Too much to pack, not enough hugs: A Kenyan man's last 48 hours in America

Sergio Martínez-Beltrán

August 19, 2025 / 2:06 pm

LANSING, Mich. — Five suitcases are scattered around Samuel Kangethe's living room in his home in West Lansing, a neighborhood lined with tall trees and big front yards in Michigan's capital. Clothes mixed with finance and accounting books, and somewhere in the chaos are his Air Jordan sneakers.

"I just want to take the clothes that I need," Kangethe says. "I don't know, it's just too much."

Too much trying to pack 16 years of his life into a handful of suitcases, and deciding what to pack, and what to leave behind.

Kangethe is leaving the U.S., the country where he earned graduate degrees through a student visa, where he worked as an accountant for a beer

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