Weydon Sri Lanka Summer 2017

Howdy Y’all! (Elodie)

Today has been a fabulous day and has also been quite sad at times, for we are leaving tomorrow morning.

This morning we began our day with a extremely populated session of yoga. However we had two absences today, Jonny and Christian weren’t feeling their usual selves but we all cheered when they rejoined the group later in the day. We then moved on to clean all the dirty elephant day beds and the free roaming area for them. We also managed to clean our last ever night bed!! After a delicious breakfast, the girls put up their vet check area hand painted sign, completing a project, one the volunteer coordinators claimed as our best project and would remind them of us daily. We started some more project work which was landscaping the area around the viewing platform. Elodie should now be a professional shoveller, as she did very well and worked very hard and Seb was extremely helpful around the site. This took a lot of effort especially from our new muscle man, Tom; but we managed to finish it over the next few hours.

After our lunch we went on a second (or third for some) elephant walk which was amazing as we got to see the elephants roaming the area in their natural habitat. I was walking with Lakshmi and the second group were with Lakshmi’s daughter, Pooja.

The best part of the day was by far the elephant showers. Every single person, hopped on top of an elephant and the elephant sprayed them with tonnes of water, but don’t worry parents, we have taken many photos that we will show when we get back in a few weeks.

We played some Sri Lankan games, Emily and Jess did extremely well at the lime and spoon race (similar to an egg and spoon race) and Hannah did very well in the bun eating race – she won by miles. Sam and Christian shared an enthusiasm for the sack race and both completed the race with vigorous speed.

As it was our last night here at MEF, Averil had prepared a small quiz for all of us, and the questions were particularly difficult although we still did pretty well. We were given certificates and a elephant poo paper notebook from the factory on site that we forgot to tell you when we visited it on Saturday. They make the elephant poo into lovely thick paper and the process is fascinating.

We handed over our completed scavenger hunt, data bases and the quiz to add to the museum a great legacy of our short visit. We hope to finish our film at home and send it back to Jade, hopefully Freebs will help us to make it great!

We all really excited to move on to Janoda early tomorrow morning but we are sad to leave the Millennium Elephant Foundation too!

Lots of love for the Sri Lanka team.

Lily (and Elodie and Emily)