[continued from Thursday's blog], wherein I am standing out in the sun, trying to get an interview with someone relevant to something.

My contact comes back. “The man’s wife should be attending the hearing soon. When she comes, I will talk to her.” Back downstairs for two more hours of hearings. My contact comes back with more news. “He will be free at 4:30.”

“Alright. I will meet you here at 4:30.”

“No, let me talk to him. Tell him what you are looking for. Then I will talk to you at 5:00.” Leaving me four hours to try and scrounge up some reporting from thin air.

Difficulties with reporting in Nairobi: there’s all of bupkis at your fingertips. The phone book only seems to list half the businesses and a third of the people in the city, and none of them have addresses, because everyone uses PO boxes. And there’s nothing like 411, as far as I know. The numbers on the net are often out of date. Should you get someone on the phone and ask for a face-to-face interview (much better for me since the cell phone is expensive, and I have no office to go to to escape the considerable street noise), you have to play the kindergarten game of telephone to get there. Kenyan gives you directions to their place, which you right down phonetically, since there A sounds like an I and their L sound like an A. Then you go to the taxi driver, and you try to read him your scribblings. He gives you a blank look, but he’s happy to drive a mzungu around with the meter running. The meter is always running: If you’re not in a taxi, you’re in an internet café waiting two minutes (20 shillings!) for a page to load.

Or you're at a local newspaper, paying to use their library. The one I go to today charges an absurd 150 shillings per hour, a fare which includes use of its way-too-funky-to-hang-around-for-number-two bathroom.

I stop in the workspace outside and make a few calls before I go in. The first chair I see has the entire back of it torn off. I pull another chair from behind a desk, and it falls over. Why? Missing a leg, of course. The only other guy in this anonymous office space, a Kenyan in an Oxford shirt, smiles.

“How are you?” I ask Mr. oxford shirt.

“I am good. How are you?”

“Doing good,” I lie.

So I sit on a desktop and call the company where one of the Mr. Bigs I’m interested in allegedly works. BeeeeeWop! Your number is out of order.

The man in Oxford shirt answers the only landline in the room. “Yes? Okay. It is for you.” I’d love to know how I was described.

“Hello?”

“I notice that you are not an employee,” no identification, just an officious feminine voice. I do a 360 and confirm that there is no one else visible. “So I want to know what you are doing here.”

“I am doing research at the library.”

“Then you must sit in the library. You cannot sit there. Those desks are for employees.” Jesus H. Christ on His four-legged throne: I can’t get one Kenyan of import on the phone, I can’t find a bathroom stall a self-respecting Urukai would use, but I’ve got John Poindexter's wife watching me through a buttonhole cam somewhere, making sure I don’t monopolize the company’s brokeass furniture.

“I’m just making a phone call. This one guy sitting next to me gets all eight desks?”

“You must sit in the library.”

“Gotcha. Which hand gesture do you prefer: this one or this one?” I repack my pads and PDA and phone and newspapers, and walk the ten feet to the sanctioned area. Start the meter running anew!

Do they have a file on the man I’m looking for? Does the Pope jump rope?

An hour later, my contact meets me. “News?”

“Not good news.”

“Great.”

“He doesn’t want to talk, today.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” I’m not optimistic. But I do note that he’s wearing the entire ensemble he wore yesterday, and it all looks immaculate. I’m wearing the same pants I wore yesterday, and you can still see where I leaned against a dirty railing in mid-afternoon. It’s a metaphor, you see: He knows how to move through the day like a dolphin through a current and his clothes end the day looking they just came off the rack. I look like I got knocked on my keister for second day in a row.

Caught a cab at 8:15 AM. Met a contact, who assured me he could put me in touch with somebody in the next few hours: the guy I wanted to talk to was supposed to be at a public hearing this morning and we would meet him there. So I sit next to my contact in the windowless subterranean offices where the hearing is held. My eyes repeatedly roll back into my skull. Then breaktime, which brings sunshine, coffee, and roll. A simple African cinnamon roll, not the syrup dripping, frosting moneyshotted $5 Cinnabon of home.

Out in the sunshine, I stand around while my contact plays six degrees of seperation (“This man in the red jacket, he knows the man’s wife. I will talk to him. Wait here.”)

I'm just thankful to be out of the hearing, soaking in the sun, caffeine in my veins. We’d just come out of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi’s trademark sprawl of bizarrchitecture. A big cylinder rising here, an enormous cone dropped there (photo). And there are ramps everywhere, with concrete-bottomed moats below them. Moat bottoms are painted light blue, to give the sense that the courtyard is littered with kiddie pools. It looks like they just kept building random add-ons until the budget ran out. The place is like Nairobi and its people itself: confoundingly arbitrary.

It makes a bit of sense: Nairobi only exists because the Brits set up a railroad camp here that kept sprawling. Arbitrary! Take the TV programming. Yes, much of it is derivative of western shows, arbitrary on the face of it. But the western TV shows here aren’t CSI or Friends, they’re The Andy Dick Show and short-lived Dan Ackroyd-as-minister sitcom Soul Man. This is where crap TV goes to live on in zombietude: arbitrary squared.

Ask about strange things that people do, and you will be told, We have a saying! In books and cab rides, “The man who chokes who should speak up!” or “When the old lady disappears, the jackal craps gray hairs.” Yes, but those are sayings. Using a saying from a bygone rural culture to justify your actions as a cab driver is, is...

"Arbitrary?" Yes, that's it.

to be continued tomorrow.