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The Joy Blog

My Maasai Mara Kenya Village Experience | African Safari

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Vanessa Joy is a wedding photographer and educator helping photographers grow profitable businesses. She’s also a storyteller with a heart for using photography to make a difference in the world.

If you’re someone who believes that photography can change lives—and you want to be part of a project that brings clean water and visual legacies to communities in need—this post is for you. The problem we’re addressing? A lack of access to clean water and the absence of treasured photographs in parts of the world where both should be basic human rights.

 

The Night I Couldn’t Eat

I sat at a table with chicken, rice, bread, and a clean glass of water in front of me. But after what I had seen that afternoon, I couldn’t take a single bite. Just miles away, in a small village I had visited only hours before, plates were empty, stomachs were growling, and children were going without.

 

The Moment That Changed Everything

I’ve seen commercials before—the kind that pull at your heart with music and images of children in need. I even sponsor a child through World Vision. But nothing compares to being there in person.

In the Masai village in Kenya, I looked into the eyes of a little girl the same age as my daughter, and I couldn’t look away. This wasn’t a campaign image or a social media post—this was real life, right in front of me.

 

Visiting the Masai Village

Before the visit, I’d heard mixed things—some warned it would be a staged “tourist trap” ending with a gift shop. But the reality was completely different.

We were welcomed with song, bright colors, and genuine smiles. Twenty-seven people, most of them children, came out to greet us. The men acted as guides and translators. Traditional clothing, mud huts, livestock roaming freely—it all looked like images you might expect, but one detail made it undeniable: the flies.

 

The Reality They Live With

Flies crawled on the children’s faces, hands, and eyes, and they didn’t even swat them away. It wasn’t because they didn’t notice—it’s because they live with them constantly.

And yet, despite the hardship, there was joy. The people were proud to show us their homes. The children laughed, played, and eagerly posed for photos, lighting up when they saw their images on the back of our cameras.

 

What Comes Next

I can’t see something like this and do nothing.

I’m selling prints from this trip, with 100% of the proceeds going toward building a clean water well in Kenya—hopefully for the Masai people specifically. Clean water is a basic human right, and we can make that a reality for them.

I also dream of returning to the village to give the gift of photography—taking portraits, printing them on the spot, and leaving each family with a visual legacy they can keep forever. Imagine never having a single photo from your childhood, and then receiving one you can hold in your hands.

How You Can Help

If this story has moved you, I hope you’ll join me in making a difference.

🖼 Shop the prints: Safari Wildlife & Landscape
💧 Build the well. Change a life.

Shop the prints. Build the well. Change a life: 

 

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Meet Vanessa

Photography education that gives your art an edge

Vanessa has been photographing weddings, events, portraits and lifestyle for over 20 years.

She's a Canon Explorer of Light, an honor given to only 5 photographers in the United States, and her work has been published by Yahoo! News, Grace Ormonde, Style Me Pretty, Rangefinder and more.

With her practical and open-book style of teaching, she shares everything she knows with hundreds of thousands of photographers as an educator and influential sparker.

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