Senior Mara Trip 2014

This year for our IC senior trip we were as usual supposed to go to coast, unfortunately this year because of security issues the school had to change that and they decided to take us to the Mara instead with the ME to WE group. I already went on this trip in 10^th grade and I remember it being an amazing trip so I was really excited for this one, especially since my entire grade was going as well (almost all).

This trip started off badly and emotionally as 9 of my classmates and 3 of my best friends had to stay behind for possession of substances. We left at 11 instead of 9 after having all of our bags searched by our chaperones. Everyone who went on the trip, the teachers included, was sad and shocked. After that we left knowing that the ride to the camp would take 5hours. When we arrived there, the facilitators, the Me to We people were very welcoming, sympathetic and friendly to all of us. They then showed us our tents and told us how they are trying to economize water, and explained how everything worked there (showers, meal time, rules). The boys had a different camp than the girls and that made us all think that we weren’t treated like 17 and 18 year olds. Earlier in that day, we visited a local school, and the kids were so exited to see us and wanted to play with us so bad, then in the afternoon, we just got back to the camp and played some games and hung out. It was nice at night for dinner when everyone was together as a grade. We were then divided in 4 groups (A, B, C, D) and I ended up in group D. Then Tuesday, we visited some Masai villages and houses and we also did some service and helped the Masai mothers, we carried around 20litres of water from the river to their houses which was about 3km away, and that was the most challenging and hard thing we did in that trip (it wasn’t that bad for me because I already did it in 10^th grade). Then we listened to some of their stories and that was quite interesting. Later in that day we started building a school for the local Masai kids. In addition to that we had a beading workshop with the Masai Mamas, which was also fun and interesting.

On Wednesday we went on a safari very early in the morning and that was really nice because we got to see many animals, had lunch in the park and bonded with each other. In the afternoon we did some masai training activities.

On Thursday morning we planted trees and later we went to the Fairmont, which was very nice, we had lunch there and we got to swim and hang out with our grade.

We came back home after five days, and we were all really tired after everything we had done, and the school days seemed so boring after the exiting activities we did back in Masai mara. I thought the 10^th grade trip was better than this one, especially because of the incident on Monday morning which kind of ruined the mood from the beginning. However I still enjoyed it and learned a lot about the masai cultures, we did some service, played with masai kids, laughed a lot at nights, and even though the sanitary facilities (bathrooms, showers…) were not what we’re used to back at home, the trip was good.