If you know anything about me in my career, you know that I decided that I, for sure,

wanted to be a wildlife ecologist on a study abroad trip to Africa.

When I was living in Kenya, I learned a lot about animals and conservation.

And I also learned about people and culture, sometimes through my own horribly embarrassing mistakes.

I told you about one of those moments last week. This week, I'm bringing you miscommunication

part two. Here's that story. Instead of being kind of curious and interested, my first feeling

was a little bit of panic.

And then the second feeling I felt was, what the hell is going on?

I'm Dr. Ray Wyn Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals.

I want to tell you my story and what it's actually like to track bears in the sierras,

chase lemurs in Madagascar, live with lions in Tanzania, and do all of that as a black

female scientist.

This is going wild.

How to even start this story? I don't know.

And from what I understood then and kind of what I still understand now about traditional

masai culture, marriage is a huge, huge part of the coming of age process. And from an American

and kind of Western identity, Maasai folks traditionally get married quite young, especially women. And in traditional

masai culture, someone can have more than one wife, and that is totally normal. I think just

saying it like that, the reaction from, you know, like a Western perspective is kind of like, oh, that's strange.

Maybe that's not very good for the women.

I definitely learned in my experiences with the Maasai not to be judgmental in that way.

I found myself even over the course of the semester getting comfortable with the idea of

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