Welcome to our website and to our Esupetai Maasai Community.

The photos you see on this page are taken from the land that is slated for white rhinos and our larger conservancy. Visit us often and we will keep you updated on our progress.  We have our email address posted in case you have any questions or comments.  Sopa! or Greetings! as we say in Maa, the Maasai language.

We are a Maasai community located in the Kenya Mara Eco-system, an area that comprises the Maasai Mara National Reserve (MMNR) as well as a strip of land running 100 kilometers roughly along the northern Kenyan-Tanzanian border. Our community is establishing a white rhinocerous sanctuary – a place where white rhinos can be preserved, protected and allowed to breed.  We have come together as a community to form the Sanctuary because we see our traditional way of life being radically changed, and our primary resource, wildlife, being extinguished. We also wish to find ways the wildlife can bring benefit to our families since they continue to pose danger as we move about and our children walk to school.
For two thousand years or so, we have moved our cows, and our families to areas that provided the best grazing for our livestock.  We have migrated in this way walking long distances to follow the pattern of seasonal growth and natural mineral springs.
We Maasais are called the custodians of Kenyan wildlife because of our intertwined migrational patterns and because in our creation tradition, we are given livestock and not wildlife to rely on for food.

Now we are watching the wildlife that we knew as young girls and boys disappear.
We cannot move our cattle to better grazing areas because there are new settlements and fences in places where there were none before. When we cannot move our cattle, we must reduce our herds and suffer losses during long periods of no rain. Our land is now being planted with wheat, a grain that is not well suited to our place because of the elephants and zebras and very low annual rainfall. The demand for charcoal has decimated our large acacia trees and natural forests. We now want to send our children to school so they can take part in the new technology and contribute their bright minds to Kenya’s and the world’s future.

Osotua Rhino Sanctuary is our community’s project to enable us to settle in once place, to take care of our cattle, to not have to sell our land and to bring benefit from one of our primary resources, wildlife. We also have plans for a large conservancy surrounding the rhino sanctuary which will encompass many of our neighbors farms creating a positive environment for the land, the people and the animals.  We are facing the challenges of our changing weather and finding ways to mitigate the effects of global warming.

We invite you to come visit us and take in the beauty of our blue hills, our warm sun and cool breezes, to walk our land with us and see the many birds and animals that call our place home. We welcome you to our villages and to share the ancient traditions of our indigenous culture, our natural medicines and our intimate knowledge of our surroundings.  And we bid you to watch us grow, step by step from a lifestyle as ancient as the hills to the successes of our children’s accomplishments in their first school, their first soccer game and their first music festival. We hope you will stop by, see our progress and say hello to us. 

Thank you,

Sonkoi Ole Keture and Ann Keture