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.
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 — 34 essays across 5 properties — is at the Year in Kenya series page.
◆ Year in Kenya — Field Series 2025–2026
Twelve months in Nairobi waiting on a CR-1 visa, watching Kenya's Gen Z protests, Tanzania's stolen election, and an American political realignment simultaneously — from the position of someone inside neither country and reading both.