The Craziest Taxi Ride Ever

Since coming to Africa I have had some pretty crazy taxi rides. For example, when the car's battery is dead and the driver has to push the taxi up a hill and then coast down before the car starts (Ethiopia). Or when the driver runs out of gas (Uganda). Or when the driver proposes marriage to you while he is driving (Uganda). Or when the driver drives around the city 4 or 5 times looking for the place he swore he knew exactly how to get to (every country). However, a couple days ago I had a taxi ride that topped them all.

Logan and I took the 14 hour bus ride from Kampala to Nairobi. I wanted to stay in Nairobi for the Kenya Course I will be taking through the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, but Logan wanted to return to Ethiopia where he manages a home for orphans who are HIV positive. There was a taxi driver named Kevin who helped Logan find a truck that would take him from Nairobi to Ethiopia. The taxi driver met us at the bus station and I asked him to take me to my friend's house (the house where all the Columbian nuns and priests live). So we get in the car and start driving. After about 30 seconds Kevin gets a phone call and answers it. All the way in the passenger seat I can hear a woman yelling at him in Swahili on the other end of the phone. Kevin responds in an equally agitated manner, also in Swahili. I can understand certain phrases such as "simu gani?" ("which phone?") and "mgeni" (he was saying something about driving a guest/visitor). Kevin hangs up on the woman, but she calls again, and again, and again.

Finally the taxi driver hands me the phone and says in English, "This woman wants to talk to you." I was slightly startled, but I took the phone only to find a woman hysterically screaming at me in Swahili. She yelled in one breath, "Jina lako nani? Utafanya nini?!"(What is your name? What are you doing?!") I thought she might not know English so was desperately trying to dig up the Swahili I hadn't used for 2 months and give coherent answers to her inquisition in Swahili. I told her my name in Swahili and that I was a student, but she just wouldn't stop yelling. I recognized the Swahili word that means "husband", but I didn't understand the rest of the sentence.

I was a little bewildered so I gave the phone back to Kevin who talked to the woman for a few minutes and hung up on her again. I asked if the woman was his boss because that was the only person I could think of that would want to talk to the passenger in a taxi. Kevin informed me that the woman was his wife and that his wife thinks he is having an affair with another woman. The he said, "Why did you talk to her in Swahili? I told her that I was driving a white-English speaking woman and now she has heard you speak Swahili, and now she thinks I am lying and that I am not driving anyone but I having an affair." I apologized for increasing his marriage problems and asked what I could do to help. He suggested that we go and pick up his wife to that she could see that I really was a white English speaking person that is not having an affair with him. So, we took a 30 minute detour to pick up a very angry middle-aged Kenyan woman. The woman didn't want to talk to her taxi driver husband so she addressed everything to me. For example she would say, "You can tell that man that [meaning her husband] I called his phone and a strange woman answered!" She did not seem at all impressed at all that Kevin was telling the truth and that I was a white English speaking person that he had never seen before that day or that we had driven half an our out of our way to pick her up. Anyway, I ended up spending the taxi ride acting as a mediator between a husband and wife. I thought it was a pretty funny taxi ride. Oh Africa, the crazy things that happen here!