YEA!  Got a photo to upload!Sitting here in the early morning “chill” listening to the elephants trumpet their excitement for getting out of their enclosures!  Well we survived the corn………barely.  We met at the meeting place and our 11 person group with a volunteer leader One loaded into the back of this HUGE truck.  As we all stood in the bed of the truck I had to reach up to grab onto the top most wrong of the bed.  We bounced along a paved road for about 20 minutes then went off roading along irrigated fields of corn and rice for about another 10 minutes.

We all piled out- were given a machete/scythe thing and told we needed to cut the stalks at their base, put them in piles of 30 stalks each and that we would need 500 of these piles.  Yes folks thats 15,000 stalks of hand cut corn.  And of the 11 in our group 4 of us are either close to or over 50!  We all had the attitude- lets get this done and over with.  So into the corn we went.  Now we also had about 5 ENP (Elephant Nature Park) mahouts with us who were helping.

We all quickly got into a rhythm, bend, cut, bend cut, pile……….repeat.  Our shoes were caked with mud.  Luckily there were not any fire ants like the group yesterday encountered – just a couple spiders now and then.  We would walk to the trucks (there were 2 we had to fill) and grab water every 30 min or so.  To say it was hot is an understatement – but it was oddly fulfilling.  The stalks that we cut fed the elephants at ENP for 1 day.  This task has to be done EVERYDAY 365 days a year.   And as they add elephants so must they add the number of stalks that will need to be cut.

At about 11:30 we broke for lunch.  In Asia dotting the irrigated fields every acre or so are these raised bed platforms, about the size of 2 king sized mattresses.  They are open sided with a thatched pitched roof.  We walked with our lunch of noddles and fried rice in big containers and a yummy huge egg omelet.  The break was welcomed.  We all worked hard- I know that I have complained about the youth of today- but let me tell you- these kids can work!

Most of these kids here are young enough to be our children- most are in college or just out of high school.  They are taking a week out of their lives to come and do REAL manual labor (ok, 2X a day for 2-3 hour stretches so not like the locals work), pay money to do this manual labor (we paid about $350USD per person per week for this, it included transportation to/from Chiang Mai, a bed, 3 vegetarian meals a day) and do so happily.  Our generation came to Thailand at their age to go to the beach and hang out!

We were a sorry group and slow moving after lunch loading the trucks with the 500 bundles of corn.  That really was the worse part.  We finished about 1:00, no major injuries we all had cuts and scrapes from the cut corn stalks that are like daggers rising from the earth and nicks from the machetes.  No stitches were required!

We then had to climb up the side of the HUGE truck them jump over the edge to the top of the pile of stalks, crawl our way across the pile to find a place to sit. Zach and Max sat on the roof of the truck.  We headed out- the moms of the group thinking “this is REALLY unsafe” the lawyer mom in the group “this is really unsafe and that disclaimer we signed surely did not include this”!  We barreled down the dirt paths, often times with inches to spare between us and the irrigated fields.

Our reward was a stop at a 7-Eleven to get snacks and/or ice cream.  We a sight we must have been, covered in mud- red faced from the heat!  We have a mother and daughter in our group from LA (Caroline just graduated from high school and this is where she wanted to go) Caroline needed the bathroom.  I happened to be in the back of the store when they came out of the back area very confused, with the bathroom that is.  I asked if it was a squatty potty?  They had no frame of mind to answer so I had them show me- and it was a squatty potty!  They are usually porcelain rectangles with 5″ square pads with a big opening, about 6″ off the ground.  You have to squat on the square pads and go.  Once you get used to them they actually are nice- but very confusing at first!

We rode back to ENP mostly quiet broken by calls of “duck” if we went under a low hanging tree

The showers we all took were some of the best of our lives.  If you cut corn you are done for the day so we took a little nap did our favorite past time- watched the elephants.

The kids are getting along great- they all 3 are working like troopers.  We threw some cards in last minute and the boys play cards with the other kids here on and off all day.  The boys had one big fight- we can hear everything as our walls are open on top to each other and the walls are bamboo thin.  Apparently both Max and Zach liked the same girl.  Max was furious and was calling Zach a “man whore”.  And much worse.  But they woke yesterday morning as if nothing had happened.