Volunteer with Elephant Nature Park, Thailand, 2009

posted: Aug.2010, written: June.2009

I've been leading a volunteer project at an Elephant Rehab center, called Elephant Nature Park. My daily tasks have been cutting grass and corn for the eles to feed (i am now a machete savante!), planting native trees for a reforestation project, shoveling shit (elephant shit, buffalo shit, dog shit, cow shit, pig shit, you name the animal---we've shoveled it!), stripping bark from Eucalyptus trees for construction use (sounds easy...but try using the machetes to strip bark in the blaring sun!), and digging trenches (1 meter wide, 100 meters long, 1 meter deep) to install an underwater pipeline to get water from one side of the park to the other.

I have cuts and scrapes all along my forearms from the grass, sunburnt arms (from the shoulder down), dirt so engrained in my nails and hair it repels soap, and am eating 4 meals of rice and noodles a day to keep my energy up! I'm a reformed Thai farm girl now !! :)

Working alongside these elephants is such an incredible and unique experience...I get to go to sleep to the sounds of elephants snoring every night. I also get to bathe with them daily and scratch their hides every time they want :) We have a couple elephants who like to hang around our bungalows. Our bugalows are built into a fig tree, so every morning around 5:30 am I wake up to an elephant face peeking through my window. Tong Su (Jungle Boy) has tuskers too, so on more than one occasion he's poked his tuskers thru my window searching my room for goodies to play with. His mahout, or elephant handler, is a new friend so he likes to let Jungle Boy give me my morning scare every day--he says it's good for me.

In a few hours, I'll be piling back into a truck with my students heading back to the park. We came into Chiang Mai for one night off of shopping, partying and eating! My group is amazing, so energetic and happy all the time! Shoveling shit is actually one of their favorite times of day, since they like to chase me around the park shooting poop bullets at me!

Tomorrow we head to the mountain top, and stay in the jungle with the Lahu hill-tribe. We'll be doing a community development project there for one week, helping the villagers build a bridge---details of how, where, and why unknown. As everything else in Thailand, the pieces of this puzzle need to fall into place at the last possible second!

July 2009: New Baby Born at the Park!

2 nights ago, Mae Dok Ngern gave birth to a brand new baby boy elephant. I woke up around 4 am to the screams and moans of the mother (loud enough to sound like a t-rex!!!) and rushed out of my bed just in time to see the baby roll out with the sac. The baby rolled out (quite ungracefully!) and was standing and walking immediately, it was amazing!

I woke up my group, and the whole morning we spent with the mother and her new born baby. Lek came rushing from Chiang Mai, and named him Chang Yim "Smiling Elephant", fitting since he's already an incredibly cheeky and naughty bugger. He's huge too! He's nearly just as big as Fah Mai, the baby girl who's nearly 1 1/2 months old now, who's his roommate...(the same baby, Steph, Maddy and I crawled into the pen with to scrub and kiss.)

Here' s the best part, nearly an hour after the baby birth the placenta came rolling out of the mother...the "afterbirth" just like a human. The mahouts grabbed the placenta, cleaned out the blood, and cooked it up. After a special animist ceremony (asking for blessings from the spirits) they drank and danced all night alongside the baby and the new mother and ate the placenta for its 'power of healing' and goodluck.

...I politely refused my piece...saying that "I simply had too much rice today".

Even more exciting is the fact that this new baby boy is the property of Lek and ENP. This baby, like Hope, will never ever ever have to go to the Pajan (the violent training process involved in domesticating elephants) and will NEVER be used for the entertainment of tourists. He will live his life as a happy, healthy, beautiful elephant.

And...MORE! Mae Malaetong (the ele whose foot was blown off by stepping on a land mine) she's PREGNANT! The vet just confirmed, she will be giving birth in nearly one month's time (hopefully with my next group too!) And again...a baby owned by Lek and ENP.

Lek seems to be successfully repopulating the Asian ele population in the North of Thailand...now we just need to get the new property up and running so the eles can be free in the jungle in a safe environment, away from the people.

Things are great!