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Any sign of heat stroke has gone and I am able to be useful again. It was my first time in the Boma which is what the place called where the elephants sleep. There a different type of jobs and if you're lucky, like I was today, you get to do both. First, if you're on dung, you have to go round the elephant pens who we need a sample from, feel all the dung balls to check out which is the warmest and therefore the freshest. Doing this at 6.30am, still sleepy and having not eaten anything isn't a good feeling. Luckily for us volunteers, only 40% of the dung is actually digested leaving the rest of it as it went in, mostly grass. I feel I have to say this, elephants also being herbivores, their dung really doesn't smell, and if anything it just smells of the fruit they eat.
Anyway, while I was doing the second job, which is clearing out all the pens, I found some glass in Mashudu's pen. I rarely see things that are right in front of my nose, but this find led to "sawdust shif" replacing everyone's break on the rota. It turned out to be quite serious. What Mashudu had done was break a window above his pen and then picked glass out of the window and played with it.
His pen was covered with bit of window. He couldn't have picked a worse day as their pens had just been filled with lovely new sawdust just yesterday. Piles of sawdust were carried out and there were piles of it with different volunteers throughout the day searching through it to find anymore glass. It became a weird find a needle in the hay stack situation. Finding glass was such a relief as you started to go a bit stir crazy with the amount of sawdust you were seeing.
With all the glass being found, some volunteers tried piecing them all back together to see if there was much more to find in the pen. Crazy I know but at the time it seemed like a great idea. When all the sawdust in the area of the pen was searched through, we then had the task of putting it all back. However, while putting it back, I then found some more glass in the already sieved through sawdust. This meant that what we had been doing all day was worthless as the sawdust in the pen now had to be completely removed and replaced with new stuff tomorrow.
Tonight was also enrichment day which is when we give the elephants food in a way that they have to 'work' for it. There are buckets that are hung over each of the pens and after you put straw in the holes in the buckets you fill them with pellets. When they are lowered slightly the elephants then pull the straw out and bash the bucket around so the pellets fall out. It's amazing to watch and quite funny to see the different tactics of each elephant. For Harry and Namib, the two biggest bulls KEP have, they don't need to wait until the buckets are lowered. This makes all the other elephants jealous and when we are in the Boma with them, they raise their trunk in the air and look at us almost to say, "we can't reach it!"
Sally, Shaka and Tosha don't have one. Instead they have tyres filled with pellets and straw. This is because Sally is a greedy pig and pulled down her bucket from the ceiling to get the last few out, Shaka was to boisterous with it and it broke also but Tosha is just a wimp and doesn't like the bucket! Mashudu also had to have a tyre today since we didn't want him nosing around in his pen looking for fallen pellets with potential glass in there so his tyre was full of carrots. I got to watch all this from the Lodge, which is basically visitor accommodation above the Boma, so you can see all the elephants at once.
It's been an unusual day for KEP and am yet to experience a regular schedule but I'm not complaining as the sun is still out and shining!
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