My father worked at the University of Nairobi's Upper Kabete Campus. Not as faculty. As support staff — the kind of worker who makes a university function without appearing in any of its promotional materials. We lived in Ndumbo-ini, the estate for people like him: the lab assistants, the cleaners, the maintenance workers. A township built for the people the institution needed but did not intend to elevate.
My parents made a decision about me early. They sent me to Loresho Primary School instead of the school closest to us. Loresho was further away, in a different neighborhood, among children whose parents had different expectations of what school was for. It cost more to get me there. It cost more in the less quantifiable sense too — I was always slightly outside the place I was standing in, which is a particular kind of training for a life I could not yet see.
I attended Loresho from pre-unit through Class 8, 1997. Then Dagoretti High School as a boarder. In April 2001, my family moved to Kangemi, in Westlands. I left Kangemi in 2005. I left Kenya in June 2011. I arrived in the United States and shipped to Army basic training on January 20, 2012. I became a US citizen in August 2012.
In 2025, I was back. Not in Ndumbo-ini — that estate has changed enough that navigating it is a different exercise. But in Kangemi. In Westlands. On the roads I had walked for four years before I had any idea where they were leading.
What is strange about returning to the places that made you, with the document in your pocket that those places could not have predicted, is the double vision. You see the street as it is now — the new buildings, the changed shops, the expressway that did not exist — and simultaneously as it was, overlaid like a transparency on the present. The two images do not fully resolve. They never do.
What I noticed in Kangemi in 2025: the density had increased. The informal economy was denser, more complex, more organized than I remembered. The young people running it were exactly my age when I left — late teens, early twenties — doing what that age does in Kangemi, which is figure out how to survive a system that was not designed with their survival as a priority.
I kept thinking about my parents' decision. The Loresho decision. It was not a guarantee — nothing about it meant I would end up where I ended up. But it was a deliberate attempt to place me at a different edge of the system, where different options might become visible.
This is what I mean when I say the Bridge Economy starts at Loresho Primary School. Not the bridge between Kenya and America. The earlier bridge — the one my parents built between the estate for support staff and the school in the neighborhood above it. That was the first crossing. Everything after is downstream of that decision.
I walked some of those roads again in 2025. I was carrying a US passport and waiting for a visa for my pregnant wife. The road did not care about any of that. It was just a road. But I noticed it differently, the way you notice something when you finally understand what it cost to walk it the first time.
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.
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