EssayStoryJournalBook reviewReflectionResearchLetterPoemMemoir801 words4 min readAutosave enabledThe next day, Martha visited the American embassy to start off her visa application given that with a green card she did not have to go through the torture of giving a three month bank statements to prove stability and what not. Despite the considerably long queue at the embassy, she didn’t seem notice due to the numerous thoughts criss-crossing her mind with what ifs situations upon moving to the USA and how she was going to miss the next Christmas celebrations that year with her family. Moreover, the agents were fast in their service delivery and by one o’clock she had already been attended to and booked for a medical check-up and interview date in three days. Even the distance from the embassy to the matatu stage seemed shorter than usual to her as she was constantly thinking of the greener pastures that the new country was in a position to offer including more employment opportunities, better pay, better infrastructures and health services like insurance; it had to be better than Kenya by all means possible, it was a developed country after all. Thursday evening was spent doing continuous window-shopping for appropriate clothing for the four seasons since now there was a reason to unlike Kenya which lied in a tropical region; nonetheless, both parents were now willing to spend some cash on her as they deemed the final favors. She kept running scenarios possible in the USA and thought if the worse were to befall she could always return back to Nairobi and of course one of the crucial benefits with a green card was the fact that she would no longer have to apply for visas to get back into America at a future date nor have to put up with the condescending questions at the American embassy. She nonetheless made another mental note to make sure she fully adapted and enjoyed her stay in the US where she more than felt a sense of belonging more than could be said for Nairobi, besides she belonged to that country then and henceforth, the country of curiosities and crudities, a country where one could drive at night with no fear of armed robbers as she had heard her neighbour’s daughter claim during her last visit to Nairobi when they had met at the Hail Mary’s sculpture that stood a few meters from the church’s main entrance to the left after the Sunday mass before being interrupted by a phone call from her elder sister, Jenna, who had years earlier gotten married off to an athletic, Kalenjin guy as a result of an arranged marriage between their parents and now both live and in Perth. Martha never liked the guy at all, probably due to his over-conservative nature and poor grooming that always seemed to worsen over time. Martha preferred open-minded people who were flexible to changing ways of doing things and way of thinking over time on a given subject matter which was always a function of the unique circumstances at the time. Jerry, her brother-in-law, on the other hand was very rigid on how things were to be done and even how he thought of different situations and preferable solutions. He was stuck in the past ways of doing things and way of thinking all in the name of “preservation of culture” especially when it was a question of a woman’s position in the society and more so in a marriage union. He always thought of a woman as a creature to be seen and not heard in the society, and going against this principle meant disrespecting the elders, which to him always stood for the men in the society. In fact Martha could not recall the last time Jerry and her had struck a conversation that did not end as an argument. She thought of how much she really despised the guy. Before she knew it, she realized that it was already six o’clock in the evening with darkness creeping in really fast. Her mind had broken the record of wandering for an entire two hour period that day. She began pacing back to her residence with the stuff she had already purchased not even remembering exactly what they were except for the fact that they were winter clothes given that month of November was already coming to an end. She could not explain how Jerry and her sister had crossed her mind and what had triggered that. She smiled at herself. Maybe she was going crazy after all. The timing could not have gotten any worse; she thought then laughed a little loud than intended that a woman who had been standing behind her gave a soft sneer with her face expressing irritation that she would have missed had she not turned back just in time.