Restored to Health and Euphoria

    That Cipro stuff works, I can tell you.  Whatever ill effects I was suffering for whatever reasons are GONE GONE GONE!  And maybe it's my imagination but I think the electrolytes give me extra zip too.  Anyway, I awoke raring to go.
    Two more guests arrived, planning to stay just a couple of days, Belgian women.  Bernadette works for a non-government charitable organization (NGO) in Phnom Penh and she'd met her friend Anne at another project in Tanzania.  Bernadette has been a friend of Jack's for quite some time, and it is she who is responsible for Jack's having such a surprising dog at the Project.  Apparently some one brought a Great Dane puppy to Cambodia but then couldn't keep him.  Poor guy, the dog that is, wound up spending around 9 months in a kennel, and Bernadette talked Jack into taking him to Sen Menorom.  The "puppy," now 16 months old, is devoted entirely to Jack, though he seems to like Jemma and for that matter everybody else too.

Here's Xerex and Jack posing in front of Jack's amazingly disreputable (though reliable) truck.
And here I am posing with Xerex, who is almost exactly the age of our Aramis.
    We spent the morning with the Big Four.  I don't think I would ever tire of watching them eat their way through their daily EXTREMELY unhurried routine.  I love the slow deliberateness with which they walk, and I love their beautiful horse-like eyes, which appear very sad to me.  
    We got to bathe the Big Four again, and that has to be one of the most exhilarating experiences ever.   Gee-Nowl and Easy like to drink from the hose, and it's so astounding to hold the hose for them and actually hear and feel the water getting sucked up their trunks.  Their trunks do not empty into their throats (!) so they then put the end of their trunks in their mouths and empty the water down their throats.  I learned from the mahouts to ask these two ladies Gee-Nowl and Easy "Drang?  Drang?" which I guess means "Drink?  Drink?"  and they consume an amazing amount of water.
    Buffy and Happy don't like to drink from the hose.  Rather they tank up at the various spring-fed streams that abound at the Project.  But they dearly love to be bathed.   While I was bathing her today, I felt something weird going on with my foot and looked down to see that Buffy was running the tip of her trunk over my shoe, apparently checking me out.  I was flattered.
    In the afternoon, it was WORK!  Remember the "volunteer" aspect to this trip?  Well, we cultivated the banana plants by hacking and hoeing around them.  The plants went in only a few days ago, and if the soil is loosened up around them, each planted banana can shoot out as many as 3 or 4 eventual trees.  They are especially important, not SO much for the bananas themselves, but because if an elephant gets sick and can't get to water, it is relatively easy to drag a few banana plants to the elephant, and there is enough water in three large banana plants to keep a sick elephant from dehydration.
    Cultivating bananas is hot and hard work, and all of us were a bit nervous because we were told to be on the lookout for snakes and scorpions.  We all had blisters on our wimpy western hands in not much more than an hour's time.  So that was that.