# Eight Maasai Rangers in Amboseli National Park

> Discover how eight Maasai rangers protect the wildlife of Kenya's Amboseli National Park and why their work matters so much for the park's fauna and flora.

- URL: https://langandtrip.com.ua/en/article/visim-reyndzheriv-masayi-amboseli/
- Language: en
- Published: 2022-12-23
- Categories: Hiking, Nature, Culture, Historic Sites, Mountains, Tours, Kenya, Relaxation

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As she packs her bags to head home for the first time in four months, Maasai ranger Purity Lakara, who patrols the land around Kenya's Amboseli National Park, famous for its free-roaming elephants and its views of Mount Kilimanjaro, is thrilled to be seeing her family for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic was declared.

![Maasai ranger patrolling in Amboseli National Park](/storage/image/prev/042023-32-1024x576.jpg)

"I missed sharing meals, the games and the fuss with my little daughter, the way I would fetch water for my mum, even helping my brothers herd the cattle. I missed all the things we usually do when I'm home," she says.

Lakara, 23, is one of eight women, the first in their families to hold a job, who make up Team Lioness, a wildlife ranger unit of the Olgulului Community Wildlife Rangers (OCWR).

The rangers patrol the Olgulului/Ololarashi Group Ranch (OOGR), a horseshoe of 580 square miles of community-owned land that almost entirely surrounds Amboseli National Park, a safari destination 134 miles southeast of Nairobi.

When Kenya closed its regional and international borders, and the tourism industry and livestock markets the community depends on vanished, OCWR cancelled all leave and asked its rangers, including Team Lioness, to stay at their posts indefinitely to protect wildlife from desperate poachers. Now that the country is cautiously but hopefully reopening and safari visitors are returning, the rangers can finally head back to their villages, two at a time.

When Lakara arrived in Meshenani on July 29, neighbours and family members welcomed her, walking her to the house, singing and clapping as she held her two-year-old daughter in her arms.

"My mother said she's very happy now because I'm back. She said they had waited a long time for this day, so they are all here beside me, rejoicing and celebrating again," says Lakara, who is the sole breadwinner for her family of 11.

## The genesis of Team Lioness

Team Lioness was created by the global non-profit International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in early 2019, after Maasai community leader Kiruyan Katamboi, affectionately known as Mama Esther, approached the organisation and asked it to hire women from the community as rangers.

Because Maasai communities are patriarchal, women are shut out of leadership and decision-making, and the community ranger unit patrolling the Group Ranch had been made up entirely of men.

![Members of Team Lioness on patrol](/storage/image/prev/042023-33-1024x576.jpg)

Christopher Kiarie, IFAW's manager of program operations and grants, says that although IFAW embraced the idea enthusiastically, the men in OCWR and the wider community were sceptical that women could handle the work. The community land is vast, nearly half the size of the state of Rhode Island, and a typical OCWR patrol may cover 12 miles of rugged terrain on foot, often in tough conditions.

Unlike the Kenya Wildlife Service, which patrols Amboseli National Park, OCWR rangers are unarmed, so when they meet dangerous animals or aggressive people they have to rely on their skills and call for KWS backup if they sense a situation could turn bad.

Even the women chosen for Team Lioness, one from each of the community's eight clans, doubted themselves.

"I used to think I couldn't do it," admits ranger Sharon Nankinyi. "But after we trained, we became very strong women. We proved to the community that what a man can do, a woman can do better."

## Gruelling work

In normal times, the Team Lioness rangers usually work for three weeks, rotating through OCWR's six camps and mobile unit, then take one week off.

A typical day might start at 5 a.m. with a run and breakfast, followed by a briefing and a morning patrol that usually lasts four hours. Depending on the day's tasks, the rangers may spend the afternoon at base, ready to respond to an emergency call before debriefing on the day's work.

Apart from having separate sleeping and bathing quarters, they do the same work as their 68 male colleagues and patrol in joint teams of varying sizes.

They record the location and activity of wild animals, talk with members of the local community to learn about any suspicious or troubling activity, and step in when help is needed, perhaps pulling a stuck elephant calf out of a muddy watering hole or finding children who have wandered too far from the village.

While two-thirds of the men in the ranger unit are illiterate, the members of Team Lioness have earned the equivalent of a high school diploma and excel at compiling the reports required for IFAW's "TenBoma" approach to wildlife security, under which the organisation works with other NGOs and ranger teams, community members and Interpol to combine actionable local intelligence with data analysis.

OCWR director of operations Patrick Papatiti says that watching the team convince community members not to hunt the lions or hyenas that had killed livestock, he saw the male rangers, chosen because they were considered some of the community's finest warriors, change their attitude toward working with women.

"I can say with confidence that \[the men\] now see them as colleagues," he says.

![Team Lioness rangers documenting wildlife activity](/storage/image/prev/042023-34-1024x576.jpg)

## The dangers of being a ranger

Working as a wildlife ranger anywhere in the world is hard and dangerous work.

Every year on July 31, the International Ranger Federation and the Thin Green Line Foundation mark World Ranger Day by publishing an honour roll of remembrance for rangers and people in similar roles who died in the line of duty over the previous 12 months.

Of the 138 deaths on this year's list, almost a third were homicides. Alongside natural causes, drownings, wild animal attacks and vehicle accidents, the 2020 list included a new category of cause of death: Covid-19, which killed five of the rangers listed.

The pandemic has only made Team Lioness's work harder.

Huge losses in tourism revenue, Kiarie says Amboseli National Park's income has fallen by more than 90 percent, have forced government-funded agencies in the region to scale back patrols.

Because OCWR's funding through IFAW is donation-based and is not affected the same way, the community rangers have stepped up to fill the gap. During a week when the risk of poaching was considered especially high, Team Lioness increased its patrols from the usual one or two to three a day, covering more than 35 miles on foot in total.

Social distancing measures make it harder for rangers to meet community members to gather information about potential poaching activity or to resolve problems. Staying in touch across the community land is already difficult because of poor cellular reception, and the problem is made worse by the wet weather at this time of year.

When the camp's solar panels can't generate power, the rangers are forced to switch off their phones to save battery, further reducing their chances of receiving timely reports of poaching activity, all the more pressing now that many people have sold most of their livestock and hardship is felt even more sharply.

"Since Corona began, there has been bushmeat poaching, because now people are jobless. They end up killing gazelles and giraffes to feed their children," says ranger Nankinyi.

After receiving a tip from locals in April, OCWR sent out a patrol that included three members of Team Lioness and discovered that four men had killed a giraffe the day before, roasted the meat and left behind what they couldn't eat to collect later. The rangers called in KWS for backup and set up an ambush. When the men returned, they were arrested.

![Rangers responding to a poaching report in the field](/storage/image/prev/042023-35-1024x576.jpg)

"It's very sad when the very people you work with \[in the community\], the ones you tell about the importance of wild animals, are the ones you see killing those wild animals," says Ruth Sikeita, one of the rangers who arrived at the scene.

Papatiti says that although bushmeat poaching later increased, the number of elephants killed for their ivory has fallen. He estimates that between OCWR's founding in 2010 and the start of IFAW's support in 2018, three to five elephants were killed on community land each year, and just one elephant was lost that year. Since then, no elephant has been killed on the Group Ranch.

"I attribute the success to the dedication of the rangers and to the fact that we've built very good relations with the community, which is our source of information," Papatiti explains.

## The impact of Covid-19

The members of Team Lioness also have more familiar Covid-19 worries.

According to Johns Hopkins University, as of September 4 Kenya had recorded 34,884 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 584 deaths.

The WHO did not respond to a query about the number of cases in Amboseli, but Papatiti believes there had been 17 cases and five deaths there, though he has no figures for the ranch community in particular.

IFAW provides masks, gloves and hand sanitiser to protect the rangers returning to their home villages from catching Covid-19. If a ranger feels unwell, OCWR has arranged with staff at a nearby hospital to run tests at base.

Now that Kenya is gradually reopening, interregional travel was permitted from July and international flights resumed on August 1, locals worry that the increased number of people, especially from outside Kenya, carries a risk.

"We see on television and hear that Europe and the US are the hardest-hit countries, so we're afraid they'll bring the disease here," says Ruth Sikeita.

There are other pandemic-related shifts too. Because schools have been closed for so long, children are more likely to drop out of education as they try to find ways to feed their families. Young women who doubt the pandemic will ever end may marry earlier.

"It's very sad. We need girls to get an education so they can join us in Team Lioness," says Nankinyi.

On a personal level, the rangers say the hardest part has been being forced apart from their families.

## A community that is changing

Back in her village and reunited with her two children, Ruth Sikeita notices that her eight-year-old daughter Priscilla has grown taller and her three-year-old son Bonham is talking more. She's grateful to her mother-in-law, who supports wildlife conservation efforts, for caring for her children while she was away working.

"They are very healthy, you can see now," she says, gently pinching her son's arm. "They are very clean. So I thank her and the whole community."

The success of Team Lioness has not only changed perceptions of OCWR, it has also shifted attitudes toward gender roles in the community.

"Before, we weren't allowed to speak with the men around us, we weren't allowed to talk with our fathers at the table, to share, or to have dinner or breakfast all together," says Nankinyi.

"We simply thought we were nothing to society, that we were only good for fetching water and bearing children. But now we've broken the taboo and we can work with men."

Looking ahead to a post-pandemic world, the members of Team Lioness want to keep building their skills and knowledge and to keep influencing their community. Christopher Kiarie says IFAW will work with telecom companies and the local government to improve coverage across the community land, and will soon roll out a radio system dedicated to the rangers, with support from the EU.

![Team Lioness rangers looking toward the future](/storage/image/prev/042023-36-1024x576.jpg)

"Once the radio equipment is up and running, communication between the community rangers will improve significantly," he says.

Every member of Team Lioness wants to see more women join their ranks.

"There are more women in the community who are passionate about this work, so I'm confident that if the opportunity comes up, more women will show up here for interviews. It will be even more than expected," says Purity Lakara, adding that she wants the number of female rangers to match or exceed the number of men.

Papatiti is also eager to recruit more women.

"Their number will depend on the availability of funds. When I'm given