Traffic

There's good news and bad news, neither relating to our daughters.
The good news: Rain has come! For the past week, it has rained regularly in Nairobi, and even our friends in the Rift Valley have seen heavy rains. March marks the beginning of the rainy season and everybody is excited about the prospect of a second straight year of good long-rains. Hopefully our daughters will come to a beautiful, green Najile that is full of life.

The bad news: Drivers in Kenya are about as good at driving in the rain as drivers in Virginia are at driving in the snow. That is, they're very very bad. Kenyan drivers are not great to begin with, the regularly create traffic jams without any traffic (which Steph and I have dubbed "doofus Jams"). There is an intersection next to the hospital, where its very common to see 4 cars completely block the entire intersection while simultaneously blocking themselves. Until others back up nothing happens-everybody just looks at each other and honks their horn.
As soon as it rains there are huge puddles in the road and people start doing the stupidest things. People start driving in the wrong lanes, they swerve and stall, they crawl along and block more lanes than exist on the road. Our normal commute from the apartment to the hospital is about 20 minutes, but in the past days I've regularly spent over an hour doing the 3 mile drive. We can only hope that people will remember how to drive in rain soon, or else there will be a lot of sitting in traffic the next few weeks....