Random blues: The beers,intrigues and joy of end of year team-building

As the Christmas holidays edge closer with their promise of endless gatherings to eat endless species of perfectly innocent Kenyan animals, the expatriate will find that he has one final hurdle to overcome before the arrival of Santa Claus: the annual staff team-building trip to Mombasa.

In Kenya, these trips are always to Mombasa. Indeed, during December, the rest of Kenya withers away in the consciousness of Kenyans, and the Coast looms large.

The more ‘Christmassy’ things start to feel, the more likely the Christian Kenyan is to bugger off to the predominantly Islamic coast. And whyever not?

A staff bus trip to Mombasa (conducted in a bus hired from a local school) sees all those office colleagues who have hated each other for the preceding eleven months having to sit next to each other for a ten hour journey that always stops at Emali for a terrible samosa, Mtito Andei for a ‘comfort break’ (Kenyans are always too coy to say what they really mean when it comes to forms of excretion) and Voi for absolutely no reason at all.

During this journey, the first three hours will happen in total silence, but things soon loosen up when an extrovert staff member reveals that he’s smuggled countless bottles of Moonwalker onto the bus.

Consequently, by the fifth hour everybody is everybody else’s best friend, there’s singing, two people have vomited, and the bus’s aisle in covered with broken glass. In Kenya, we call this ‘teambuilding’.

Meanwhile, the expatriate staff member (who might or might not be the boss) is sitting alone on his front seat, trying to identify new bird species through the front windscreen.

This is impossible because: a) Mr Maingi keeps running to the front of the bus to tell him that ‘I’ve always loved you’; b) the bus driver, who had to wake up at 3am to begin this journey, and who has also been enjoying the Moonwalker, is by now halfway to somewhere other than Mombasa and is almost crashing into every oncoming vehicle he encounters.

On arriving in Mombasa, everyone is drunk, and the team has been thoroughly ‘built’. By which I mean, they have communally collapsed in the hotel foyer.

The next few days will see the expatriate trying to organise meetings that nobody turns up to, although of course everybody’s fully punctual when, after dinner, the bus arrives to take the group to Kilifi’s Mango Club for a ‘cultural evening’.

The expatriate looks forward to this evening, but on arriving at the club he finds that the cultural evening is in fact a beauty pageant involving countless twenty-something lovelies, and a token number of halved coconut shells.

The audience is composed almost entirely of geriatric white men and Nairobi officeworkers out on their ‘teambuilding’ trips, although it has by now become clear to the expatriate that the only teambuilding that will happen during this excursion is a series of ‘paired activities’.

He dreams of dashing out his own brains with a coconut.