Shirley Francona for Kennebec7 (#7)
Elephants & Mahouts
(Part 2)
How did I become so attracted to elephants? I think about it often these days back in Santa Fe. Lek and Jodi send me videos of my dearest Mimi and her playful, often naughty son, Bop, safe and totally free at the Elephant Nature Park.
When I abandoned my husband and baby at a time of chaos and despair in my life I was just twenty-five. I was homeless and wayward for a period. This was twenty years ago. Then I began learning how to do Navajo art and make a living. I could paint a little. I could make jewelry. I was befriended by Auntie Sky, a wise woman twenty years my senior from the Alamo Reservation. She is still my friend today. She makes jewelry for my company and serves on my Board of Directors.
When I lived on the reservation making art I began to slowly recognize a kind of serenity coming over me. I stopped drinking and smoking, cried less, and spent more time in nature. Albert Tree, a medicine man who looks forward to his seventy-ninth birthday next month, somehow saw something in me worth mentoring.
Years later in Thailand, I felt that same sense of tranquility when Mimi watched over me as I sat in my jungle shelter during a heavy rain.
In Thailand I thought I was going to enjoy a well-deserved retreat into nature again. I wanted to get to know living elephants before they disappear from this distressed planet. After all, my elephant art was making money, but I had never been close to one of these extraordinary animals. I had only seen them in zoos, and once in a circus when I was a little girl.
I had read that in Thailand, the country whose symbol is an elephant, once there were 100,000 elephants roaming the land. Now they are down to their last 2,000! Is it not shocking to you to imagine our earth without elephants and so many other marvelous endangered animals? It is to me. That’s why I went to Thailand to be with the elephants. Little did I imagine how close I would become to one elephant in particular.
After I rescued Mimi from Krit’s threatened bullet in the brain, we hid in the jungle together. Maitre came, as I said in the previous blog, to tell us where Bop had been taken. Somehow Mimi and I made a pact to go find him. She protected me from a cobra. Saved my life. When she saw me trying to reach mangoes in a tree for breakfast, she just used her big, powerful elephant noggin to bang on the tree and the fruit rained down! I sang to her the way Lek sings to the baby elephants at the park. Elephants love music. I think it’s all going to be in the film, The Earth Trembled, Kennebec is planning to make about my story.
Other western women have likewise been compelled to come to Thailand to be with elephants. Some like Mook and Mollie stay much longer than I have. Mook is a 50+ year old German-born American who is a local legend in Thailand where she has become a mahout, so deep is her commitment to the preservation of elephants. Like Jodi Thomas, Mook is married to an Asian mahout who taught her how to handle elephants. She cannot imagine a life that does not include elephants.
Currently Mook is based at the Taweechai Elephant Camp located near Kanchanaburi.
Mollie is an artist who won an award for her animation project. She decided to use the award money to “invest in traveling somewhere I would never have been able to go.” Her friends were visiting Thailand, so she tagged along. Little did she imagine that a 5-week visit in 2000 would extend over the next ten years?
Her experiences with elephants changed her life. Mollie was taught by the manager of a famous mahout training school. “These men,” Mollie relates, “whose tradition is over 4000 years are invisible at best; their culture and knowledge is sidelined, ignored and treated as unimportant…. Over my ten years here, I have seen good and bad mahouts. Many are untrained and without the understanding of their role or the difference they can make in the lives of elephants.”
One of the saddest stories of man’s ignorance regarding elephants brings us to an account of the female elephant named Jokia. Because this story is so horrific, I must tell you in advance that it has a reasonably happy ending. Jokia today is alive and well at Lek’s Elephant Nature Park.
Jokia was born around 1960 in a Karen village along the border of Thailand and Burma. Lek rescued Jokia in 1999, with financial support from Amanda De Normanville and friends. Jokia’s name ironically means “eye from heaven.” Jokia was blinded by her mahout and her owner.
During her younger years, Jokia worked in the logging trade to support the Karen family who owned her. With the 1989 logging ban in Thailand, Jokia and many other elephants became unemployed. Jokia’s owners then sold her to an illegal logging camp. It was here that Jokia’s tragedy began to manifest.
After a few years of working for the illegal loggers, Jokia became pregnant. She was forced to work during her entire pregnancy. While pulling a large log uphill, wearing heavy logging chains, she gave birth to her baby. It rolled down the hill behind her. Jokia was not permitted to stop working to tend to her newborn, to see if it was alive or not. By the time they returned to her baby, it had died.
Depressed, Jokia refused to work. Her mahout used physical threats, but still she refused to return. The mahout used a slingshot and shot rocks at her repeatedly until she was blinded in one eye. Jokia became resentful and dangerous, as I have seen first hand when Mimi’s Bop was taken from her. Jokia hit her owner with her trunk. He had no sympathy for Jokia. He became impatient. With the impeccable logic of a worm, he decided that a completely blind elephant might be more submissive. He shot her remaining good eye with a bow and arrow. His idea backfired. Jokia became increasingly more stubborn, swinging her trunk at people, and refusing to obey commands.
When Lek discovered Jokia, it occurred when she heard an elephant roaring and trumpeting in pain and anger. She followed the noise and found a man beating Jokia very severely. The blind elephant’s body was covered with infected wounds and scars from past beatings. Lek saw tears running down from Jokia’s blinded eye and empty socket.
Lek set about to find Jokia’s owner.
[To be continued]
Shirley Francona
Santa Fe, New Mexico
5-25-2010
