When my family traveled to Kenya this July one of our first stops was to an elephant orphanage - The
David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. It was a heart warming experience to see infant and adolescent elephants run to their keepers during feeding time, which is what the public can come and experience. These elephants have been rescued from situations from poaching (of their mama's) to getting stuck in the sand. Obviously, rescuing an elephant and flying it to safety is no small feat so this is a huge operation, but so worthwhile.
These are my shots from our time at the orphanage.
Soon after we returned from Kenya I thought that fostering an elephant would be a nice Christmas present for my family. I spent one evening carefully choosing which one seemed to suit us Corbett's. I ended up choosing Wasin, the youngest who was only three months old. We received (via email to save cost) updates about Wasin, pictures, journal entries by her keeper, who she bonds with and who literally sleeps in a bed beside her at night, as elephants crave and thrive off of love. It was lovely.
Yesterday I received the email below from the Trust and although it is very sad that little Wasin died, it is the circle of life, and it is comforting for everyone to know that she had such a wonderful life full of human and elephant love while it lasted and that there is an organization dedicated to such a worthwhile cause.
Dear Corbett Family,
It is with deep regret that I have to write about the very sad passing of baby Wasin. Over the years we have accepted the hard way that baby elephants can be fine one day, and dead the next and the sudden and unexpected death of precious baby “Wasin” on the morning of 8th January 2011 was a painful reminder of just that! We will automatically be making a transfer of your fostering of Wasin to her stable mate and dear friend Mutara, but should any one have a different preference of who you would like to foster in Wasin's memory please let us know and we will be happy to make the adjustments.
Wasin had never been a robust baby, and maybe this was because being so young when she came in she may not have had adequate amounts of her mother's colostrum, we will never know, but certainly she never really thrived in our care. Over the many years that we have been rearing the orphaned elephants, several have come in with heart defects which became more apparent with age, others have succumbed to blood embolisms having been confined down wells, and one was born with just one lung which could not provide sufficient oxygen once she was older. We therefore have to accept that perhaps some orphans are abandoned because they are not sufficiently robust to keep up with the herd – Nature’s way of natural selection to ensure that wild genes are strong – but that said, losing a loved one, irrespective of why, never gets any easier.
Wasin was deeply loved and will be deeply missed by us all, as well as her many foster-parents, whose hearts she stole during her short life. She had been with us for the past 2 ½ months and was apparently fine the day previous to her death. But, she unexpectedly took a turn for the worse during the early hours of January 8th 2011 and died later that day at 3.00pm, passing small blood clots indicative of severe gastro enteritis. She had weathered a long struggle cutting her first molars, which always cause baby elephants difficulty, and which obviously compromised her immune system. She was simply not sufficiently robust to come through that, despite a couple of courses of antibiotics, but she died surrounded by an outpouring of love and grief. Rest in Peace precious little Wasin, Somewhere in the Great Somewhere.
These are pictures of our new little orphan baby Mutara.
Three years in she comes more and more and more out of her shell. For the first year or so I would cherish the moments when she would come and lay on the couch close to me. Now, only very very recently, she has started jumping up as I'm working and curling up on my lap. Love. She converses all day long and changes her meows so much that I know she is trying to tell us all sorts of things. Mostly, she just seems so incredibly content and happy to hang around with her people.
