My colleague Kelsy getting acquainted with an elephant as a volunteer in India

I am notorious in the office for having the messiest desk. It is my claim to fame. But in an effort to clean it up a little I found a newspaper clipping I saved from Earth Day. It was about this company called Mr Ellie Pooh which makes paper from 75% Sri Lankan elephant dung and 25% recycled paper. Sri Lanka has a sizable portion of Asian Elephants but their habitat it becoming smaller and smaller and these great beasts are clashing with the interests of agriculture much more than ever before. Mr. Ellie Pooh is hoping that elephant dung paper will help lessen the human-elephant conflict as people see the economic resource that these elephants can be. On a side note, I just learned that an adult elephant on average produces about 500 pounds of dung a day! That is crazy!

Although we don’t have programs working with elephants in Sri Lanka if you take part in any of our other programs you will certainly see a lot of elephants and please check out Mr Ellie Pooh and all their cool products.

by pasto911

I saw absolutely nothing during my stay that would lead me to believe that the areas where we work are unsafe for volunteers. There are security checkpoints at the airport and around the capital buildings, as well as a rather tense political mood. Frankly all of this was not very different than what one sees in London and New York every day so I felt quite at ease – much more so, in fact, than during my 2004 visit to Nepal.
If there is an upside to the current political situation, it is that the tourist infrastructure is underutilized at the moment, which means that many nice hotels and restaurants are sitting empty and are overjoyed to see our volunteers walk through the door.

MORE…

by pasto911

Sri Lanka’s reputation as being more comfortable than India for westerners proved more or less correct in my view. Even at the Turtle project in Bundala, which is pretty remote, the volunteers had access to a western toilet and high speed internet in the host-family’s house. Of course, the road outside the host-family’s house was just packed-earth and badly pockmarked.

Charley and I are too cool for school

by pasto911