Volunteering at Elephant Nature Park: Day Three – A Corny Morning

We all climbed into the back of a truck that drove us about 40 minutes away to a large cornfield. If you look carefully, you will see that several members of Team Poop were also about to have a corny morning:

Once on the cornfield we were given machetes and a short demonstration of how to cut down the corn stalks and place in piles to be bundled. Here’s Mindy who had become quite the expert after only a short time:

Ligeia, on the other hand, discovered that it was much more enjoyable to eat the corn. It was the freshest, best-tasting corn she had ever had:

After a local woman came around and bundled all our piles of corn up, our job was to carry them back to the truck. It was hot and they were quite heavy so this took us awhile. Some of us used a relay system that seemed to work well:

At the end we were rewarded by being able to experience riding home on top of all the corn we had just cut. This offered us some really beautiful views of the surrounding area:

After lunch, we went to bathe the elephants again and Mindy made sure to visit her Dani:

Our afternoon chore was building a fence around a couple trees that needing protecting from the elephants. No doubt due to all the mud they like to cake on themselves, their skin gets very itchy so to scratch they like to rub up against things like rocks or trees. After excessive scratching a tree needs a little protecting and that’s where we came in. First we had to carry the materials and tools to the tree location. Here is Mindy, Britt and Claire on this task:

Next, we had to dig holes to put the stakes into. Here is Ligeia working on that:

And setting it all up included an amazing fence-building team of Mindy responsible for the nails (if you look closely you can see that she is holding up a nail in the picture), Adam on hammer duty, Carolyn and Maren in charge of tightening the wire, and Claire and Nathalie who were responsible for unraveling the wire:

Our walk back allowed us to visit Jungle Boy. Due to being in his Must period he can become rather aggressive towards the other elephants and is therefore contained to a particular area of the park.