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Lek Chailert founded and operates the Elephant Nature Park near Chiang Mai Thailand. She rescues elephants from abusive and harmful environments. Her sanctuary is devoted to serving and caring for the elephants. Volunteering there was a life changing experience for my daughters and me.

Not every “sanctuary” is devoted to caring for the animals. Some sanctuaries have the animals perform and entertain visitors. For example, if elephants are painting or visitors are riding elephants, these activities entail using abusive practices to teach and train the elephants. Other sanctuaries such as lion sanctuaries intentionally orphan the babies for volunteers to care for them and then allow hunting of the adult lions.

So after digging deep, we found Lek’s sanctuary, The Elephant Nature Park in Thailand. As a little girl, Lek got her first elephant as a present for her 8th birthday. Lek has such a deep love and big heart for elephants, that after witnessing the abusive practices of so many, she bought a large area of land and began to retire elephants in her sanctuary. Rather than the elephants working, the visitors and volunteers go to serve the elephants. Every day we washed literally a ton of fruit and carried buckets of fruit to all of the 18 elephants at ENP. We cut bamboo for the elephants and cleaned their sleeping areas.

At her beautiful sanctuary, elephants roam free in the huge forested space along a river. They take baths in the river and eat delicious fruit all day. Female elephants have best friends always walking beside each other throughout the day. If a young elephant gets frightened by a loud sound, all the elephants circle around the young one. They walk in a circle enclosing the young elephant in a safe place while they comfort each other with trumpet calls and trunk stomping.

On our trip there was a newborn premature baby elephant. His elephant mom had recently been rescued from a very bad situation. So she was not emotionally able to take care of her baby. My daughters and other volunteers fed the baby milk in a bottle. They kept flies off the baby. And best of all, we slept on the dirt floor next to the baby to keep him warm at night. Even though the baby was small, he weighed 300 pounds and could push the volunteers around. We loved him very much.

After two weeks of serving the elephants, we learned so much about elephants and how intelligent and compassionate they are. These volunteer trips connected us to amazing people using their time to serve and help, reminding us of how we are all connected.