It was still dark when eight-year-old Jamani Lororua slipped out of his home and started walking.
He had no escort, no map, and no phone. What he had was a memory: a single glimpse of our main Ewaso Lions Camp, pointed out to him from a bus window weeks earlier as we drove him home after five unforgettable days at Lion Kids Camp. That one glimpse was enough. By five o’clock that morning, Jamani had set off on foot, determined to find his way back.
A 33-Kilometre Walk Through Lion and Elephant Country
The journey was not a short or easy one. Jamani walked 33 kilometres (about 21 miles) through Westgate and Meibae Conservancies, a landscape shared by elephants, lions, and other wildlife, completely alone. For a grown adult, that walk would require preparation. For an eight-year-old boy, it was an extraordinary act of courage, determination, and trust in a place that had changed how he saw the world around him.
When Jamani finally arrived, dusty and tired, but with a big smile on his face, he told us simply that he was on his way back to Lion Kids Camp, the place he had spent five days falling in love with, learning, and imagining a different future for himself and the wildlife around him.
What Five Days at Camp Had Given Him
Left: Jamani with a smile during his first Lion Kids Camp playing the Ewaso Lion’s Conservation Game. Right: Jamani during his first wildlife safari.
Jamani had not forgotten a thing. He recounted wildlife tracking, the food chain, and the principles of coexistence with the kind of clarity that comes from genuine understanding, not memorisation. And then, unprompted, he told us exactly what he intended to do differently because of what he had learned:
“When I see lions, I will take our livestock away and give the lions space. And I will not kill dikdik again.”
It is hard to overstate what those two sentences represent. Jamani comes from a community where livestock and predators frequently come into conflict, and where hunting dikdik is common among children. That walk said everything. In finding his way back to Lion Kids Camp, he was already showing us a shift not just in knowledge, but in values and behaviour, the very outcome conservation education hopes for, achieved in real time, by a child.
A Story That Gives Us Hope
Jamani was safely reunited with his family. But in many ways, his journey is only just beginning. His walk is a vivid, almost unbelievable, illustration of what Lion Kids Camp can do: not simply teach children facts about wildlife, but instill in them a genuine sense of connection, responsibility, and love for the natural world around them, strong enough that an eight-year-old would set out alone, before sunrise, through wildlife country, just to return to it.
We made Jamani a promise that day: we will welcome him back to the next Lion Kids Camp.
His story reminds us why this work matters, and gives us real hope for what a new generation of conservationists, even the very youngest ones, can become.
