My Jungle experience!

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So we'd arrived as MESCOT and Jim told us about the project and what we'd be doing for the next 2days, we also found out that there were elephants in the area very close to where we were supposed to be camping that night. And Jim though it would be a good idea if we did a night safari tonight rather than tomorrow as he thought we'd have a better chance of seeing the elephants, though that meant rearranging the plan and going to our home stay that night as we couldn't do this safari from the camp. Everyone agreed to this idea as it meant we might see the elephants and so we were shipped out in pairs to different families in the area.

The families have all come to MESCOT to be a part of the program. It is a way that they can make a little extra money by sharing their everyday lives with us. At the moment I think there are around 30 families involved. Me and Michelle went to stay with Abayah who is a widow and she has 13 children the youngest was 16 (My name has gone blank for the moment of her name it will come back to me though). Most of her children have grown up and left home and we only met one other Corrina who was 19. Both the girls spoke very good English, but their mother spoke very little. She had made some dough balls I'm not sure what they were but they were for us and they were delicious and also tea in very nice china cups. The girls asked lots of questions and were quite shocked when Michelle revealed that she still wasn't married at 35! The younger one was still at school, but Corrina was on a year off and hoped to go to university in KL in September.

Their house was huge! We walked into the main living room from the veranda and it was easily about 10m square, but there was hardly any furniture. There was some shelving at the far end of the room stacked with trophies from all the children over the years, a lot of them were for sports. And there was a big TV there as well, then in the left hand corner closest to the door there was a coffee table and some chairs around it and that was all the furniture in the room! Off to the right there were 2 doors the first led to out bedroom, the second to another bedroom which appeared to be the girls. Then following on through from the lounge there was another room which was maybe half the size of the lounge then that led through about another 2 rooms possibly 3 before you got to a kind of open air space/ wide walkway which led to the kitchen, off the kitchen was the toilet (glad to say western) and the wash room. They had one of the big clay jars filled with water that you use to pour over yourself to wash. Then there was another small porch out the back of the kitchen and I think there were a few more bedrooms off the other rooms.

The younger one (I hate calling her that) took us for a walk through their 'garden' I use that term incredibly loosely, the place was huge and and quite muddy and I was only wearing my flip flops. I'm sure it made an amusing sight, me almost falling over every 30seconds, flip flops getting slurped into the mud, not being able to move! I did see the funny side though and at one point I had Michelle holding one arm and AMY (Yes I'm almost certain that's her name!) holding the other! We walked for ages and came to another little house. It was on stilts so we had to climb up the steps to get in and Amy called something out as we approached so this young woman came out with a big bucket of water for us to wash our feet, I used a fair amount of water! We went in and there was a little baby there so cute her name was Leanna i think she was about 2months old and she was this lady's first child. We stayed a little while and every time Michelle had Lanna she would start to cry it was cute really. Mother and Baby were coming back to Abayah's house for the night so using a cloth that couldn't have been much bigger than a tea towel she made a sling and put the baby in to carry her there it was quite amazing!

So we started back rather slowly with me slipping and sliding all the way and the mother (i really can't recall her name) walked off so quickly and without any trouble on the muddy ground. We could hear all these noises and we asked Amy if it was a bird but she said she though it was a frog. Then she pointed out in the trees - at what i think was the bottom of her garden there were monkeys there! Real live wild monkeys, I don't know what kind, we asked but Amy wasn't sure. Oh and did I mention that the night before they'd seen elephants in their garden!! When we eventually got back to the house we had just enough time to clean our feet and grab our stuff to go elephant spotting in the night...

We got to MESCOT where we had tea before our big expedition. Had to eat with our hands. And there was rice, chicken in a sauce and a fish dish. I ate mostly sauce and rice I couldn't bring myself to eat the fish or the chicken, I just couldn't. Later we found out that it was stingray! So I'm kinda glad that I didn't but a big sad that I couldn't say 'Hey, I've eaten stingray!' Then it was a matter of waiting around around until we got the phone call to say we've found the elephants 'GO! GO! GO! GO!' Jump into the vans and go find them.

We finally get a phone call that the elephants aren't too far away but they're right at the other end of the village so we all pile into the 2 vans with our torches, water and plenty of DEET! We drive about 10mins down the road where one of the MESCOT workers tells us that this is his house so we walk a little way into the garden and then basically stand around in the dark with our torches on, but kinda useless and hope that the elephants will come closer or perhaps pray that they don't? We wait for maybe 15mis before they decide that the elephants have gone the other way and have moved further from the houses, I'm all up for going a wandering and hoping that we'll see them, but we're getting picked up at 5:30am to go on a morning river cruise and it's already about 9pm and they don't want our families to stay up waiting for us too long.

So we got back and put our stuff ready for the morning and packed up our bags because once we left the next morning we weren't going back to our homestays 😞

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