Taking the Big Break

The elephant is the symbol of Thailand. 100 years ago, there were an estimate 100,000 elephants in the wild. Now there are only about 8,000 elephants. Most of their lives were taken for ivory. How sad! But luckily, we are helping out at this elephant conservation center, called Elephant Nature Park, in Chaing Mai, Thailand. We are staying in a tiny, boring room for a week, doing chores and learning about elephants.

We started out and had breakfast with the other weekers, and then we went to our job, which was shockingly poop scooping. It was a blast because everyone in our group was talkative, nice, and funny. They all spoke English well and were mostly native English speakers, and there were two other kids. Our instructor was very funny and knew a lot of English songs that we all knew. We had two morning jobs that day and our second was walking to see the elephants in the jungle. They are not normally out there, but sometimes their mahouts (caretakers who walk with them everywhere) take them out to the forest. The three elephants are just right there! Five feet from you! The Mahouts don’t even bat an eye. We approached them and they looked at us and ate from the baskets of food with their long trunks.

We then had a delicious lunch and headed out to our afternoon job. Our afternoon job was planting grass. Some people in the group went over to take some grass from the field with hoes, a few people would carry the grass to where it was being planted, and the rest would work to plant the grass again where it was supposed to go. We had the same instructor (his name was Chet). Some of our other new friends (Jackson [10] and Olivia [8] from Australia) worked with me to carry the grass.

After that, we went to see the person who started this place. Her name is Lek and you could tell that she loved animals, especially elephants. She told us why she owns all this and the rest of her story. The elephants here were rescued from people who mistreated them. She found the worst elephants and bought them to take care of them. Most were hurt by mines or abuse. She is saving elephants from trekking with big heavy loads, illegal logging, and street begging. It makes me feel good to help save the elephants from abuse.

Overall, I think that our first day was fantastic! I am ready to continue our week working at Elephant Camp. With nice instructors, determined owners, and good friends, our week should be great!