Vollenteer day

---

My roommate mellisa and I woke up at 6am and took our cameras and sat out overlooking the property, with the mountains in the background. We waited for the sunrise, and had coffee it was a beautiful way to start the day. We worked in the morning shoveling poop,37 elephants make a whole lot! It wasn't a bad job and we actually got done pretty quickly. I got to feed them from our observation platform, there trunks are so incredibly strong and my elephant liked watermelon and pumpkins and bananas. After that I went to a different part of the sanctuary, where all the dogs are, all 400, rescued from the flood in 2011 and also others that get dumped off. They need attention from people and volunteering with the dogs apparently is a pretty hard sell next to elephant work. So they asked us if we were willing to go play with them. The Thai dogs all look like little foxes, they are very cute, so I hung with them for a while. Then it was back to work, a bunch of us built some mortar and stone pillars (they surround the trees so the elephants don't knock them over) After that we got to go in the river with the elephants and bathed them! It is always fun getting to be close to them. Lecture, dinner and another talk, this one on Thai culture. This place feels sacred to me, the animals are so happy, the dogs, the cats the elephants. They take such good care of them all and they are living a free life, after most of them having a pretty awful one for so many years (the elephants anyway) I might stay on a few extra days to help with the dogs, instead of chaing Mai, not sure yet. It would be nice to be around the elephants a little longer...

---