Day 2: 5/19/2010

Today was my first full day of work at the MEF. I've been assigned to work with Pooja and her mahout Upali, so my first task of the day is to go up the hill to her night bed and clean up her poop. Using my hands. Yep. We clean the balls of poop (about the size of a softball) up one at a time and throw them onto a big pile. From there, they get recycled at the paper factory next door, which breaks it down and combines it with recycled paper to make really cool stuff like picture frames and journals. The rest of the poop is used for fertilizer in the eco garden on the MEF grounds.

After getting thoroughly filthy, I followed Upali and Pooja down to the river where Pooja lay down and we scrubbed all the dirt and mud off of her with coconut hulls. She uses her trunk like a snorkle when she's laying down, and when I scrubbed her hip she started kicking her back leg, just like a dog.

I had a special treat today, I got to go out with the Mobile Vet Unit (MVU) to see an injured tusker. He's owned by a rich family who lives in the city somewhere, but he lives out in the jungle with his mahout, who had to have been at least 80. The tusker's name was Gamini, and he was in pretty bad shape. He had a skin condition that made him itchy all the time, so much so that he had itched the tip of his tail off. He had also knocked one of his toe nails off and a huge sore had developed over the gap, and the nail bed was separating out from the bottom of his foot. He needed to come to the MEF for surgery, but we have to wait for approval from his owners before we can bring him in. In the meantime, Ruwan, the MVU vet, poured hydrogen peroxide and iodine on the sore and treated it with some dusting powder.

Gamini and his Mahout. Notice that his tusks touch!!

Gamini's tail-or lack thereof

The big sore on Gamini's foot, and his missing toenail

The mahout treating Gamini's foot, while Gamini eats a tree

The whole time he was being treated, Gamini was eating a tree. Literally, he ripped it open using his tusks and feet and trunk and ate all the juicy meat in the middle.

Once we returned to the MEF, we went up the hill with a vet from the university to see Sumana. She's a 79 year old elephant who was mistreated before she came to the MEF, and has huge pressure sores on both of her hips to show for it. She was treated with antibiotics for a while, and then switched to a regimen of native medicines, and now they've put her back on antibiotics. While we were watching they gave her 100 cc's of amoxycilin. She's amazingly good-natured, and didn't complain once while they were jabbing needles into her backside.

Something I learned today: students here don't get to choose their subject of study at the university. They're just told what they'll study by the faculty. And if they fail out of doctoring they become a dentist, and if they fail out of that, they become a vet.