A Wild Wild Holiday

Happy New Year and Welcome to a new decade! 2020 has already been quite exciting, and maybe not in the way we'd all hoped, so I'm here to renew our 2019 naive holiday cheer! This is the holidays in the Mara.

Needless to say, here at Fisi Camp we are pretty bad at remembering to get into the holiday spirit. In fact, through much of December we were stuck in camp thanks to an "enhanced" short rains season, so our morale was pretty low. But it wasn't all a loss. Matthew and I are now very good at the card games Uno and Memory so, you know, who's the real winner here.

The Mara. The Mara definitely won this round. But I did have something else to look forward to, my parents and little brother flew all the way over to visit, and it is always refreshing to remember that the Mara is a pretty awesome place (which you can forget when you haven't actually seen the Mara in a few weeks thanks to a very angry sky). According to them, the best part of their Mara experience was actually playing Uno with Matthew and myself, so perhaps our aptitude for childhood card games is a positive rather than a negative!

They would like you all to know that they were amazed by the amount of elephants in the Mara Triangle and adored having 2 cheetahs walk in front of the car. All in all, it was wonderful having my family visit. Especially because it came with snacks!

My mom, per my begging, brought me a plethora of Trader Joe's goodies! From chocolate covered marshmallows to Greek yogurt cookie sandwiches, I felt absolutely spoiled. And yes, they are all delicious.

It's so fun showing people around the Mara when they've never seen anything like it. It's a wonderful way to be reminded of how unique this environment is and how lucky I am to live here. Of course, seeing my family over the holidays was wonderful, and it goes without saying that holidays are some of the times people get most homesick, so bringing some of home to my temporary home was the easiest cure for that.

My year in the Mara is coming to a close (sad!) but it isn't ending without a bang! We have new cubs and we even found teeny cubs with my family in the car, they must be a good luck charm. We also have quite a few hyenas immigrating into our South Clan, so things are definitely heating up here in the Mara. I have to believe having visitors kick-started it all.

Happy 2020 everybody! Welcome to a new decade, and may it be filled with hyena babies. 😁