Hard, skanky, gangsta Ragga videos, mixed together by the Taliban Crew, play on a big screen in front of me, pumping, and I mean PUMPING out of subs hidden somewhere under the seats.
Little Mogadishu, its streets filled with burqa-clad women, tall Somali men, lake-sized puddles, and new building developments (funded by Somali pirates), bounces by me out the windows.
Squished beside me is a hefty woman in a pink suit. She watches impassively as Dance Hall legend, Elephant Man dry-humps bikini-clad booty in time to the four-on-the-floor rhythm on screen. Behind her, mothers hold babies on their laps, while men hang off the side of the open sliding door because it’s too packed inside.
Above me, in two foot by two foot panels across the matatu’s ceiling are super-sized political cartoons poking fun at Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe and his controversial policy of reclaiming (stealing) white-owned farms.
I leave the ghetto of Mathare– its crude, utilitarian apartment blocks laced with hanging laundry, its rolling dirt streets teaming with running, laughing children and parents returning home from a long day of poorly paying, menial work– behind me.
Ahead is a short walk through Jericho, just as the sun sets on Kenya, then into Buru Buru, Phase 5, through the security gates and into my home here, where I’ll fall asleep under my mosquito net for the 54th night in a row.