Bringing it Home: Journey To Freedom Project

---

This cross-cultural service project is the culmination of our month-long adventure in Thailand. If anything beats splashing with elephants in the mud pit at the ENP, this is it. Imagine waking up in the jungle each morning, having breakfast with your tribal family, watching a herd of elephants roam freely through the jungle around you while monkeys call from the trees overhead.

Welcome to the Journey to Freedom project. Planting elephant food, building fire breaks, and re-establishing wild lands in the northern jungles. Journey to Freedom is a new addition to the ENP and helps introduce more elephants to the wild to live without human interaction. To expand habitat and reestablish wild populations is the gold standard for conservation efforts, and your involvement in this amazing week will be the capstone of our adventure in Thailand.

---

The goal of Journey to Freedom is for elephants owned by the Karen in the north of Thailand to retire from trekking camps and return to living in the jungle and hills near their villages. It is intended that this project will enable these elephants to live a more natural life and help to restore the close connection that the Karen people traditionally had with their elephants.

When logging was outlawed in the 1980s, Karen families could no longer earn income from the elephants they cared for and had lasting relationships with. As tourism flourished, elephants were often hired out to camps where they were poorly treated.

We spend a week in a home stay in the village of Baan Mae Satop and watch elephants roam freely in this remote mountainous region while learning about Karen culture. You’ll complete our leadership program as you volunteer your time teaching English in schools, planting food for the elephants, and helping to build the shelters and facilities that the tribe needs to allow elephants to live freely in the area instead of serving as a source of income. You’ll learn first-hand about sustainable development as you work together to help provide services for the Karen people without destroying the habitat that surrounds them.

The forest in the area is home to other endangered species, such as gibbons, who also benefit from Journey to Freedom. Activities like replanting and building firebreaks give you a chance to help elephants while also helping thousands of other species. Living deep in the jungle for a week also gives us a chance to see species we might miss on a day hike.

---

In less than a year, Journey to freedom has already returned seven elephants to the jungle, with plans for more to join them in the future. The project helps to fund the Karen's care for the elephants in their area. The ENP also believes “that the interest and affection shown toward elephants by foreign volunteers will spark a similar interest amongst the younger Karen generation.”

Journey to Freedom drives home the lessons of our five weeks in Thailand, wraps up our discussion of conservation and leadership, and brings us back to the elephants we began with, only in their natural home.

Then we have one final night in Chiang Mai to clean up and relax before you head back to real life and start compulsively posting your endless pictures of elephants, tigers, temples, and the perfect pad Thai.