I understand that third world countries don't have a functioning mailbox-to-mailbox postal system, and that thus P.O. boxes are necessary. And thus I understand that there must be thousands of boxes lined up somewhere. But when you see the City Center post office in Nairobi for the first time, it's what a hack writer would term Kafka-esque, but a truly dorked-out writer would term Bard's Tale-esque.
About six billion 5"x5" blue PO boxes are located on the second floor of this giant concrete structure: an unending grid of square boxes in series of long square hallways: three of them. Three divergent open-air corridors that branch out again and again, but never meet one another. But they all have the same dirty white ceilings, dirty concrete floors, row upon row of dirty blue doors with smudged white letters painted on them.
I'm picking up a package, so the lady at the INFORMATION booth downstairs tells me to walk all the way to the back. So I walk through the first corridor: rows of blue, more corridors branching left and right. Take one, and it dead ends. Take another, dead end. Retreat to starting point, try other wing of the corridor: same dead end, same damn blue doors.
Walk all the way out, walk into corridor two. Come across a barred alcove not unlike the one where Mad Max has to drop off his sawed off and his tire iron and his pistol before he can meet Tina Turner. Have I lost you? In English: the alcove is musty and dominated by a flickering overhead light. It is Mondo Third Worldo.
I give the lady behind the bars my Package Pick-Up slip and she begins to forage. After five minutes--they seem to have packages stuffed on the shelves in no order--she triumphantly pulls one white package down. It is wrapped in a plastic sleeve.
Instead of handing it over, she then pushes a slip at me through the bars. The slip explains that the parcel came to them damaged, and thus any damage to it is not their fault. It says so here on this strip of paper, so they must be faultless.
"But we have wrapped it plastic, to protect it now," she says. To demonstrate, she holds aloft the clear plastic sleeve and displays it like Bosley hawking GLADWRAP. Except she holds it the wrong way, the parcel slips out the sleeve's opening, and clatters to the floor.
I know it's just a paperback book inside, so I don't sweat it. Just Africa. Post Office Lady, oblivious to any irony, picks up the parcel and slips right back into the end of her speech about how the parcel became ripped open through no fault of the Kenya Post Office.
She places my package on the corner of the table and pulls out a gigantic blue ledger. So large is the ledger that when she opens it, my box is pushed aside and again sent tumbling onto the never-once-washed Third World floor. Still no flicker of regret from her.
In the big blue ledger she writes down all sorts of information from my passport: no right to privacy in the Third World. You want a visa to Ngieria, you send them your bank account statement. You want to pick up your own property at the post office in Kenya, you better hand over your documents and let them note whatever they want.
Half the time (when there are computers involved), I do my best to just make up addresses and passport numbers, and half the time (when big blue ledgers are involved) I just hand over my documents. There isn't even a memory hole for my personal information go down: just a bored postal worker working by rote, writing down numbers into a dusty ledger in a back alley of an architectural and bureaucratic deadend.
