Of course it was a lot of hard work as well (...poo pit, need I say more??) but Peter and I were really lucky to have a great group of volunteers we were working with: Tim, Floor and Patty, Lynn, Jill and John, Dave and Jo and Tom, Sylvia and Malika.

And the jobs ranged from:

Letting the cows out and in again, feeding them and cleaning their stalls. It's quite a task when you have a defensive mother (it was funny watching mum chase a baby elephant only to have to run away from an annoyed mother elephant!), a bucky little calf and an on'ry white female (whom Peter thinks is just misunderstood); cleaning up the elephant poo in the yard which I'm sure I don't need to mention is MASSIVE, and the worst job of all: rearranging the poopit - arhhh!! It was backbreaking work but good practice in fly dodging and for some, how to negotiate squidgey things in flipflops!; demolishing old bamboo huts and building new ones; lots of tree planting (I've only just got the red mud out from under my fingernails even now); banana tree felling to get the inner sweet core to feed the bulls (its less sugar filled than bananas and so better to keep them calm).

One of the best things to do was feed them pumpkins and bananas (luckily trunks don't have teeth) even if a naughty wee one was caught crawling under the hut to steal bananas; and my personal favourite, Bath Time, even though the current almost washed me away.......and then watching them immediately get dirty again as they applied their natural sunscreen of mud and dirt.