The Dangers of Crossing the Street

There are all kinds of horrific headlining causes of death in Kenya, but one of them, the 9th leading cause of death, isn't quite sexy enough to get the response it deserves. There will never be a 'Eureka!' moment in which the cure is discovered, there will never be an overnight solution to this problem and most upsetting: nobody, including myself, can do  

much to protect themselves from it. The cause of death: road accidents.


In Kenya everybody is subject to all the disastrous outcomes pretty much no matter what. If you ever want to leave your house, cross the street, trust a bus driver to get you somewhere, even drive yourself somewhere, you are 

putting your life at risk.


I became convinced recently that the road accident deaths are significantly higher than the amount reported by the Kenyan government when Sheila Atieno from Youths for Road Safety - Kenya showed me the official report released and the numbers seemed laughably small just 

pulling from my own experiences. 


It's easy to explain when many accidents go unreported, leaving the scene of the crime is nowhere near uncommon, police officers are easily bribed, and when people die later of complications, I can't imagine that is recorded very often.

The craziest thing to me is how well the 'cure' is understood. Fix the car-size potholes. Put in street lights. Create more lanes on the highways to make passing cars at 80 miles an hour around blind corners a thing of the past. Implement emissions testing so that the trucks/lorries people are forced to pass are not these dinosaurs creeping at 4 miles an hour while spewing exhaust.

Institute quotas for traffic cops, affordable traffic violation tickets for drivers and a navigable court system so that speeding isn't so accessible and bribing isn't so necessary for all parties. But this is not a 'Eureka!' cure. This is bottlenecks wrapped in lobbyists covered in committees all inside an oven of party politics. It would require so much good-will, cross-party handshaking, statistical reporting and follow-up 

that when I envision how difficult it would be in America's cluster-Congress, I don't even know how to realistically imagine this campaign's success in Kenya.


That is not to say things aren't slowly getting better. They are. Better roads are a quick, tangible way to appease a constituency for a politician trying to get re-elected. So at least I can say that's happening...

All I keep coming back to is: if these things cured HIV/AIDS, you couldn't stop activist groups from implementing them. But for some reason road accidents aren't at the forefront of the development conversation. I could explore how or why, but the truth is, it's just not. 


One organization who is taking on this topic. Youths for Road Safety - Kenya (YOURS-K). YOURS-K came down to Hamomi a couple weeks ago and put on an educational workshop for Hamomi's students - who are just as at risk as anybody else every time they walk to and from school. I couldn't be there, but all parties reported a great success. YOURS-K posted an album on their Facebook page which you can find here. These pictures are all ones I've pulled from that album.

Not only is the content of this workshop incredibly important, I was so impressed with what you can see in the pictures: they know how to talk about this to kids. Classroom portion, outdoor portion, activity portion, food. I'm sure the Hamomi students loved it, but beyond that I feel certain it will lead to at least one student taking smart, preventative measures against road hazards, and that makes me feel like Superwoman.


Thank you to YOURS-K. You can find out more about them here. Thanks to Keats Landis for connecting Hamomi and YOURS-K and getting me to take on this issue more proactively. You are an inspiration.


All my best,
Susie