Maine in January

I went to Maine in January because that was when I could get the time off.

Friends from Kenya and Nigeria were in graduate programmes at the University of Maine — the particular path that brings people from East and West Africa into the cold interior of New England through the logic of academic scholarships that do not ask what month you will arrive. I had been meaning to visit. January was the window. I took it.

Everyone who heard about the plan had the same reaction: January. Maine. You know what that is.

I knew what that was in the way I had known what a hurricane was before Sandy — correctly, in my head, but not yet in my body. I had been through a Missouri winter at Fort Leonard Wood during basic training, which had been cold in the particular way of a flat inland expanse with wind across it. Maine in January is a different argument. It is cold that has accumulated conviction.

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The snow was the first thing. Not the snow itself — though the quantity was genuinely difficult to process, ploughed walls of it taller than I was along every road — but what the snow did to the architecture of outdoor life. It did not cancel outdoor life. People were outside, moving through it, dressed for it, unbothered. The snow was not an event. It was the condition. You lived inside the condition.

What I found inside it was relief.

My friends from Kenya and Nigeria, in their university-issue winter coats, in apartments heated to a temperature reasonable in Nairobi, were the most relaxing company I had been in since arriving in America. Not because they were remarkable people, though they were. Because in their presence I could stop performing legibility.

The specific exhaustion of immigrant sociability in America is the exhaustion of constant translation. Not language translation — that can become automatic. The deeper translation: of context, of reference, of the thing behind the thing you are saying. With your own people you do not translate. The reference lands. The joke requires no explanation. In Maine in January, in a small apartment with Kenyan and Nigerian graduate students, in the coldest state in the coldest month, I had the warmest social experience of my first years in America. The cold outside was part of it. You do not feel the relief of warmth unless you have been cold — in all the senses.

I stayed two to three weeks. Long enough to understand the Maine winter as condition rather than event. Long enough to walk in snow up to my knees and find that I enjoyed it — the silence it created, the specific quality of cold air in a pine forest that has no equivalent in any equatorial experience I had brought with me, or in the flat Missouri cold of basic training.

I had gone to Maine to see my people. I found them, and I found also the snow, and in the combination something I have not found in the same form anywhere else: the suspension of the outsider tax in conditions that were themselves foreign to me. I was a stranger to the climate. My friends were strangers to the climate. We were strangers together, which is a different thing than being strangers separately.

The most foreign I have felt in America was the warmest I have felt in America. Both were in Maine. Both were January.

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These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.

Texas Is Just Virginia

I drove across America in April 2022 and the thing that surprised me most was how much of it looked like Virginia.

Not the landscapes — the landscapes were genuinely different in ways the photographs promise and the body confirms. The red rock of New Mexico is not Virginia. The Grand Canyon is not Virginia. The Mojave approaching Las Vegas at dusk is not Virginia. These were as advertised and better than advertised.

But the towns. The suburban commercial strips. The franchise restaurants at the interstate exits. The Walmart Supercenters at the edge of every city large enough to sustain one. The church marquees. The truck stops with their diesel islands and their aisles of beef jerky. The gas station attendants in fourteen states who asked the same question — "You need anything else today?" — in the same register of professional warmth that meant the transaction had concluded.

I had driven I-40 west from Virginia to California, returned via Kansas and Indiana. Roughly five thousand miles. And the impression that settled over the drive was that America had built a single town and reproduced it across three thousand miles of varying geography.

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This observation is not original. Americans have made it about themselves for decades, with varying degrees of lament. The franchise monoculture, the death of regional distinctiveness — these are familiar complaints. By 2022 I had been in America eleven years, had lived in the same Northern Virginia corridor for most of it, had moved through Walmart and the military and the professional world and accumulated enough American context that I was arriving at this road trip with a different frame than a fresh arrival would have had.

What the familiar critique misses is what the sameness provides to the person passing through for the first time.

When you are driving alone across an unfamiliar country and you pull off in Elk City, Oklahoma at 9pm needing food and a known quantity, the franchise is not a symbol of cultural decline. It is the thing you can read. The menu you already know. The interaction that will proceed in a way you can predict. The sameness is a legibility infrastructure. America built itself readable at scale.

An African driving across America for the first time is not nostalgic for the regional distinctiveness that was lost. There is nothing to be nostalgic for. What is available instead is the discovery that a country this large has made itself this legible to a stranger. The franchise at the exit says: you are far from where you started, but you are not in a foreign country. You know how this works. I was grateful for it and also aware, by 2022, that the gratitude was data — it told me something about who the legibility infrastructure was built for and what problem it was solving.

Texas is larger than France. I drove across it in a day. It had everything Virginia has — strip malls, Baptist churches, Walmart, the highway sound made by the same cars on the same pavement with the same white lines. I drove out of Amarillo the next morning into the Llano Estacado and the sky was bigger than Virginia sky. Texas had kept something the franchise strip had not consumed. You had to drive far enough from the interstate to find it.

The difference between Texas and Virginia is real. It is approximately ninety miles from the exit.

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These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.

I'm From Here

The question comes in two versions and the difference between them is the entire subject of this post.

The first version: Where are you from?

This is a reasonable question with a reasonable answer. I give mine — Nairobi, Kenya, Northern Virginia since 2011 — and the conversation proceeds.

The second version: No, but where are you actually from?

The second version is a different question. It is not asking for information the first version failed to obtain. The first version obtained the information. The second version is asserting that the answer I gave — the true answer — does not satisfy the underlying inquiry. The underlying inquiry is: your presence here does not read as native. Account for it.

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The first time I encountered it I was working at Walmart, six months after arriving. My English was fluent — it had always been fluent — but it was Kenyan English, which is its own thing, distinct in rhythm and vowel placement and the particular music of a language learned formally in classrooms before it was absorbed from rooms.

A customer heard the accent. "Where are you from?" I said Virginia — factually accurate.

"No, but where are you actually from?"

"I came from Kenya."

A pause. The specific pause of someone assembling a reference. Then: "Like Obama."

The Obama reference, offered in late 2011, was not malicious. It was the genuine product of a mental filing system doing its best with available information. The person knew one prominent Kenyan, and that Kenyan had recently become the most powerful person in the world. The connection was offered warmly, as a bridge: I have a place for you, I know what to do with you. The problem was not the warmth. The problem was the filing system. One Kenyan in the reference library, and I had just become him. I would encounter variations of this for years — in retail, in the military, in professional environments. The filing system updated slowly and differently in each.

The actually is a precise instrument. It is relocating the ground tmy wife of a person’s identity away from where they currently are and toward where they originated. It is asserting that one of my two true answers is less true than the other.

Fifteen years of answering this question have not produced a satisfying response. The answer I use most often now is to say Nairobi before anyone can ask the second version — which forecloses the actually while also being entirely true.

What I am doing when I lead with Nairobi is pre-empting the actually by offering it voluntarily. Which means I have incorporated the actually into my self-presentation without ever agreeing that the filing system requiring it is correct.

This is one of the quieter taxes of the immigrant life. You pay it so automatically that you sometimes forget you are paying it.

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These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.

Fwo

My host was trying to teach me how to say four.

He was a Kenyan man who had arrived in the United States in the early 1990s. By the time I landed in his guest room in June 2011, he had been here twenty years. His English was fluent and thoroughly American in its cadence — the accent that remains after two decades of daily recalibration, not quite gone and not quite present, a middle distance the ear learns to place after a while.

He was trying to teach me to say four the way Americans hear four. The problem, he explained, was not the word. I was saying the right word. I was saying it in a way that required Americans to do a small translation before they could receive it. "Fwo," he said, exaggerating the American version. "Like that. Soft. Let the r do less."

I tried. It came out as four. Clear, Kenyan four.

"Again," he said. "Fwo."

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The lesson was not about the number. The number was a vehicle for something he had been teaching himself for twenty years: the economy of friction. The decision, made daily and mostly unconsciously by every immigrant, about which frictions to eliminate and which to maintain.

He had done the math across two decades and arrived at his position. Certain frictions were pure cost with no benefit. The pronunciation of common numbers fell here. Nobody needed to know you said four differently. The sanding cost nothing you needed to keep.

Other frictions were worth maintaining. The things that carried information about who you were and where you came from, that cost something to sand away — those required a different calculation.

Every immigrant builds a taxonomy of the self that does not exist for the native-born. Category one: the things you change, because the friction costs more than the authenticity is worth. Category two: the things you do not change, because the thing matters more than the friction. Category three: the things you change and then mourn, years later, when you understand the cost was higher than you calculated at the time. My host was still in the process of working out his taxonomy after twenty years. The military would later give me a compressed version of this exercise — eight weeks of being told which parts of yourself to sand down for the institution, which were required, which were never discussed. Category three has entries from that period too.

I kept saying four the Kenyan way. Not as a political act. I simply could not produce the American version without it feeling false, and false speech requires a cognitive overhead that compounds across a workday. The accent stayed because the cost of removing it was too high.

What I took from the lesson was the taxonomy itself. That every immigrant is constantly deciding which version of themselves to offer to which room. That the man who had been here twenty years and still found it worth teaching this to new arrivals had not resolved his own taxonomy. He was still placing things in categories. I think about that sometimes. Particularly about category three.

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These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.

Leaves in April: What Seasonal Time Feels Like When You've Missed a Year

I left when the leaves were just coming out. That tentative spring green that Virginia does for about a week before committing. I came back a year later, and the same thing was happening again. Kenya does not have this. Nairobi has two rainy seasons and two dry seasons. The plants respond to water, not to temperature. There is no single annual moment when everything comes back. Things are green or they are not, based on whether it has rained. The American spring — this specific April thing with the leaves and the particular temperature change and the daylight lengthening — is an American thing that I had not realized was a thing until I missed it for a year. Coming back to it felt like being handed a clock I had not known I was running on. Sanctuary has many shapes. One of them is the repeating year. Knowing that the leaves will do this again, that you will be there to see them, that the cycle continues. It is a small and enormous comfort.

The author 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.

DOGE and the American Faith in Efficiency

Americans have a specific relationship to the word efficiency. It functions, in the American conversation, almost as a moral category — a thing that is good in the way that cleanliness is good, or punctuality. Efficiency is how you know a thing is being run well.

DOGE eliminated 317,000 federal jobs in ten months and was described by its supporters as a function of efficiency. The framing worked, in large part, because Americans are primed to believe that large institutions are inefficient, and that the solution to inefficiency is reduction.

From Kenya, watching an administration brand its own citizens as terrorists while protecting the governing class's interests, and simultaneously watching DOGE eliminate the institutional nodes that exist to check executive power, the word efficiency landed differently.

Efficient for whom. That is the question. American things, including the American political conversation, have a particular tendency to answer that question with "everyone," even when the answer is clearly "some."

This is one of the hidden things: the moral vocabulary that makes certain choices look neutral.

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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.

The American Grocery Store After a Year of Nairobi Markets

Thirty-seven varieties of cold medicine. I counted once, a few years ago, in a Walmart pharmacy aisle. It became a kind of touchstone — the thing I cited when trying to explain American abundance to people who had not experienced it.

Nairobi has pharmacies. Nairobi has Carrefour, now, and Chandarana and Naivas. The selection is not thirty-seven cold medicines. It is three or four. You pick one. It works or it does not.

The American grocery store — after a year away — hits differently. The produce section alone is larger than some of the markets I was shopping at daily. The lighting is specific. The temperature is controlled. The choices are organized into a logic that I can read fluently because I have been reading it for fifteen years, but which, after a year's gap, I can see as a logic again rather than as simply the way things are.

The abundance is real. The design is also intentional. Both things are true.

This is the observer coming home: seeing the familiar as a thing, not just as a given.

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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.

◆ 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

◆ Year in Kenya — Field Series 2025–2026

Twelve months in Nairobi waiting on a a spousal visa, watching Kenya's Gen Z protests, Tanzania's 2025 election, and an American political realignment simultaneously — from the position of someone inside neither country and reading both.

Full reading order → gabrielmahia.com · gabrielmahia.com