Letter 02: The Paperwork Summer

Letter 02 — February 2026

Re: The Paperwork Summer

Dear Soldier,

That summer of 2011 — the one between arriving and enlisting — was one of the lonelier periods of your life, though you did not name it that at the time. You named it waiting. You were good at waiting. You had been trained in it by a life that had required patience in ways that patience should not be required.

The paperwork determined everything. Whether you could work legally, whether you could open a bank account, whether you existed in the administrative sense that America requires before it acknowledges you in any other sense. You spent that summer in a kind of suspended state, existing but not yet counted, present but not yet legible to the system.

The volunteering was not martyrdom. It was sanity. The library gave you a place to be on a schedule, a reason to be somewhere at a specific time, the small dignity of being useful. The thrift shop did the same. These were not prestigious places. They were places that let you be a person rather than an applicant.

I want you to know that I remember that summer not with shame but with a kind of respect for the patience it required. You were twenty-some years old in a country that did not yet have a file for you, doing the small unglamorous work of waiting without collapsing under it.

The collapse came later, in other forms. But that summer you held.

With more understanding than I had at the time,
Gabriel

mydearsoldier.com

◆ YEAR IN KENYA SERIES

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.

Read the Series →gabrielmahia.com

Letter 01: Before the Uniform

Letter 01 — January 2026

Re: Before the Uniform

Dear Soldier,

I am writing to you from Nairobi. From Dagoretti, specifically, which you have not seen yet. You are still in Virginia. You are still in the summer of 2011, in the paperwork limbo, waiting for the country to decide whether you exist.

I want to tell you about before — before January 20, before Fort Leonard Wood, before any of it. I want to tell you about the person who showed up at the recruiting station in the fall, because I think you have forgotten him, and I think forgetting him is one of the reasons some things went the way they went.

You had been in the country for five months. You had come from Kenya with the particular confidence of someone who does not yet know the specific texture of the obstacles ahead. You were volunteering at the library in Northern Virginia and at the thrift shop and working at Walmart and the paperwork was slow and you needed something to do with yourself that felt like moving forward.

The uniform was the forward. The uniform was the thing that said: you are here, you belong, you have chosen something. Nobody told you that choosing something is not the same as arriving somewhere. Nobody told you that a uniform is a container that can hold very different things.

I am not writing to tell you not to go. I am writing because I think you went for reasons you did not fully understand, and understanding them now might be useful to the person you are still becoming.

There is a soldier I was. He deserves these letters.

With the knowledge I did not have then,
Gabriel

mydearsoldier.com

◆ YEAR IN KENYA SERIES

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.

Read the Series →gabrielmahia.com