Letter on Namugongo: The Walk, the Martyrs, and What Faith Costs

Dear Soldier,

I was at Namugongo on June 3, 2025, with my wife. Three million people. Some of them had walked for weeks to be there.

The Uganda Martyrs were killed between 1885 and 1887. Young men, most of them teenagers. They were pages at the court of Kabaka Mwanga II. They were executed for refusing to renounce their faith when it conflicted with what the King required of them.

I was not raised at Namugongo. But I have been in enough situations where someone with authority over me required something that conflicted with what I actually believed to recognize the shape of that moment.

The walk to Namugongo is not symbolic. It is a physical re-enactment of a journey that ended in death. The pilgrims who walk barefoot, who carry crucifixes through forests and across borders, who arrive exhausted and pray anyway — they are doing something I recognize from other kinds of service.

They are saying: I believe this enough to make it cost something.

That is a standard I keep trying to hold in every context. Whether it is the wait for a visa, the year away from home, or the decision to serve a country before it decided whether it wanted me.

Gabriel

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Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. federal infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of a series written after twelve months in Kenya, April 2025 – April 2026.

Letter on Namugongo: The Walk, the Martyrs, and What Faith Costs

Dear Soldier,

I was at Namugongo on June 3, 2025, with my wife. Three million people. Some of them had walked for weeks to be there.

The Uganda Martyrs were killed between 1885 and 1887. Young men, most of them teenagers. They were pages at the court of Kabaka Mwanga II. They were executed for refusing to renounce their faith when it conflicted with what the King required of them.

I was not raised at Namugongo. But I have been in enough situations where someone with authority over me required something that conflicted with what I actually believed to recognize the shape of that moment.

The walk to Namugongo is not symbolic. It is a physical re-enactment of a journey that ended in death. The pilgrims who walk barefoot, who carry crucifixes through forests and across borders, who arrive exhausted and pray anyway — they are doing something I recognize from other kinds of service.

They are saying: I believe this enough to make it cost something.

That is a standard I keep trying to hold in every context. Whether it is the wait for a visa, the year away from home, or the decision to serve a country before it decided whether it wanted me.

Gabriel

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Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.

Letter on Watching the Deportations from Kenya

Dear Soldier,

I am watching from here as 605,000 people are deported. I watch it the way you watch something that involves people like you — not with dispassion, but with a specific readiness to recognize the shape of the thing.

The shape I recognize: the state deciding, retroactively, that the deal it offered was not the deal it meant. That the acceptance of your labor and your compliance and your taxes did not actually constitute a promise.

We know this shape. We crossed for a country that then had to decide, separately, whether it wanted us. The naturalization process is not an automatic outcome of the service. It is a decision the institution makes.

Some of us got the decision we hoped for. Some of us are still waiting. Some of the people being deported served, paid, complied, and still received the wrong answer.

I do not have a resolution for you. I am writing from Kenya, waiting for my own answer from the same system. I am simply noting: we all know what it feels like to wait for an institution to decide what it thinks you are worth.

The system's answer does not change what you are. Remember that.

Gabriel

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The observer angle on deportations from Kenya: https://www.americansandtheirthings.com/search/label/Hidden

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Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.

Letter on Watching the Deportations from Kenya

Dear Soldier,

I am watching from here as 605,000 people are deported. I watch it the way you watch something that involves people like you — not with dispassion, but with a specific readiness to recognize the shape of the thing.

The shape I recognize: the state deciding, retroactively, that the deal it offered was not the deal it meant. That the acceptance of your labor and your compliance and your taxes did not actually constitute a promise.

We know this shape. We crossed for a country that then had to decide, separately, whether it wanted us. The naturalization process is not an automatic outcome of the service. It is a decision the institution makes.

Some of us got the decision we hoped for. Some of us are still waiting. Some of the people being deported served, paid, complied, and still received the wrong answer.

I do not have a resolution for you. I am writing from Kenya, waiting for my own answer from the same system. I am simply noting: we all know what it feels like to wait for an institution to decide what it thinks you are worth.

The system's answer does not change what you are. Remember that.

Gabriel

---

Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. federal infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of a series written after twelve months in Kenya, April 2025 – April 2026.

Letter from Nairobi, April 2025

Dear Soldier,

I am writing from Nairobi. I arrived yesterday — the early morning of April 15, 2025 — having left Virginia the night before. The leaves were coming out when I left. I landed to the smell of Nairobi in the morning: diesel, rain on red soil, the particular clarity of the air at altitude.

I am here because my wife is here. We were married in January. The CR-1 petition is filed. The wait has begun.

If you are reading this, you know something about waiting. You know about the particular discipline of loving a country that is processing you. You know how to hold your posture inside a bureaucratic system that does not care about your timeline.

We trained for situations where we had to function under pressure without knowing the outcome. I keep returning to that training in the context of the visa process.

Stand by. I will write from here as the year unfolds.

Gabriel

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Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.

Letter from Nairobi, April 2025

Dear Soldier,

I am writing from Nairobi. I arrived yesterday — the early morning of April 15, 2025 — having left Virginia the night before. The leaves were coming out when I left. I landed to the smell of Nairobi in the morning: diesel, rain on red soil, the particular clarity of the air at altitude.

I am here because my wife is here. We were married in January. The CR-1 petition is filed. The wait has begun.

If you are reading this, you know something about waiting. You know about the particular discipline of loving a country that is processing you. You know how to hold your posture inside a bureaucratic system that does not care about your timeline.

We trained for situations where we had to function under pressure without knowing the outcome. I keep returning to that training in the context of the visa process.

Stand by. I will write from here as the year unfolds.

Gabriel

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Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.

Start Here — All 30 Letters in Order

mydearsoldier.com

Thirty Letters to the Soldier I Was

A man writes to the soldier he was between 2012 and 2018 — from basic training to the food pantry winter to the first car to the museum on the Mall. Start at Letter 01.

READ IN ORDER — 30 LETTERS

Letter 01	Before the Uniform
Letter 02	The Paperwork Summer
Letter 03	What the Library Gave You
Letter 04	January 20, 2012
Letter 05	The Sapper (not yet published)
Letter 06	The Green Beret in the Platoon (not yet published)
Letter 07	No Mail (not yet published)
Letter 08	The Pool Table (not yet published)
Letter 09	The Graduation Nobody Came To (not yet published)
Letter 10	Red Lobster (not yet published)
Letter 11	Back to Walmart (not yet published)
Letter 12	The Car Polish Winter (not yet published)
Letter 13	The Food Pantry (not yet published)
Letter 14	What the Reserves Actually Were (not yet published)
Letter 15	$7.50 (not yet published)
Letter 16	The Workforce Development Class (not yet published)
Letter 17	The Xerox Internship (not yet published)
Letter 18	$11.50 (not yet published)
Letter 19	The Thirtieth Birthday (not yet published)
Letter 20	The Chicken (not yet published)
Letter 21	The First Car (not yet published)
Letter 22	Joyce Koons Honda, Manassas (not yet published)
Letter 23	What It Meant to Never Deploy (not yet published)
Letter 24	November 10, 2018 (not yet published)
Letter 25	The Road Trip (not yet published)
Letter 26	Five Thousand Miles (not yet published)
Letter 27	The Museum on the Mall (not yet published)
Letter 28	What the Museum Asked (not yet published)
Letter 29	The Return (not yet published)
Letter 30	Dagoretti (not yet published)

mydearsoldier.com — Letters from soldiers who crossed