Buying trainers

..A simple thing you would think, but one that demonstrates the stark differences in this city. We are in the process of kitting out the children with their school uniform and needed to buy trainers. I went to the shoe shop in one of the very nice malls that I enjoy shopping in, price £60 plus per pair. I mumbled something about not buying them today and hurriedly left the shop. A new experience feeling very poor. I come from Dodoma where I felt like a millionaire to Nairobi where I feel scruffy and poor. Anyway the next plan was to go to the second hand market. If I am honest I would rather not shop there. It is dirty and smelly, there are people everywhere (almost none of them white). There was also a rather dead looking guy (I think he was dead because someone had covered his face) with horrible looking burns over his chest lying by the side of the road. To be honest I didn’t look too closely because it wasn’t very nice. But you wander past feeling like you are doing the complete opposite of the good Samaritan. I was actually quite pleased that when I walked past later the man had been taken away somewhere. What do you do in those situations? What you really want to do is go racing back to the nice clean mall, have a cappuccino and forget that that side of the world exists. How can it be in a world of bandwidth, decaf lattes, and cereal that costs £10 a packet that side by side with this there are people dying on the pavement?

We managed to get trainers eventually but next time I will buy them on sale in a sports shop in the UK!