Dear Soldier, I am writing from Nairobi. I arrived yesterday — 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 visa 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 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 in Nairobi, April 2025 to April 2026. The analytical home for the series is gabrielmahia.com, where Gabriel writes on power, institutions, and what holds under pressure. The full reading order — essays across five properties — is at the Year in Kenya series page.