Before the Cameras Came

I was a writer before I was ever on television. Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing—and started being watched. This is how that began, and why I’m finally ready to tell my story.

Since I was a little girl, all I ever wanted to do was write. As I got older I began to judge myself harshly and so I also judged my words. I judged so hard, that I was no longer able to share my personal stories with the world. Then I stopped writing about myself altogether. I still took freelance writing gigs, but nothing that called for me to put my story out to the public. The dream I had as a little girl extinguished. One day I will write in the way that I used to… but not today. That day was every day. Until now. Now I am compelled to share my story on my own terms. If no one reads, that will be okay. At least I am writing my story. Rusty perhaps, but writing.

While this entry will likely not be a long one, the story that it belongs to, is. For now, we can begin, at a point in time, almost six years ago.

Although I had been living mostly in Africa, I had come home to the US to receive prenatal care. I was sleeping on my parents’ couch in their living room when I was jolted upright by massive anxiety that had provoked me into a cold sweat of panic. What had I done? I had been cast in a reality TV show called 90 Day Fiance: The Other Way about relationships between Americans and their foreign partners. The very next day a camera crew was to arrive at our suburban New Jersey home, to document my journey as I navigated the complexities of intercultural love and pregnancy.

The opportunity had seemed to fall into my lap. In those days I scrolled through Craigslist looking for freelance writing gigs. This time I’d come across an ad that was looking for Americans who had fallen in love with a foreigner. My first thought was that these anonymous Craigslist posters may be able to help me bring my love, Biniyam, to the US. By that point, I’d already spoken to several lawyers about procuring a visa for him in time for the birth of our baby, and was feeling rather desperate. When I called the number I was informed that they could not help at all in any visa process, rather they were looking for people to appear on their television program. Reality TV had never interested me much, except for the occasional episode of Pawn Stars. Before that phone call, ‘90 Day Fiance’, meant nothing to me.

The truth was that I held an innate prejudice against reality TV. It was all scripted anyways. People could be so naive. How could anyone believe in that nonsense, let alone waste their time on it? (How much I was to learn... and to understand!) I mentioned the phone call to Biniyam, disappointed by the fact that it had been another dead end concerning help with the visa. However, he had heard of it. He reminded me of an incident a few months prior in Kenya. He was watching a show in our apartment and had asked me to come look at the television. There was a loud blonde woman yelling at her Nigerian boyfriend. Immediately I dismissed his calls to direct anymore attention at the screen. “Don’t you know these shows are fake?” Then I walked out the door.

Biniyam and I were an unlikely match. We had very little in common. Yet, I was struck upon our first planned meet up, with how very talented he was. He showed me music videos he had directed, choreographed, and performed in. He had competed internationally in Tae Kwon Do and MMA. He had worked at several nightclubs and hotels as a dancer alongside his gorgeous female partner and he had been a performer in the African Dream Circus. One of the first things I ever said to him was, “If you were in the US, you’d be able to accomplish so much.” Then he promptly asked me if I would manage his career. The truth was that I had no experience in such endeavors and I told him so. “I’m not really sure what I can do for you, but I can try.” This frequently happened to me in Ethiopia. People would approach me with high expectations of the sorts of things that I could do for them. It had happened to me in several countries. Maybe it was a vestige of that old rumor that the American streets were paved with gold, and some of that imagined sparkle had left its sheen on our collective American shoulders.

Biniyam’s friends called him Baby, and I began to do the same. It’s actually a surprisingly common nickname in Addis Ababa, the city he hails from. He had a knack for getting me to do things for him that I would likely not do for anyone else. He could be persistent, pushy even. He encouraged me to use my soft skills to reach out to people and organizations. It dawned on me that maybe I actually could help him, and how spectacular it felt to help people! A bit of a weakness of mine, really. So this was the mindset that I was in at the particular time that I happened across this casting.

“I tell you about that show. Remember?”

It dawned on me that exposure was exactly what Biniyam needed to help launch his career internationally. He was attractive and talented. True, the show called for both of us, but people wouldn’t even be paying attention to me. He could carry all our scenes himself really. All I would need to do would be to show up, and let him shine. We’d also be paid for it, and with a baby on the way, it would be nice to have some extra cash in our pocket.

Now here I was—about to film a television show. The internet could be quite mean, I was at least aware of that. People would have good excuses to judge me. My life always tended towards the unconventional. I had spent the last several years living around the Middle East and Africa, and before that South America. Now I was pregnant with the child of a man that I had known for months, not years. For the most part, I was convinced that I could appear on one season of this silly show, use it for its purpose and fade into the delightful obscurity that I had lived in for so long. Yet the jolt of fear that had pulsed through me, awakening me in the dead of night, told me that my life was about to change forever. I just didn’t know how much. And now almost six years later I am finally ready to write it all down.

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