The Republic of ARMY

2. Selfies

Author's Note: an introduction to Environmental Health. 😊

The week long conference in Beijing had been an eye opener for all the people who attended it. I learned so much more than I thought I ever would about the environment. Countries had sent in delegates who all had interesting things to present.

I especially loved Israel's presentation about organic farming. It made me want to go see it for myself.

We all picked up contacts from each other, and everyone left when they needed to. The Kenyan team stayed behind to further explore China. We flew to a few places that seemed very interesting. Our last stop before going back to Beijing and flying out was Guangzhou.

After looking at all the tourist sites, three of us decided to check out a nearby street's art gallery, and indulged our eyes and ears in the beauty of Oriental paintings and sketches.

I was happily taking photos after haggling over the price of a few bracelets I knew my mum would fancy, when I spotted a group of Asian men walking by. They all had face masks, but one of them stared pointedly at me.

I spotted him looking when I finished taking the photo. He had photo bombed it and made a 'peace' sign, which I had quickly discovered was a thing a lot of Asians did which didn't alarm me anymore.

Even then, I couldn't help but imagine how many wars we would have averted if those signs actually aided in communication and understanding and better human behaviour.

The masked guy ran after his friends while I easily walked up to mine and headed back to the hotel. I uploaded the photos to my google drive and sent some to my mum too. She always replied favourably to them.

We hurried back to Beijing later that evening. Our flight touched down and we rushed to the hotel to get some sleep. At midday of the next day, we were all at the airport and went through all the necessary checkpoints before boarding the plane.

Our flight back to Kenya was long, but we made the most of it. We had booked chairs near each other, so we exchanged stories and used the plane's WiFi to exchange texts.

The food was really good. I enjoyed the trip very much. Despite that, I missed my lovely house in Nairobi's Gigiri. I also really wanted to go visit my parents in Milimani. I had gifts for them, and I was pretty sure everyone would love them. Both of my brothers were home, so I knew they'd gladly enjoy my gifts, and my intern Mercy also got something small from me.

Since I lived a stone's throw away from work, I rarely ever needed to use my car. I walked to and fro, or even biked sometimes. It was good exercise, and helped a lot because I never got a chance to work out while I sat through meeting daily at the office.

The car that picked me up dropped me off at Gigiri, so I went in and took a nice shower and slept after eating noodles for dinner. That wasn't before I tweeted under a strange pen name that never failed to make a few people laugh. 'Chic-a-healer' was both my pen name on twitter and on Instagram. I also used it to write music for any companies looking to buy some for their artistes.

My catch phrase was, "need a filler? Chic-a-healer is here!"

Yes, as I said before, I have pretty much done everything in my time to prove to my dad that I am as good as my brothers, if not better. Back to our story though.

Since I was a big fan of KPOP, I obviously had followers of Kpop from a number of countries. I also followed quite a few of them back. So, after uploading my photo of Guangzhou, and falling asleep, I woke up at eight in the morning to a call from Mercy and she sounded very excited.

She was also a Kpop fan, so we had bonded over that when she was first assigned to my department.

She yelled into my phone about me being in the same photo with Kim Namjoon from BTS. I was still groggy and half asleep when she said it the first and second times. When she said it again, my eyes snapped open.

"Wait, what?!"

"Yes! Kim Namjoon photo bombed your Guangzhou selfie! Raina, how could you not see him?!"

My intern was crazy... Right?

"Check your twitter and Instagram! ARMY is going crazy over your update!"

Despite the exhaustion from my trip... I had to check my social media, which had blown up with mentions from hundreds of fans. There were a lot of theories around the picture, with some claiming that he finally had a girlfriend.

Not me.

They can't be talking about me... Right?

I am not Kim Namjoon's supposed girlfriend... Am I?

This was just a trick of the light... Right?

The theories kept blowing up on my timeline and I couldn't help but start to worry. Luckily, I didn't upload any photos with my face on them. Most had me wearing a baseball cap, and i'd take photos of the scenery behind me.

With that assurance in mind, I was able to fall asleep.

I wondered what Kim Namjoon would think if he found out that people thought he was actually in Guangzhou and that he photo bombed my picture.

I stared at the said picture and shook my head. Meh, that definitely was not him... Was it? It was probably just some cheeky model on his way to a photoshoot or something.

Right... Or something, right?