In early 2013, the hours at Walmart dropped.
January is the slow month in retail. The holiday season ends, the foot traffic falls, and the store responds predictably: it narrows the schedules of part-time employees without seniority. Thirty-two hours. Sometimes less. I was one of those employees. I was making $7.50 an hour and working thirty-two of them a week.
The arithmetic did not work. It had never quite worked — Northern Virginia is not a cheap place to survive at retail wages — but in the January contraction it worked less. I had come back from basic training and AIT the previous summer changed enough to see the room clearly, and what I saw clearly in January 2013 was the shape of the road I was on.
The shape was flat. Not descending — the people I worked with were not failing. They were anchored. There is a difference. But the road did not rise from where I was standing, and I had been standing on it long enough to understand that it would not rise on its own.
I had an IT degree from Kenya. It had not translated directly into American employment because the American hiring system runs on locally legible credentials and local experience, and I had neither in the domain where the degree was useful. The degree was real. The gap between the credential and the role was not a function of the credential’s quality. It was a function of the system’s preference for the familiar.
I had heard about a workforce development programme — a scholarship initiative run in conjunction with Northern Virginia Community College, specifically designed to bridge the gap between immigrant qualifications and American employer expectations. I had been sitting with this information for some months. In January 2013, working thirty-two hours at $7.50, I started taking it seriously.
I did not apply to the programme that January. The application would come later, when the timing aligned with the programme’s intake cycle. What January 2013 gave me was the decision — the internal shift from considering to committed. The thirty-two hours and the arithmetic that did not work had given me enough clarity about the road to decide I needed a different one.
Nobody wrote this down from where I was standing. The electronics section looked the same every shift. The badge reader clocked me in and out without comment. The decision was invisible to everyone but me.
That is usually how the decisions that matter are made.
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.