Monday to Friday I am at the Maetaman Elephant camp, just north of Chiang Mai in Thailand. I wake up at 5:30AM, get dressed, grab my things (broom, gloves, and sccrub brush), walk to my elephant and wait for my Mahout (elephant trainer, every elephant has their own), pick up elephant poop, sweep the grass from their home, ride them down to the river, scrub them clean in the river, and ride them back home. After this we go home and shower, make and eat breakfast, and go to work until lunch time. Work includes working in the show selling elephant paintings and sweeping out the elephant enclosures; or helping out in the kitchen peeling potatoes, cucumbers and packing vitamins for the elephants and feed them their vitamins. Have lunch-we eat the same thing every day for lunch. Lunch is buffet style complete with rice, yellow curry, sweet and sour chicken, cooked vegetables, fried chicken wings, chicken potato soup, a noodle dish, watermelon, and some fresh salad vegetables. After lunch we have a couple hours free to do something if we do not have to go into the jungle, then we bathe our elephants again at 4:00PM, have supper at 6 and I am usually in bed around 9, if not before.
Getting up onto my elephant had gotten easier with time. I am more confident about it. a Few things I have learned about my elephant:
Ernie is HER name, she has ants in her pants - cant sit still for bath time, she is playful, doesn't like to always listen, and is always hungry.
Ernie is very sweet and swy (Thai for pretty), she is smart (she can play harmonica) and I like her.
Elephant poop: I call it coconuts, because it is about the same size of a coconut. Actually like a coconut but with grass strewn through it. My mahoot and I usually count the elephant poops when we pick them up, we don't have much else to talk about, my Thai skills allow my to ask how someone is (and I wouldn't know what they were saying unless they say that they are doing good), and to ask their name, along with a couple words now. My mahouts English skills, I am not sure of. He doesn't say much in English.
My mahout is named Suway (spelling?) not Woolan, and I, which is what I have been calling him. I started calling him this when another Mahout (Dun) told me to say Woolan po ba ba - I thought he was saying that Woolan was poo ba ba. Ba is Thai for crazy, later I found out that it meant totally crazy. Tonight I was speaking with Jin, our volunteer coordinator here at the camp. He said that my mahout is not named "woolan", his name is Suwy. Woolan is a word that I was not even pronouncing correctly, it was "louwan" and that means "bonehead". I guess it is good that I did not often call him by what I thought his name was since I learned it. Of course I would be the one to call my mahout bonehead for two weeks.
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