Thailand Post #10

Wednesday

About Medo:

Miss Medo

She was born ~1980 and rescued in July of 2006. Worked in illegal logging from an early age, her back right ankle was broken and healed badly. Then she was forced into breeding with a bull entering musth and he attacked and injured her. Her left leg was broken at the knee and her left hip was dislocated. She never received medical treatment because it is logistically near-impossible to perform orthopedic surgery on an elephant. She still gets around well and up and down easily. Her best friend for years was Mae Mai, and after Mae Mai's death and Asii's death, she and Asii's girlfriend Mae Lanna became best friends.

Elephant Kitchen

Much to write - little time. Our assigned job this morning was chopping fruit in the elephant kitchen and "mud pit." (That was all of the information given on the job board.) I'm sitting in my room as I'm writing this, giving Sandy a belly rub. He/she is sleeping on top of the part of my mosquito net that is on the floor. It's extremely cute.

Preparing fruit in the Elephant Kitchen was fun. We started out assembly-line style, passing down pumpkins to put in the tub of iodine and sodium bicarbonate to wash off the pesticides. Then we started scrubbing them off with brushes and putting them in baskets, but Aek asked if anyone wanted to separate bananas and I did, so I went out to a tarp covered in banana bunches and lots of ants and started pulling apart bananas. I was joined shortly after by Jessica. I found myself missing Connor because I started singing "Banana Man" under my breath. I told Jess that back at the airport I had been speculating that the reason she and her sister, Ashley, were running late was that they were conjoined twins. She said that now it made sense why people had kept calling them twins - apparently my joke confused some of the girls in the group. (Ashley and Jess are two years apart and look nothing alike.) I did not tell her about my other theory, which was that they were Amish.

Because it was apparently all I could think of to say, I asked her if she used to watch "Bananas in Pajamas," which she did. I said that I had always found them a little scary and was more of a "Big Comfy Couch" kid, but her fear of clowns had kept her from enjoying that show. Then she BLEW MY MIND by saying, "Oh yeah, one time I met the mailman from that show." After my heart restarted itself I yelled, "MAJOR BEDHEAD????" Then I said something like, "I've been carrying a torch for him since I was a toddler." She said that at film school, one of her professors had happened to be his brother-in-law so they had him in once to give a talk. He was very tall and very bald.

We continued separating bananas until I uncovered a HUGE fucking spider in the middle of the tarp and said, "Oh my god, look at that HUGE fucking spider," and Jessica immediately took off to get Ashley because Ashley is afraid of spiders. I decided to call it quits on the bananas and went to wash my hands until I felt less spider-y.

After cleansing myself and my lingering machete-blister, I went back in and took over for Thor, chopping watermelons. Then Brooklyn was like, "Where's the other machete? Is there another machete? I want to chop fruit too" and okay, I'll admit that she and I briefly bonded yesterday while loading banana trees into the back of a pick-up truck, but I still generally avoid being around her because she's such a ______ ____.

Later there was mud pit, river, Tilly, joint shower, seeing Lek for the first time sitting cross-legged underneath an elephant's belly, being ambushed by eles, the mahouts from Burma making fun of my glasses, reading and sulking.

Cats I've nicknamed: Hal, Alice, Stinky, Dan, Stinky Dan, Sandy, Gatsby/Catsby, Captain Jack Sparrow.

Dogs I've nicknamed: Rocco, Artemis, Dexter, Conference Room Dog.