment was calculated, I picked up the two necessary forms, and vowed to brave the payment queue early one morning this week, retrieve all three boxes and then move on with my life.
But once again I'm forced to ask, "Who do I think I'm foolin'?" When has life ever been that simple for me? Just today, I learned that the controversial Commander of Kenya's infamously troubled police force has just been named Postmaster General. Oh great. Now, if my papers aren't in order, or some counter guy doesn't like the way I look, I can expect a Special Delivery, Grand Coalition ass-whoopin' along with those packages.
"I'm just sayin', dawg....."
No comments:
Post a Comment