They waited years for jobs that were never their dream

He left Kenya in 2020 as a respected librarian and lecturer and never expected to end up as a manual worker earning Sh1,099 an hour, hiding from immigration officers in a stranger’s basement and living with fear of being deported.

In the US, he has worked five jobs in five years, from a manual worker on a food-production line to a quality-control worker, supervisor, assistant manager and, eventually, a registered nurse.

None of those was the career he set out to build.

The 41-year-old left Kenya for what was supposed to be a short conference in Tennessee, but the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 stranded him in the US. Then he saw an opportunity to advance his career abroad.

“There were no incoming flights, and there were no outgoing flights. So we had to stay back,” he remembers.

With nowhere to go and no income, Stephen turned to a Kenyan community he barely knew in Pittsburgh. There, he learned about a food company willing to hire immigrants who had entered the US on visitors’ visas and were not yet legally allowed to work. He left Tennessee for Pennsylvania in 2020, making the day-and-a-half journey by bus.

The company, Fourth Street BBQ, made mainly sandwiches, and an Indonesian manager welcomed him alongside other Jamaican and Haitian immigrants, many of whom, like Stephen, were willing to take factory jobs for low wages.

“It was an intense physical job,” he says. “I think that’s where my perception of everything changed, and it has shaped how I see things to this day.”

“I was doing manual jobs and being paid Sh1,099 an hour,” he says. The shifts were unpredictable, starting sometimes at 6am, sometimes at 3pm and other times at 11 pm.

After some time, the climate for immigrants in the US grew more hostile. Immigration officers began conducting sweeps in Pennsylvania, and Stephen’s six-month visitor visa was weeks from expiring. He remembers seeing military-style trucks in his neighbourhood and running for cover with other Kenyans he lived with.

A retired white police officer who rented rooms to the Kenyans quietly offered them a place to hide in his basement. He told them he would prepare it as a refuge in case immigration officers came to the house.

The raids came close more than once. “One day I was outside, coming from work. The work van dropped me near McDonald’s with a couple of other immigrants. We had to run,” he recalls.

He feared being taken to a detention centre while still recovering from Covid-19 and without a stable job.

Stephen turned to an immigration lawyer, who mapped out a legal strategy for him. The lawyer asked for Sh97,000 in legal fees, which Stephen paid in small instalments from his Sh1,099-an-hour wages.

The application was filed on August 22, 2020. Within six weeks, Stephen had received his work authorisation card, giving him a legal path to employment in the US.

A year later, in 2021, he landed a quality-control job on a production line after a chance meeting with a Kenyan coworker and a colleague from Namibia led him to a manager named Michelle.

“I love your English,” Michelle told him after their first conversation and sent him for advanced training.

His pay rose from Sh1,099 an hour to Sh1,250 as a supervisor and eventually to Sh2,900 as an assistant manager overseeing electronic resource processing. The role took him to other states, where he presented cost-saving systems he had designed himself.

Friends connected him to a Kenyan nurse living in New York, who would later become his wife.

“I could finish my work at 1pm, get into my car, go to New York from Pennsylvania,” he says.

His wife nudged him toward nursing school just as they welcomed their first child in October 2022. He describes that period as brutal.

“I almost dropped out of nursing school thrice,” he admits, describing sleepless nights caring for a newborn while studying for weekly exams.

He qualified as a nurse on August 5, 2023, three years and five months after he first landed in the US as a stranded conference visitor with no plan.

Is he happier with his career path now? “My dream is not in nursing, and has never been in nursing, but I’m proud of the job,” he says, “My true ambition still points toward Kenyan politics and academia.”

Chasing a dream in 3 countries

Mercy Adhiambo has spent more than a decade chasing a career in healthcare across three countries: Lebanon, Qatar and Luxembourg. She has worked as a nursing aide, makeup artist, and wellness therapist, retraining herself along the way.

Now, at 32, she is waiting for one more email, a visa that could finally take her to Luxembourg and the healthcare career she has been trying to build.

In 2014, she took her first job abroad, in Lebanon, where she worked for two years as a caregiver in a hospice before moving into private homes, taking care of elderly patients living with Alzheimer's and dementia.

“I worked with patients, both in hospital and in my bedroom,” she says.

In 2016, she moved to Qatar after paying an agent Sh120,000 to arrange her relocation. She started as a caregiver but switched paths after four months, spending the next two years working as an assistant makeup artist.

Three years later, she returned to Kenya and enrolled at MP Shah Hospital for formal healthcare-assistant training. After qualifying, she worked at Nairobi Hospital, picked up part-time nurse-assistant shifts at MP Shah and took on additional hospital and home-care jobs in Ongata Rongai.

There was no single, stable job. Instead, she pieced together work wherever she could find it, building the experience that she hoped would later help her pursue better opportunities.

“I had a lot of jobs,” she says.

In 2022, she returned to Qatar for a second time, this time at more than twice the cost of her first move.

“I paid an agent Sh280,000,” she says.

When she arrived, she found a job at a wellness centre doing therapy and massage, despite having no formal training in either.

“I felt lost,” she says, but was pleased with the salary which was more than she had earned from jobs back home, even if it was far removed from the healthcare work she had trained for.

Mercy enrolled in an online therapy course, studying after her shifts ended. At the same time, she completed a nurse-assistant course in Qatar, paying Sh120,000 for the training.

“I never took a month off,” she says.

Year after year, Mercy applied to hospitals and private clinics, only to find herself blocked by paperwork her employer refused to release.

Her qualifications were not enough; without a release letter, prospective employers could not hire her. “If you want to employ me, just employ me,” she remembers telling one interviewer, frustrated by a system that kept her qualifications from opening the door to a better job.

She recalls a Syrian-owned company that offered her a formal job, but her employer still refused to release her. “They needed an appeal letter,” she says, describing the same bureaucratic barrier that had blocked her before.

Mercy also tried, more than once, to leave the Gulf. In 2024, she applied for study and work programmes in Germany and Sweden, spending about Sh220,000 on the German application alone. It was rejected. She applied to Sweden weeks later, paid again and was rejected there too.

Last year, a Luxembourg job offer gave Mercy fresh hope. She passed the interview and received an offer letter. Then the waiting began again—the visa was the only thing left.

“I have done everything. The only thing that is remaining as we speak is the visa,” she says.

For now, the next chapter of her career sits in an inbox, waiting for an answer. If the Luxembourg opportunity does not work out, Mercy is considering staying in Qatar for a few more months, perhaps until next year. Eventually, she hopes to return to Kenya and open her own therapy business or train others in the skills she once had to teach herself online.

Her advice to anyone dreaming of working abroad is blunt. “Lower your expectations. Abroad is not what people think it is,” she says.

Failed fake marriage

For Abubakar Juma, the journey to a better life abroad took years of rejection, deception and false starts before it finally began to move.

The 57-year-old tried Canada, Germany and the US, losing money to agents and schemes involving forged documents and a fake marriage plan.

At the American embassy, an official mocked the marriage plan outright to his face. “You must be out of your mind. Or you're just using her to get to America,” he was told before being denied a visa.

But he didn't give up. Each attempt promised an escape from Kenya; each ended with another door closing.

Dubai finally opened one in 2003. But even there, success did not come quickly. He travelled to Dubai on a visit visa.

His first job attempt was to broker horticultural exports between Kenyan farmers and Dubai importers, dealing in avocados, snow peas and French beans. The business lasted about a year before the importers cut him out and began dealing directly with his Kenyan contacts.

Broke and running out of options, he took the only job he could find: a security guard position at a building on Sheikh Zayed Road. “If it’s the only one that I could do, I said, why not?”

He worked and saved for a driving licence, which cost about Sh230,000, hoping it would open the door to better opportunities. He earned the licence in 2004, piecing together the money from tips he received from Emirates cabin crew he had befriended at the accommodation block.

A year later, an Emirati offered him a job in cargo logistics. But when his security employer learned he wanted to leave, the company tried to block the move by imposing a two-year work ban. A sympathetic public relations officer at Emirates eventually intervened on his behalf, clearing the way for him to take the job.

Juma spent eight years in Emirates’ tracing department, tracking missing cargo shipments across airports around the world. Around 2010, he was promoted to commercial and business development, overseeing airport operations. Looking back, he describes the years before that breakthrough simply: “It’s nearly a decade of false starts before things finally settled.”

Looking back at the young man who once paid strangers for a fake Rwandan identity and forged German paperwork just to get on a plane, Juma says patience ultimately carried him further than any shortcut could have.

Twenty-three years after leaving Kenya, Juma left the UAE and started Fahari Ventures, a company supplying spare parts to clients in Kenya. He funded the business with savings from his years in cargo logistics and commercial operations.

Today, he continues to expand the network, connecting suppliers in Dubai with clients in Kenya. “We have to keep trying to find new ways,” he says.

He has also opened a travel office in Nairobi, helping other Kenyans navigate Dubai’s visa and job opportunities, something he wishes someone had done for him. He now warns clients about the scams that once cost him money, time and years of false starts.

“No one will give you an answer that you might not like for the first time. So I think that's the way we need to work,” he says.

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