KENYA

My fourth Earth Expeditions adventure was to the magical country of Kenya. We (Samantha Battersby-Roberts, Eileen Keating, Rachel Medley, Suzanne Waite, Kelsey Edens, Emily Summers, Morgan Weigel, Natalie Cibel, Lauren Belcher, Kelly Fischbach, Sydney McCartt,  Selina Niblett, Kristen Luise, Saadat Faiz, Lila Fried, Ashley Revay, Carlee Simpson, our instructors Lily Maynard and Jerran Orwig and me) spent time with the game scouts in Amboseli and then flew in tiny planes into the South Rift Valley to the Lale'enok research center. This experience was wonderful and I learned so much about working in community and what it means to center community values in decison making.

Because I have not yet finished my full journal reflection, I have included my final reflection from the course I wrote after returning from Kenya.

I am so thankful that I was able to come on this Earth Expedition to Kenya as a 4th year student. Having programs affected by COVID for my 2nd and 3rd trips really caused me to not fully experience those places and I was so worried that this would happen again. Not only did illness not affect us this year, the group and interpersonal relationships developed added so much to my connection and belonging throughout our time in Kenya. I do not take for granted how much relationships matter and the importance of the day to day interactions between people affect this. In our current system of American life, we do not generally get to spend this much time with people without screens and other distractions. This is one of my favorite parts about Earth Expeditions, because I feel like we return to the way life used to be, when we could hang out and talk most of the time. Interspersed of course with taking magical game drives and hearing fantastic conservation stories. I am continuously amazed that I get to do this and I hope I can keep going.

When people ask me about Kenya, I have focused on a few main ideas.  The first are the connections of the Maasai and the community to the core values represented by the 5 E’s. In my workplace, we have established core values as a team, including, equity, justice, love, joy and community. Throughout meetings, retreats and interactions, we consider how these core values are represented and how we are living up to them as ideals. It was important to me to see how Lale’enok was also implementing and considering how the core values could be represented physically and through community interactions. Seeing this lets me think even more deeply about what these core values might look like in my own community and how we might be able to represent them through both interactions and physical representation. Community and joy are more clear to me than equity and justice but I am still working on all of them and how I can embody these ideas.

 Many of these values connect to my master plan because I am thinking about how connection and stewardship to land might encourage people to be more interested in long term protection of ecosystems. I think I would like to add some of the ideas of research and the future to my final projects as these are important to how I think about conservation and connection in California. Finally, respect as a core value means that all of the interactions in Kenya were moderated by this in the background. This was even evident in the ways that Cisco interpreted and described the interactions of the baboons. I think that having this core values means that people and relationships are more important than individual gain or achievement and this showed up in our conversations with everyone, including the play by the kids, greetings and transitions, how Musa the farmer described how they all use and share water, the community groups that determine when cattle can be moved to the dry land areas and how people shared and spoke.

Another aspect of the trip that struck me was the way that groups of people responded to and listened to each other. This showed up for me in the ways that when a person was speaking, there would be times that everyone would respond with a sound or word.  This did not just happen with the greeting call and response, Sopa-Epa. It also occurred during presentations and discussions. I asked a few people about this and they generally told me that it was because the speaker had asked a question and that the question required a response. But what this meant to me, was that the people were really listening. I think it was Mercy who said that in community conversations, what was important was that everyone had a chance to speak, and that it was more important that everyone would continue even if they said the same thing. Both of these things are different from the main cultural interactions I experience in my workplace. I tend to multitask which means I am not always totally listening, which would lead to me not being able to accurately respond to the verbal questions and also, I will generally not repeat something that has already been said, trying instead to streamline and shorten meetings and conversations. It is different to both be intently focused and listening as well as to value and support the contributions of all people. I would like to take this value back to my work and to consider how I might be able to listen and contribute.

Overall, this was my favorite EE so far. I loved all of them and I felt like I learned so much and made amazing connections on all of them. But this one was much more focused on the community organization of Lale’enok and the work that they were doing for conservation. I think that having the actual people of the community in the organization matters significantly. Additionally the fact that we were able to connect with the game scouts both at Amboseli and in Olkiramatian gave us connection to the land and people who were actively involved in wildlife conservation. At some of the other EE sites, I think the organizations we partner with are led by non-local people. At this site, although there is significant involvement by the Cincinnati Zoo, they do not take over the community decisions or plans, rather they support as the organization requests. This was clearer and stronger than at other sites I have visited.

I am so thankful to our group, to the time we were able to spend together and to the hopefully long term relationships we were able to forge in this experience.