T.I.A baby

"Had to stop at a red light
Looking in my mirror not a jacker in sight
And everything is alright...
Drunk as hell but no throwing up
Half way home and my pager still blowing up
Today I didn't even have to use my A.K.
I got to say it was a good day."
-Ice Cube, "It was a good day."

Spent yesterday working on a budget for Matatu and researching funding options – my least favourite aspect of filmmaking – albeit a necessary one, and one I am striving towards mastering, or at least improving on. Six years of Kraft Dinners have inspired me to do better.
Got up bright and early this morning to head to Ignite to get some wireless access. A normally 10 minute drive became an hour of bumper to bumper traffic filled with cars cutting each other off, triple passing on a single lane road. A matatu with the name painted on the rear windscreen “Everything is in God’s Hands” accelerated madly uphill into oncoming traffic. Perhaps miraculously, no casualties ensued. The lord works in mysterious ways, after all.
Made it to the office only to discover the power is down (another notorious outage). Three hours later and still nothing. Fired up the blackmarket Ipod (purchased on the streets of Nairobi for $20) and tuned into “homeboyz radio” on 91.5 FM, for a great old school classics show. In Nairobi they play good hip hop. Because of the lack of advertisers, DJs play what they want to hear, or what the audience tells them to play, not the top 40 shoddy generic tunes the record companies think you want to hear. Six hours later still no power. I shrug. I no longer care. I have Biggie, Tupac, Ice Cube and lil’ Kim to keep me company.
I head home by foot this time, past the vast coffee fields under the hot sun in a perfect, cloudless aqua blue sky. It’s a half hour walk, but it feels good. It’s downhill. Back home now, I grab a cold Tusker from the fridge. I laugh as one of the dogs jumps on the patio table and licks my hand trying to console me. I can’t help but remember my favourite line uttered by DiCaprio in Blood Diamond.
“This is Africa.”