Long days and heat waves

It seems that things here go from being extremely busy from 7am to 5pm to barely having anything to do. Yesterday and today so far seem to be the later. Lakshmi, my elephant has been getting a little cheekier with me each time I bathe her. This morning she tried to thump me on the head with her tail, which ended up splashing water all over me. Scrubbing an elephant is much harder work than I previously thought.

Yesterday we worked in the eco garden for most of the morning planting pineapples and weeding. Pineapple plants are surprisingly sharp and we all ended up with some awesome cuts on our legs and arms. The way pineapple grows is very interesting because instead of planting a seed each time into the soil, you just replant an old pineapple and a new one will start to grow in its place. The tools we use are very basic, so it takes longer for us to do anything, but luckily that is countered by the fact that we now have close to a dozen volunteers. In the afternoon we have been working on an enrichment bag (burlap sack filled with mineral grass and fruit) for the elderly elephant Sumina. She is 75 years old with a giant wound in her side from when she was a temple elephant. Each day we have to clean out all the pus and dead tissues and rinse it out with hydrogen peroxide. It has gotten a lot better since I've been here, but she has quite a bit of edema in one of her legs. We've been giving her injections of an antibiotic as well as a ton of vitamins and minerals. It's funny giving an elephant 15 pills of vitamin C when I'm used to giving one or two to a dog, but then again they are about 10 times their size!

I'm slowly getting a bit tired of rice and curry. We have it every day for lunch and sometimes dinner. It's not particularly spicy, just very repetitive. I'm looking forward to tomorrow when we are going to Kandy to see the Temple of the Tooth and get some different food. Tonight we are going to see a Perahera, which is a religious parade, because today is Poya, or the new moon. This is the season for Peraheras so they are many of them all over the countryside, and several of the elephants here are frequent participants in them. Oh my goodness it is hot.