Tablu is the Karen word for Hello and Thank-you and Good Luck. The Karen are a hilltribe people who live in the Northern part of Thailand. They orginated in Myanmar (Burma) but many refugeed in Thailand to escape their oppression in their homeland.
I had the amzing fortune of spending several nights in three differnt Karen villages during a program called "Jumbo Express." Lek, the founder of Elephant Nature Park, believes that for elephants to be cared for well, their mahouts and owners must be cared for as well. Once a month, Lek dispatches volunteers and staff to visit different villages and provide medical care to villagers, their elephants and their stock animals. We brought medications, food, and other supplies to be distributed.
The first village we visited was high in the mountains. It was the village of "Ging Mai," the young orphan elephant. We stayed with his former owner in a raised Teak house. Our arrival was clearly an event in the village with kids, dogs, and folks coming to check us out. We prepared small packets of Tylenol, cough syrup, stomach settler, and skin cream for dispersal-trying to remember-brown for cough, pink for fever.
After dinner, folks started to arrive enmass. We cleaned wounds, cleaned ears, and received many thanks. As darkness fell and the fireflies started their nightly dance in the jungle, some villagers moved into a circle surrounding us on the floor. They spoke Karen, our guide spoke Thai, we spoke English and two other volunteers spoke Danish. The villagers asked us to sing a song-we quickly replied with Old McDonald's farm. They answered with a Karen Catholic spiritual. Different than most Thai who are Buddhist, the Karen are Catholic.
The singing went back and forth, each group clapping for the other. At one point, a Karen woman began to sing "Frere Jacque." We all grinned at each other and all began to sing the song in all the languages we knew. English, Danish, Thai and French blended into an international harmony and a magic moment of meeting each other deeply through music. We finished singing the song all together in a second language to French-and marvelled at the universality of the song.
The next day we traveled up the road to Hope's village. Here we repeated our distribution and noticed that villages only moments apart by road, could be far apart in access to resources. The second village had the lassitude and pallor of poverity hanging over it and I appreciated that Lek sees that we need to care for both the elephant and the village.
A few days later, we left for another Jumbo Express. Here I learned that you can easily get into trouble when you say the Thai greeting well enough that people think I can speak Thai. We visited the village of the woman who is the cook at Lek's farm. We brought food parcels to five older folks who were living with different kinds of disabilities. I had the pleasure of introducing a 75 year old woman who was blind to the concept of a juicebox. I also shared a conversation with a 92 year old Karen woman in which we each spoke our own languages but connected with our hearts and souls beyond the indecipherable words. At each household, we shared a prayer of thanks with the recipients.
We also had the job of deworming all of the pigs in the village. The vet quickly taught me how to size a pig: lidden, middle, or big and the corresponding amount of dewormer to stir into their slop. Being a researcher, I thought of it as pigs on a "Likert" scale: just born, piglet, large piglet, small pig, medium pig, large pig, very big pig, mother of all pigs.
A villager escorted us to each pig sty in the village-a really unique way to see different homes and gardens. As always in such situations, communication can be humourous. The word for pig in Thai is "moo." The word for pig in Karen is "duck." Already, you can see the challenge. So, I'm standing the road heading to the next house when a man roars up on his motorcycle.
He says "I have three ducks."
I say "we are vaccinating the chickens after dinner. I don't know if we are vaccinating ducks."
He says while holding up three fingers on one hand and indicating a middle sized pig between his hands, "I have three ducks."
I say with raised eyebrows, "Ducks? This medicine is for pigs."
I resort to the universal language of Old Mcdonald's Farm once again and begin to make "oink oink" here and "snort snort" there while pointing to the white powder trying to ensure that the correct animal was going to receive the medication.
The man got an excited look on his face and said-yes-"three ducks worth."
Later that night, while retelling my story, I finally learned about the Karen word for pig.
After dinner, we began our second job-vaccinating chickens. I had no idea that chickens got vaccinated. Kristen and I formed one team. She was delivering the Newcastle vaccine by introducing small droplets of vaccine into the chicks and chicken's eyes. Do you know how difficult it can be to get a chicken to open its eye once again after the first drop? It's tough.
My job was to inject adult chickens with Cholera vaccine. Fortunately, I was experienced at giving shots into bellies (my own mainly) so I was able to be immediately deputized as an honourary veteranarian. Once again, I invite you to imagine the challenge of placing a needle in a chicken abdominal muscles in darkness lit only by a dim flashlight while the chicken is making quite a fuss. The rooster were especially pissy and unhappy at the prospect.
With pigs and chickens taken care of, the next day we headed to an elephant camp that can only be reached on foot, by elephant or by river. We took the river route using a 30 foot bamboo raft. It was a stretch of river unseen by tourists and our raft polers built the raft the morning we set off. It was a reminder of Huck Finn; a bamboo raft, a river thickened by the rainy season, and a group of intrepid elephant healers. The raft floated just below the rusty muddy water and plowed through waves rather than floated over them. The river had class two and three rapids and had plenty of rocks to manoever the raft around and over. We stood upright on the raft, balancing ourselves, trying not to be pitched into the water. Our gear hung like jack fruits from a tripod mounted on the raft-the only dry spot on the raft. The other raft tipped at one point sending people and supplies into the water. All were quickly rescued, the raft patched, and we were underway once more.
Over the two days on the river, we stopped and provided medicine to elephants and their mahouts. I thought giving an injection to a chicken was hard, you should try giving one to an elephant!!!
I also spent a few more days on the farm with baby elephants. I admit, I'm in love. Hope and Ging Mai have stolen my heart with their trucks. I felt very close to my brother who is a new father. Here at the farm, I had the experience of being parent to the baby elephants. I had to wake up during the night when the elephants were being fed, I had elephant drool all over my clothes, and I had to spend hours watching and celebrating their every move and achievement. "Look, Ging Mai just picked up a piece of Bamboo." "Wow, Hope just squirted me with water during our bath," (when an elephant gets a bath-everyone gets a bath).
I put my experiential education background to work with the baby elephants. After learning that it is good for them to have new and novel things to play with, I began to design elephant initiatives by sculpting with logs, tires, ropes, and used water bottles. Ging Mai especially, loved to solve the puzzle of getting the soccer ball out from under the tire. Hope liked to push the sculpture down so that I would build it back up again.
Elephants are very social animals. In the wild, their herd is their family. For orphan elephants, their human caregivers become their herd. This past two weeks have been very precious to me as I got to be close to both big and small elephants and to be a part of their family. I am reminded of my great love of animals and the joy of sharing time with them. It is tempting to stay and watch Hope and Ging Mai grow-up.
Instead, I'm heading off to Vietnam for three weeks. I wish Lek the best with her project and thank her for the privilege of living closely with elephants and villagers. I hope to return to do it again one day.
