Making Conservation Fun: Imara Njeri’s Creative Approach

And how was the transition like from city life to coming into the Mara? And was there like a specific moment in the wild in Mara that shifted you from appreciating nature to like, to feeling responsible for protecting it? That you've mentioned about topis, about cheetahs, about, uh, leopards, lions, all these animals that you've fallen in love with over the past couple of years.

Um, was there that light bulb moment of saying, "Hey, it's not just about the perfect photos, guys, but it's all about how can we conserve this for our future generations, our kids and their kids?" That sort of thing.

So the whole transition, city life to, let's say Mara life was, uh, yeah, of course you get homesick, you're missing family.

You're missing like a bit of familiar, familiar things like, uh, language.

Obvi- obviously now being in Maasai Mara, majority of the language spoken is Maa.

I don't know Maa.

Yeah.

So I was like, "Oh, wow, it's a whole different, I mean, a whole different region." Even the culture, like you're seeing a lot of traditional things a bit different.

And for me it was okay.

It was just about like, okay, um, it's a whole new language around.

That's thing, I tell you, everyone was speaking English and Kiswahili.

Now, it's a bit different from Nairobi obviously.

But the sleep, I slept much better in the bush.

I preferred to have natural sounds.

I don't like having...

You hear any buses at 6:00 AM or anything.

For me, nature...

So the whole transition was quite smooth, but of course the whole aspect of missing home and, um, the time even noticing like, yeah, it's not just about us and maybe even us as taking pictures of these animals.

There's some few days when you realize some people weren't behaving properly in the reserve or in the park.

And when you see that you're like, "But hold on, you've come all the way to see these animals.

You paid over thousands and thousands of dollars to come here, and when you come here, you treat them, you treat the animals like they're not, they don't have any feelings or any emotions or, you know, you just think them as just animals, but they're not." So that's the point where I was like, okay, 'cause if we now start talking about like animals and how...

Like recently learning even, like you talk about elephants, like you know a lot about elephants.

So even like diff- like how, for example, like apparently a matriarch or an older female in the group can actually fake estrus to give relationship advice to younger, um, elephants.

To give them like more of a, like, this is how it can be done and this is a high success rate if you do it this way.

So me learning about that also, because a lot of animals are able to fake estrus, like lions protect their cubs.