The Kind of Alone That Has Nothing to Do With Being Single

The video is less than two minutes long. A man sits on a street in Australia, talking to a stranger with a camera. His name is Ian. He went to St Joseph's Boys in Kitale, the kind of school that produces doctors and engineers and boys whose mothers brag at church. His old classmates remember him as bright. Disciplined. Going somewhere. The stranger asks how he ended up here, homeless, thousands of miles from home. The clip travels from Australia to a former classmate's phone, then into WhatsApp groups in Dallas and London and Nairobi. Within days, Kenyans in Queensland are organizing to get him home. Here is what nobody in the comment sections wanted to sit with. Before that camera found him, Ian was alone in that city for a long time. And most of us who watched the video know exactly what that kind of alone feels like. We just have jobs and apartments that hide it better. ## The lie we carried in our suitcases There is an unwritten rule for those of us who left. You can call home tired. You can call home broke, quietly, once. But you cannot call home lonely. Lonely sounds like weakness. Lonely sounds like you failed at the one thing you were supposed to do, which was make it. So we perform. We send the photos in front of the nice car. We wire the school fees. We show up on the family group chat with fire emojis and silence about everything else. Back home they say you are sorted, you have made it. And we let them believe it, because correcting them feels like a betrayal of everyone who sacrificed to send us here. That is the cultural lie: that success abroad and loneliness cannot live in the same body. They can. They usually do. ## When faith becomes a hiding place Here is where it gets complicated for those of us who pray. We were raised on God is with you. And it is true. But somewhere along the way, many of us started using that truth to dodge a different one: that God being with you was never designed to replace people being with you. Read Genesis again. Before sin ever entered the story, God looked at a man who had perfect communion with heaven and said it is not good for him to be alone. The first problem God ever named was not rebellion. It was isolation. Even Jesus, the night before the cross, took three friends into the garden and asked them to stay awake with him. He had the Father. He still wanted Peter within arm's reach. So when you sit in your apartment on a Sunday after streaming a Nairobi service at 3 a.m., and you tell yourself that Jesus is enough so the ache does not count, you are asking Scripture to bless something Scripture never blessed. There is a Swahili word for it, upweke (oo-pweh-keh), the loneliness that sits in the chest and stays. Naming it is not faithlessness. It is honesty. And honesty is where real faith starts. ## What it costs This is not only an emotional problem. Researchers now link chronic loneliness to depression, anxiety, heart disease, even early death. The former US Surgeon General called it an epidemic. But you do not need a report. You have felt it: the way you talk to yourself in the car because it is the only real conversation of the day. The way a missed call from home can wreck a whole evening. The way church, even when you attend one here, can feel like a crowded room where nobody knows your actual name, just your Sunday one. For diaspora couples, it shows up as marriages fraying under work schedules built for individualism. For single people, it shows up as years passing without one friendship that goes below the surface. For the strongest among us, it shows up like Ian: slowly, silently, and then all at once on a stranger's camera. ## The reframing Loneliness is not proof that you are weak, unspiritual, or ungrateful for the opportunity everyone prayed you into. It is proof that you are human in a country that was not built around your people. You came from a place where community was the default setting. You moved to a place where community must be built by hand, on purpose, against the grain of the culture. Nobody told you that part before you boarded the plane. Now you know. And what was built by hand once can be built by hand again, starting smaller than you think. ## One thing to do this week Not five things. One. Tell one person the truth. Not the group chat. One person. A Kenyan you trust, a pastor, a sister, an old classmate. Say the sentence you have been swallowing: I am doing fine on paper, but I am lonely here. That sentence has broken more chains than most sermons. And if someone crossed your mind while you read this, someone abroad you assume is thriving, send them a message tonight and ask a real question. Then wait for the real answer. The people carrying the most are usually the ones performing the best. Ian's classmates only found out when a camera did their job for them. Do not let a viral video be the first time your people learn how you are actually doing. If this found you in a quiet apartment far from home, we made Radio Kenya United for you. Come sit with us at [radiokenyaunited.com](https://radiokenyaunited.com).