“I’d say it would be much easier getting there from Hawaii than it would be from Kenya.”
The flight length from Hawaii is twice as far as any single flight length from Kenya to the US..
Go look at a map.
Distance from Honolulu to Seattle: 2680 miles
Distance from Nairobi, Kenya to Seattle: 8994 miles.
I don’t know how many flights or legs it would have taken in the early 1960s to get from Africa to Seattle, and neither do you.
But I do know that the distance from Hawaii to Washington is only 30% of the distance from Kenya to Seattle.