Elephant Jungle, Build a Road!

Our volunteering escapades with Elephant Nature Park have amplified this past week! We took our 13 volunteers to ENP's new private property with the important tasks of building the road up there and tree planting to reforest the once heavily logged area.

The property will one day be a second sanctuary for rescued elephants, and we hope to make it a jungle paradise for them, ripe with sweet fruits and tasty native trees the elephants will someday feast on!

The biggest mission for this project is construction of a road. Right now the only way in and out of the property is a mud track, and in the rainy season only 4 wheel drive trucks can make it through since the road actually washes away in big chunks. 2 years ago we started this project, and now I have returned to the same project, the same road and all the same challenges!

I have led volunteer groups through the construction of over 4 road culverts (water filtration systems designed to limit road erosion) on that property now, putting in over 100 man hours and shedding buckets of sweat and ripped callouses into every batch of hand-made concrete! The work is so hard: physically demanding; the heat and mosquito infested jungle can make you feel like you are losing your mind; and on top of that we deal with the strain of sharing an accommodation with 16 people (and all sorts of poisonous wildlife) with electricity for only 4 hours each day and only 1 cold bucket shower....that's right, just take a second to imagine that... Yet, at the end of the day when you get the job done and you survive the elements, you feel indestructible!





Our accommodation is remote, simple, bare, but beautiful. While my volunteers tend to struggle without electricity and heated showers, I feel right at home here. I skipped the line for the shower nearly every day, choosing instead to bathe in the river just down the hill from our hut.

The poisonous wildlife made life exciting, especially the night one of my volunteers nearly stepped on a poisonous centipede. (Imagine a centipede with fiery orange colored legs, the length of a bookmark!) Even more terrifying was the fact that this centipede was crawling its way up the stairs into our living quarters...*shudder*

Please note: this particular species of centipede in Thailand is toxic enough to kill small dogs and can seriously incapacitate adults for several days. The Thai way of handling these critters is to scream your bloody head off, jump around frantically to avoid their speedy fast mad-driven crawling, and then cut their heads off with sharp tools. This we did with great relief.


(pictured here: our jungle hut accommodation; and my private tent on the balcony)

We also put our hands in the construction of a super-adobe mud-house. A first for me! This house will eventually be an information center for the project and local forest, and we're attempting to build it with all natural and recycled materials: mud house, thatch roofs, recycled glass windows and tires for structural stability, and a sticky tapioca mixture for natural glue.



The tree planting was hard work since the sun beat down on us nearly every day, but the end result will be great! In a couple years these young trees will up be up and blooming, and forest life will eventually rejuvenate itself.