By: Oscar Gronros ’26

-Photo credit: Oscar Gronros ’26

This year Hebron Academy had six students travel to the Round Square International Conference. This conference was located in Nairobi Kenya and took place over the course of seven days. We took a three day pre-conference trip before the seven day conference for a total of ten days. The flight was a whopping 17 hours and when we touched down in Kenya we met up with two other schools from Toronto Canada.

The three day pre-conference trip was located in the Masai Mara. The Masai Mara is a massive national reserve. The entire park was constantly patrolled by officers to protect against poachers. Our van first traveled into the reserve to a hotel where we split up and headed to our respective hotel rooms. There was a slight mishap where my group’s key had been misplaced before it was given to us. We knew the general location of our hotel however we didn’t know the exact number. Therefore we were quite stranded until we could find a new key. Finally after we got a key we moved into our rooms however only for a minute before we had to switch again with another group. This switching went on and on for two days finally ending with all the girls in one room and the boys being split between two rooms.

-Photo credit: Mr. Tholen

After all that movement we were able to go on a safari. These safaris were incredible with more animals than I have ever seen in my life. The herds of gazelle and zebras covered entire hills to the point one couldn’t see any grass. We as well were able to see a few lions roaming looking for shade to protect themselves against the hot sun. These incredible experiences were only on the two to four hour safaris. On the second day we went on a massive eight hour safari. This safari had every animal I could think of. We got incredibly close to many animals and we were even less than ten feet away from a leopard. We first traveled for four hours through the plain seeing hundreds of different animals each just a little bit different than the one before it.

Then as we were reaching lunch time we reached the Mara River. This is the biggest river in Kenya being home to almost all of the crocodiles and hippopotamuses. At the river we stopped for a picnic with pre-made bags of food. There were so many small animals running around the picnic site and many monkeys. These monkeys were asking for trouble as they kept rushing up from behind someone in our group trying to get a little scrap of food. After our short picnic we loaded back into the vans where we traveled back to the hotel to pack our bags for the massive International Conference. The next day we all piled into the vans to travel to Brookhouse Schools for the Round Square International Conference.