Even before I stepped off the plane, America had thrust me onto center stage, raising the curtain on a wild spectacle of chaos, culture clashes, and epic gaffes.

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Fresh from his Kenyan village, Andayi arrives in Detroit to study at Eastern Michigan University, convinced he is stepping into a land of milk, honey, and limitless opportunities. Instead, he collides with a relentless storm of culture shock: slang he can’t decode, machines he can’t master, and customs that leave him baffled or sprinting for cover. Everyday life becomes a comedy of errors—he leaps off escalators in terror, bolts from the man sent to pick him up, mistakes “pizza” for a person’s name, and flees from hot dogs he believes are real dog meat. Even the all-you-can-eat buffet, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Dollar Store transform into cultural booby traps. His sincere attempts to adapt only spiral further into chaos. A swimming class tete a tete escalates into a sexual harassment fiasco; simmering fish heads in a dorm kitchen spark an X-rated uproar; a voicemail blunder leads to a blow-up laced with obscenities, and his first city bus ride nearly ends in tragedy. Before long he is rattled by America’s serial-killer realities, totally lost in his basic computer skills class, and at last, storms out of a BYOB party he mistakes for a racist gathering. While the hilarity is constant, beneath the slapstick lies a deeper journey of resilience, grit, and the aching quest to belong. At its heart, one question remains: Can you take a man out of Africa without taking the African out of the man?

Welcome aboard and strap in for a hilarious ride—where culture shock hits harder and funnier—as one village boy’s dream unravels into a thousand missteps on his quest to survive, adapt, and thrive.

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