Save and Rescue an Asian Elephant Today

Dear Supporters,

Happy New Year all! What an eventful few months we’ve had here! With wilderness challenges, a whole lot of cultural celebrations, and a huge spay and neuter clinic for the dogs and cats of the village, 2018 is going to be a hard one to beat.

Imagine our delight to wake up one December morning, head up to base for breakfast, and see our Elephants in the cornfields just across from the village! The mahouts were moving them to a new area to let the forests regrow, and so for a few days we were able to see them walking across the hills and frolicking in the water, even hearing the odd playful trumpet! It was very special for all of us, as this happens very rarely - usually they are hidden in the forests and we have to scramble over tree branches and through rivers to reach them.

Thanks to all of our donors in 2018, our three elephants Khum Suk, Sadja and Lulu are still enjoying a natural life roaming freely through the forest. There is really nothing as special as witnessing these beautiful creatures being able to interact with their environment just as nature intended, and eating natural food. We are still proud to say that Khum Suk, our old matriarch who is coming on 70 years, is still pretty much as healthy and spritely as our younger elephants, and is commonly found knocking down huge bits of bamboo to eat. We attribute this health to her natural life and natural diet that she enjoys thanks to the GVI Trust.

But our work is not yet over. It costs the GVI Trust nearly $2000 every month to maintain this project, and this is why we frequently run fundraisers with our volunteers to be able to raise this money. We’ve had our fair share of fun this quarter, with a lot of celebrations going on including Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and the Thai Lantern festival, so plenty of opportunity to raise some money too! The interns created a Halloween face-painting and food party at base for volunteers and village children, everyone looked sufficiently scary and we managed to raise a significant amount of money for our elephants in just one evening - well done to everyone involved!

Of course I must also mention our Wilderness Camping Challenge - Thank you to all who donated to our challenge of staying out in the forest for two nights, cooking over the fire, and completing survival challenges along with the mahouts. As December approached it was getting rather chilly outside so it was all your donations that really got us through those cold nights! We raised enough to keep Sadja, Lulu and Khum Suk in the forest for another month just from that one weekend, which made it all worth it!

Here's to 2019! 

All our best,

GVI Chiang Mai