​its not easy to leave your family behind to go seek greener pastures abroad and especially in Saudi Arabia.

when i left Kenya for Saudi Arabia in 2014, i left my wife and my little girl. she was only one and a half years old when i left for their benefit.

she was already walking by herself, albeit unsteadily and hadn’t begun to speak properly.

when i came for vacation in 2016, my wife came to pick me up from the airport.

my princess was asleep on the back seat and i got in and scooped her up and cradled her on my lap and when she woke up, she was in the lap of this stranger whom she didn’t know.

it took some time for us to bond again and unfortunately, the vacation was over, and i had to go back to Saudi Arabia again.

i’m always worrying.

worrying that there will be another Al- Shabab terrorist militia attack in Nairobi, our fair capital city, and that i’ll be three thousand miles away, too far to be able to keep my family safe.

worrying about the doctor’s strike in Kenya and how that’s going to imapact on my life, keeping in mind that we’re expecting a second child and that an expectant mother who went to the hospital to be delivered was turned away and as she sought means to go to a private hospital, she went into labor, there were complications and the baby died.

worrying that as here in Saudi Arabia, we’re just south of the border with Iraq and north of the border with Yemen and with the Saudi war in Yemen afoot, an extremist from Yemen or an ISIS operative from Iraq may slip through the security net and blow up shopping mall to make a political statement, with me happly sitting in my car at the parking zone.

worrying about the reckless driving style of most Saudi drivers and how, despite having taken all precautions, a young man with a Chrysler or Dodge muscle car might get it into his head to do the Tokyo Drift, lose control and hit my car (i don’t want to imagine my life in a wheelchair or my wife widowed and my kids orphaned).

they say that mixed marriages in Kenya don’t work out.

i’m a Muslim and my wife’s a Christian and we somehow make it work out.

with love, trust, empathy and compassion, we make it work out.

and if my delightful four year old daughter isn’t proof enough that where there’s a will, there’s a way, i just dont know what is.

i miss my clan back at home.