Morning After

ELEPHANT DAYS

I will be a little sparse on the pictures and they will not be edited.. but you will get the drift. We got on and left Thaepe in a park van. There was the mandatory dvd but it makes the trip faster. The day schedule is similar but they are not taking the elephants to Nature Park which is about a mile down the road. That is a "job" for the folks that stay more than a day. It appears that they take a family at a time so they walk the road and then they go into the woods area and spend a few days. Are walked back and then the crew walks back. The day walk for the overnight folks is a walk out with the Michele or Jody and a great talk about the "soap opera" of the elephant families. So to go back to first day. First we feed them. Folks were a little timid at first, except Joe. I think he was an elephant in another life since the baby was so in love with Joe and almost as much as Joe the baby. It is interesting that they have such a great deal of hair at the young age. It is thick and dark and then as they get older, the hair gets thin. I can identify with that. While they caution not to touch or get to close. I think this pic shows what a mutual relationship this was. More competition. You can see that Cheryl tried to get his attention..but I think Joe lost his heart to the little one. How fitting for the community it is a he. We watched him play and bathe and run between his auntie and his mom and suckle.. it was a magical and I could fill a page with these pics. One more. He just is a kid a baby with all the adventure of a spirit. I think some of us are blessed to be that curious and want to see and do it all. I can understand that someone would leave their home and come and live here. There is so much to do, wash and clean and give medicine and rescue. While good volunteers come to help, it is the steady ones that keep the place going.

Twice a day we fed the elephants and twice a day they get bathed. Of course we can do that and we jumped right in. I will not blog the pic we took for the Gazette but I think it is a great one and needless to say, we had a friend in with us.

Here Cheryl is putting bread into the mouth of one of the adolescents. This one has also been trained to put a hat on the head. If there was something to be done, we did it and (Joe really did it). I was thinking that any memory he had of those 10 hr days at his place of employ were long gone. By the end of the time, the Arena's were asking about how they could come for a week to work. In addition to the feeding and walk. We also could get into the water and wash the elephants. That was quite hysterical and impossible to show the energy and excitement of the little one's. In this pic Cheryl is walking behind the baby and Joe is washing his mom. They love the water and of course as soon as they are out, they toss dirt on themselves for sun screen. It reminds me of when I try to get dressed and look good and then ooops something happens to make me look back to Bonny.

One of the high points of the day was the rescue of an old elephant from the park at the corner. The difference between a healthy animal and a sick one. Sores, worms in the skin, a backbone sticking out. When we got to the camp, we slathered on some goop to kill the worms that were living in the skin of the elephant that we came to rescue. When Lek saw another elephant she did not think she could live, so we took her. She was loaded onto a truck and then folks got around her to give her support. In the far pick that is Joe with the hat standing on the log next to her and he patted her all the way home. I got a front seat on the rail and Lek took this picture of me before they took the elephant off the truck. The elephant got off more gracefully than I. When I ran on, I did not think of getting off.. This was not in the travel material.. ride in the rain forest in an open truck with a sick elephant... what a day.. what a time. (I think Joe and I took 150 pics each.. so are you not lucky I will end now.)