I am poor these days.  There's a week left until I go back to work, and even then, it will be the first week of April before I get a check.  I have sooo many bills right now.

This is Max! 

I first read about Elephant Nature Park several months ago on Hedgehogs Without Borders  They spent several months at the park (in Thailand) volunteering.  It's an amazing place run by a woman with the mission to rescue mistreated elephants.  The stories told on the site are beautiful and heartbreaking and inspiring, and they stuck with me.

So, last night I was thinking about Blogathon (the yearly charity blogging event that I've been doing for ages now), and wanted to redesign my blogathon blog this year.  Part of the redesign includes other charities that are important to me in the sidebar.   I remembered Elephant Nature Park, and looked it up to find the URL again.  While I was at the site, I did some poking around in the donation area, and found the page where you can adopt an elephant for the year. 

You can read all about him at:

http://www.elephantnaturepark.org/herd/maximus.htm

 He has a fascinating history!

 I was talking to Kelly while reading Max's history…

I really hope that I can go to Thailand and visit him someday.  Volunteering at the park is exactly the sort of thing I've been dying to do lately. 

Also, she looks strangely like me on the cover (and I am not a person who looks like Angelina on a daily basis, if you know what I mean.)   If you click on the image above, it takes you to the Amazon site, and you can do the "look inside the book" thing to see a better pic of the front cover and see what I mean.  And you can read the first few pages while you're there!

The book is simply written- she's not trying to be some great writer that she's not- it's just her journal, her thoughts, what she's learning on these trips.

Reading books like this always stirs up a huge desire in me to be less ignorant about the world.  It makes me angry how sheltered America is when it comes to what's going on in the world.  A photographer in the book mentions that the photos he takes of the people in the refugee camps are bought by newspapers and magazines around the world, but most American publications have no interest in them.  All you have to do is watch the BBC World News one morning to see what a different version of the news we get here.  There is SO much going on in the world that we hear nothing about, but Anna Nicole's funeral gets an hour long special.  It's the old saying about how one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.  So much of TV is dumbed down for us.  (And this from someone who is going to go watch Family Guy after I post, so I'm not saying everything needs to be high forms of entertainment, just that we deserve more.)

It bothers me how much of politics in our country is about ego.  I'm amazed to find how interested in it all I've become in my old age. 

I don't understand why more businesses don't get involved.  The book mentions the UNHCR being upset that their funding for sanitary pads for the women in the refugee camps has been cut, so they're distributing strips of cloth for the women to wrap themselves in, but instead of using them, the women give the cloth to children who have no clothing so that they can have warmth.  Why isn't a company like Always or Kotex donating these supplies?  Skip paying for one TV advertisement a month, and use that money to make a real difference!