Elephas maximus: lord of the jungle

Elephants can be seen everywhere here: large stone ones guard the entrances to pagodas, armour-wearing ones carry men to battle in the temple carvings and there is even an Elephant Terrace amongst the ruins of Angkor Thom. Elephants feature in Cambodian myths, they frequently appear in the designs woven in textiles, their statues adorn many public buildings, and live ones give rides to tourists.

However, I’m not sure that riding elephants is an ethically or morally correct activity for tourists here, as the poor beasts are often not well treated, according to Jack Highwood who runs the Elephant Valley Project. The project, in the northeastern province of Mondulkiri, is home to 12 elephants that Jack has rescued from locals, though, in this case, the mahouts often accompany their elephants to the sanctuary – being paid to care for their elephants at the sanctuary provides an alternative income for these local people.

The Elephant Terrace at Angkor Thom

The indigenous people of northeastern Cambodia still actively work with elephants, using them to haul logs from the jungle, periodically harvesting their ivory for sale to the Vietnamese, and, latterly, using these majestic beasts to carry tourists on treks to local tourist attractions.

Sadly, these elephants are frequently mistreated. The methods used to render them safe around tourists are nothing short of torture, designed to crush their spirits, and they are often overworked and undernourished – elephants need to eat for 15 to 20 hours each day just to maintain their body weight, impossible if they’re out trekking with tourists all day.

According to 2006 statistics, there are just over 200 elephants living in captivity in Cambodia and between 200 and 300 wild elephants. The Cambodian jungle does, in fact, provide an ideal habitat for the elephants and large areas of dense and seemingly remote forest still remain here. However, even in these remote areas, the elephant population has been decimated by ivory hunters and by the prevalence of landmines.

Elephants as temple decorations

My organisaton, Globalteer, provides volunteers and financial support to the Elephant Valley Project, which I hope to visit in the coming months. If you care about elephants, don’t be tempted to ride them. Instead, spend a week or two helping to care for them – bathing them, feeding them and helping to conserve their forest environment. I’m sure that would be a much more satisfying experience.

A temple guard at the ruins at Koh Ker

Colombian kids

There’s no doubt about it - Colombian kids are cute!

I have recently returned from a week in Medellin, Colombia, where my employer, UK charity Globalteer, works with two local organisations to help the underprivileged children of Colombia.

The first organisation I visited was Poder Joven, which has two projects in Medellin. Poder Joven is a non-profit organisation, founded 16 years ago by students from local universities and young professionals, who resolved to work together to provide better life opportunities to the young victims of the humanitarian crisis in Colombia. 

I was extremely impressed by Poder Joven’s director, Clared, who is passionate in her efforts to help her fellow Colombians.

At the first of Poder Joven’s projects I visited, Casa Karah, the dedicated and hard-working staff provide a protective environment for kids who live daily with parental drug-taking, poverty, abuse and violence. 

Casa Karah is located in a poor inner-city suburb and assists 60 children between the ages of 3 and 14. These children live with their families in individual rooms (one per family) in a local lodge. The children live in very precarious conditions and are often mistreated and disregarded. Casa Karah’s work with this population is focused on providing the children with education, with two meals a day, and with psychological and medical assistance.

One of the beautiful young girls
at Casa Karah

And one of the cute boys, with the
remains of his lunch still on his face!

The next day I visited Poder Joven’s second project, Casa Maren, where the organisation is working in a community of displaced persons to try to assist both the families and their children to live dignified lives without the threat of poverty and violence. Just to put this problem in context, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, since 1985 more than 3 million people have been forced to leave their homes in the Colombian countryside to seek refuge in the major cities as a result of the escalating armed conflict between the illegal paramilitary forces and the guerrillas. This is the world’s third largest internally displaced population.

Casa Maren assists 70 children between the ages of 3 and 12, who are provided with food and education, and receive psychological and medical assistance on a daily basis.

The final project I visited was Antorchas de Vida, which means torches of life. It was established in 2001 by husband and wife team, Luis and Lucy. They gained funding from many sources to purchase a house to accommodate the children they wished to help, and Antorchas de Vida is now home to 68 children from 2 to 17 years old, many of whom come from the street, from very poor families or from parents with various problems that do not allow them to care for their children. The building is no longer a large house but rather a family home, where the children think of each other as brothers and sisters, and the staff and volunteers are their uncles and aunts. Where possible, contact is still maintained with the children’s natural families.

The international volunteers supplied by Globalteer play a vital role in supporting these projects, both through their donations, by teaching the children English and, more simply, by being there to provide the kids with affection and fun. Despite their often miserable life conditions, all the children I saw at the projects were full of smiles, and constantly wanted to hug and play and help each other. It was a wonderful though very humbling experience to spend time with them and to see the amazing work done by project staff and volunteers. I would like to have stayed much longer.

It’s a dog’s life

When I was looking for a suitable title for this blog, I immediately thought of ‘it’s a dog’s life’ but then wondered whether that was a positive or negative statement. After all, many dogs have an easy life, eating, sleeping, barking, sniffing, scratching. But dogs can also lead a miserable existence, starved and beaten, used for fighting, maltreated, or living wild. It seems the expression initially had negative connotations, having first been recorded in a 16th-century manuscript where it alluded to the miserable, subservient existence of dogs during that era. 

Here in Cusco both sides of the story are true. Some dogs are well cared for, pampered even, and these poor pooches are often dressed by their owners, sometimes in clothing obviously made specifically for dogs, sometimes in family cast-offs. I feel sorry for these dogs as the clothing is certainly not needed for protection from the elements and the dogs themselves often seem to look embarrassed – if that’s possible!

Sleeping peacefully!

A Peruvian hairless dog

But, for the majority of Cusco’s dogs, life is tough. They frequently look malnourished and diseased, with matted coats and obvious injuries, from being hit by cars, fights among packs or from being beaten. They spend their lives roaming the streets, scrounging desperately for food.

There are thousands of dogs here – in fact, I’ve never seen so many dogs in one place before. The problem seems to be a complete lack of population control. The cost of veterinary services for neutering dogs is beyond the reach of most Cusquenians and even those who can afford it don’t seem to choose that option. Instead, when their female dogs are in heat, they let them roam the streets, pursued by packs of eager male dogs.

Here, the sound of dogs barking and fighting can frequently be the cause of a sleepless night. And, with so many dogs on the streets, you also have to watch carefully where you walk. No litter control laws here!

Dogs can also be dangerous, of course, and as the dogs here can carry rabies, you have to be careful to avoid being bitten. Soon after I arrived I was told that the best way to scare off a dog is to bend down, as if picking up a stone to throw. Even if there are no stones, dogs recognise the action and run away – a sad comment on the society they live in.

He may look docile but this dog, who lives behind Picaflor House, can be vicious and frequently scares our children

Peru has its own native dog, one of several breeds of hairless dog, though some have tufts of hair on their heads, feet and the tips of their tails. I think they’re quite ugly, but the locals obviously like them – a huge replica was paraded through the streets during a festival here in June.

The Peruvian native dog on parade

The charity I work for, Globalteer, plans soon to begin assisting a local organisation with a stray care and neutering programme. Volunteers from around the world will come to help care for the local dogs and their donations will fund the programme. The project’s goal will be to nurture the animals back to health through loving care and veterinary treatment at the hands of project staff, veterinary students and volunteers, and whenever possible place the animals in caring adoptive homes. In my opinion, it can’t happen soon enough!

Food hygiene and phenomenal growth

We were supposed to start the new text books in English at the beginning of my third week at school but it didn’t happen, as is often the way at Anjali. I’m not sure why as the books had arrived – a miracle in itself!



Anyhoo, we spent the week revising various bits and pieces: doing word and vocab games on Monday; learning the names of buildings in cities on Tuesday – not sure these kids really understand what an aquarium is or will ever visit one and, if they do, they’ll probably wonder why they can’t eat the fish; using those building names with prepositions in sentences on Wednesday – ‘The aquarium is opposite the fish market’; and drawing a map of an imaginary city, adding its buildings and talking about their cities on Thursday. There was no school Friday as 7 January is a public holiday, variously called Victory over Genocide Day, or Liberation Day, commemorating the day Phnom Penh was liberated from the control of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese.

In General Studies the topic was food hygiene, a relevant enough issue but it’s not easy to find teaching worksheets that don’t include ‘what temperatures your fridge and freezer should be set at’ or ‘defrost food products on the lowest shelf in your refrigerator’! As some of the Anjali kids don’t even have electricity in their homes, anything that involved refrigeration was out of the question.  



One of the women who cooks lunch every
day for kids, staff and volunteers at Anjali



I eventually settled on four basic points to hammer home to them during the week:

* always wash your hands before touching food

* always wash fruit and vegetables before you eat them

* scrub the cutting board before and after you use it

* make sure meat and chicken is cooked thoroughly before you eat it

On Monday we went through a reading on the topic – they laughed hysterically when I mimed the meaning of diarrhoea, something they could all relate to! On Tuesday, we did a quiz to see how much they remembered from Monday, then did some revision when it was obvious they had forgotten almost everything but the diarrhoea! And on Wednesday, they produced some colourful posters (no, they didn’t draw the diarrhoea!), which now have pride of place on the wall outside their classroom. (Sorry, I forgot to take photos of these.) On Thursday, I reverted to supporting the English lessons with a city buildings word search and ‘find the differences between two city images’ activity as I couldn’t find a way to work the food hygiene idea any further.

Our workshop activities this week included making Anjali signs to support their football team’s first game in this year’s competition, the first round of which was the following Sunday; origami – I had taken some multi-coloured and patterned origami paper with me and the school has several instruction books, so we produced all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures and shapes; jewellery making – I had also taken over a supply of plastic and glass beads, shirring elastic and plastic string, so the kids produced a variety of colourful bracelets and necklaces; and games. One of this week’s new volunteers, Courtenay from Tasmania, is a PE teacher and she had a great selection of new games to teach the kids, which they thoroughly enjoyed. 

The great success of the week was how well the garden was growing, and the fact that the kids were watering it every morning without being asked. Here are some photos taken the following week, on my last day at Anjali. The plant growth in just over three weeks is phenomenal!

One of the highlights of the week for me was actually not at Anjali. On Tuesday afternoon I joined Marianne and her Advanced class on a visit to Grace House Community Centre. Established by Globalteer just two years ago, it is a glowing testament to the dedication, hard work and enthusiasm of its manager Bridget Cordory and her husband Alan. It was incredible to see the advances and improvements they had instigated at Grace House in the year since I last visited. They have built additional classrooms, a toilet block, a volleyball court and football field, developed gardens for the local villagers to grow their own food, as well as building a vocational block, where they are already training older boys to be electricians and are about to start teaching woodworking and woodturning skills. Alan proudly gave us a guided tour of these workshops, showing us samples of the beautiful wooden products they plan to make and sell.

Grace House is a model school and community centre, supporting the poverty-stricken people of Kor Kranh village which surrounds the school site and two other villages located between Siem Reap and Tonle Sap lake. They have now achieved NGO status and operate independently of Globalteer, though still receive support when desperate and for special projects. Bridget told us stories of sleepless nights when she worried about how to pay for the following month’s rice supplies to desperate villagers, so if you have a few spare dollars, I can definitely recommend you donate to this extremely worthy cause. Here’s the link: http://www.gracehousecambodia.org/how_to_help.html

43 more sleeps ...

When I went to Cambodia last December, my motives were many ... I wanted to escape the crazy razzamatazz of Christmas and the loneliness of a season traditionally spent with family, I wanted to pass on to those less fortunate some of my good fortune in life, and I wanted to explore a new country to discover more about its people and culture.

When I was first contemplating where to go and what to do, I had no specific ideas. I googled, checked out various travel company websites, saw something about volunteering in Vietnam and quite liked the idea of that. Then I posted a comment about the ideas that were spinning round in my mind on Facebook. Almost immediately a friend, Christine, told me about a friend of hers, Anna, who was then in Cambodia, volunteering with the UK-based charity Globalteer. Christine put me in touch with Anna, emails were exchanged, Anna recommended Globalteer highly and was enthusiastic about Cambodia.

In just 24 hours my decision was made!

And I knew I'd made the right decision when everything just fell into place over the following few days. I applied and was immediately accepted as a volunteer, my travel agent cousin found me a good airfare, and very soon I began counting the sleeps.

Little did I know then the lasting effect the trip would have on me. I shared delicious meals, incredible sightseeing adventures, and beer-soaked pub quizzes with like-minded fellow volunteers from around the world, many of whom became my friends. The crew at Globalteer impressed me with their affability and professionalism in often-challenging conditions. The people of Cambodia overwhelmed me with their broad smiles, warm welcome and eternal optimism in the face of sometimes extreme poverty. And the delightful children of Anjali House touched my heart, with their incessant chatter, cheeky grins and unstoppable energy.

Even as I stepped on to the plane to come home, I knew I had to go back. And now I have just 43 more sleeps till I once again tread the earth of the Khmer kingdom. I can hardly wait!