Nairobi long rains

Are supposed to run March to May. This year, they're late. The rainy season is just hitting full momentum.

Heavy showers. Silver drizzle. Thunderstorms. For the past 48 hours, it's either been raining, or about to rain. Or it's just rained, and you pick your way through craters filled with water, gasp at sudden splashes from trees, gutters, awnings.

I love the rain. I love the pre-rain and post-rain scent of the air and earth. But the rains in Nairobi slap you in the face with the realities of urban poverty. Schoolchildren pick their way through roadside ruts of sticky mud and running water, under cheap, flimsy umbrellas, trying to keep their uniforms clean. You know they will shiver in their damp clothes half the day, in draughty classrooms. The slum areas are knee deep in water. The dirt roads that are the only way around them are rushing rivers.

Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city and main port, has had 5 continuous days of rain. The town centre is waist-deep in flood water in some parts – cars have been buried, houses have collapsed.

This morning, we drove past a man carrying a sick woman on his back, stumbling through the mud.

You daren't stop, says my mother. However sorry you feel for them - you can't take the risk.

I want to protest, fiercely. But what do I know? Everyone in Nairobi tells me I'm naive, lulled into a sense of security and trust from the luxury of living in the west. Everyone has a carjacking story, a mugging-at-gunpoint story, a rape story.

I'm angry. At the 40 years of abuse, corruption, neocolonial kleptocracy, that have left Nairobi without infrastructure or the most basic support systems for most of its population. There is NO FUCKING REASON this city should not have functioning drainage systems, efficient affordable public transport. NO reason most of it's residents shouldn't be earning decent livelihoods. No reason anyone should live in a shack which floods every rainy season, walk miles to work or school through mud, raw sewage, pools of mucky rainwater.