SUSTAINING THAILAND'S TREASURES

There are more than 300 elephants registered in the Surin Province and the majority of these are trapped in the unfortunate trade of street begging and circus shows. These activities reduce an elephant’s life expectancy by at least 50% as elephants needs hundreds of kilos of fresh vegetables and water daily. Essentially, volunteers will be working at Thailand's only "elephant refugee camp" for one week.

Projects

The majority of projects involve work with locals to preserve the native elephant habitat. This includes planting food crops, such as bamboo and native grasses, and also the construction of shade shelters for these elephants.

The work schedule varies from week to week depending on what needs to be done. The volunteers have built enclosures and platform, sun shelters for the elephants, make composts from elephant dung and cut elephant food. Volunteers plant elephant food and cut it; this process is a big part of the project. It really insight on what the life of a mahout is like because an elephant eats 500-600 pounds of food every day!

In this province, where not much grows naturally, it is a full time job for the mahouts to find food for the elephants. They have to get up in the middle of the night to feed their elephants. Every night! Volunteers feed the elephants fruit, sugarcane and grass. They cut the sugarcane and grass and feed this to them as well. They bathe them and go for long walks down to the river with them. When elephant food is planted, the elephants are right there with the volunteers.

There is also a night when the volunteers camp out, if they chose, by the river with the elephants. Most of the volunteers’ time is spent directly with the elephants.

Please note that this is a unique program in that Globe Aware was asked by a local grassroots organization for its help recruiting volunteers.

This is the only Globe Aware program that has an age requirement. Due to safety reasons, volunteers must be 16 years old and accompanied by an adult to participate.