By Alizee Aerts – 1 week intern

Doing an internship here is an amazing experience that I would recommand to everyone who wants to be closer to the nature and to contribute to improve the life standards of elephants in Thailand. The situation of elephants in Thailand is sad and the people of this sanctuary are doing their best to help them. It is unfortunatly difficult to place all the elephants back into wildlife so they are in semi wild life, they still need to get food, watching from humans and data collection to understand the needs of asian elephants better. To cover the costs and to collect data, the sanctuary is organising touristic visits and internships in a very respectfull way of the elephants ; we always need to stay at a certain distance from them and the elephants are free to go where they want in the forest during the day, this is why we need to hike in different places everyday to get to them and follow them.

I am a person very sensitive to the atmosphere and the ambiance of the places and this village and base camp has a really really nice one. The people working here are very nice, welcoming and caring. So I felt rapidly very good in here. It is run only by girls, everything is very well organised and the people from the village seem very happy about their presence because it gives them some opportunity to make money (homestays, smothie coffee bar, selling textiles, …), it bring deflea for their dogs and Kerri and Cristina are speaking the local langage.

Everything is done in a very respect full way of the village life. Every morning I was so happy to get up and every evening I was troubling to fall asleep because I was too excited about being here. The hikes are not too difficult because there are quite short (just the morning) and the afternoons are chill with some small not physical activity and a bit of working on the project. Evening are also very chill. Basicaly they respect the mood of every intern, no one feel obliged to participate in everything like card games in the night if you prefer to go to your room, but if you do it is really cool and funny. The food is good too.

My homestay was more confortable and cleaned than I imagined, almost no insects in the room but the mosquito net had a lot of holes. I would advised you to stay more than one week to be able to have a meaningfull impact on the project, if you dont mind the cold showers and quite cold weather in the night in certain seasons.

For me it was a step in a big trip around Asia and kind of a spiritual experience because it gave me a lot of inspiration and clearty.