Runaway Bride

Things didn’t work out so neatly. Lydia arrived the week before 9/11. The hotel business suffered such a drop-off that the school could not afford to house Lydia and the other international students. The school told them to go home.

During her brief internship, Lydia had met Richard Nyabworo, a man three years older than she, on a sightseeing trip to Savannah, Georgia, with a group of fellow students. Nyabworo, also there on vacation, spotted her Kenya T-shirt and struck up a conversation. Though he was from Kenya, he was not Masai. He took her in when the school dismissed its international students. Their friendship eventually turned romantic.

Lydia was determined to continue her studies and find work. She tried to enroll in a Texas college to major in nursing, but she learned she would have to return to Kenya to change her visa to be accepted at the college. She didn’t dare. Instead, she moved to Dallas and worked as a nursing aide at a nursing home.

Nyabworo moved to Minnesota in late 2002, and Lydia moved there too. She again found work as a nursing aide, this time at a nursing home in St. Louis Park. When her student visa expired in 2003, she obtained a work permit. She also completed her associate degree in culinary arts at Hennepin Technical College.

The threat of being sent back to Kenya—and the fate that awaited—stalked her. After much research into student visas, she learned about asylum protection. With the help of Richard Breitman, a Bloomington– based immigration attorney, she applied for asylum in April 2004. A month later, her application was denied because she had not met the requirement of applying within a year of entering the country. No one had told her about such a requirement during her first year in the United States. “I did not tell anyone about how I was afraid to return to Kenya because I did not know anyone well enough to trust them with that personal information,” she says.

Lydia was referred to a judge from the U.S. Department of Justice, who would consider her case. To win “withholding of removal” status, an applicant must convince the judge that if she returns to her home country, she would most likely face persecution because of her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. In her application, Lydia asserted her fear that if she were to go back to Kenya, the Masai would return her to her community, which would force her to undergo FGM, which can lead to death.

Reports from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Equality Now, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights corroborated the danger Lydia feared. “It is undoubtedly true that this applicant will face great danger, tortuous experiences, and a threat to her very life if she is forced to return to Kenya,” Samad swore in support of Lydia’s claim.