Working in Elephant Orphanage

This project is for animal and especially elephant lovers. The elephant loving volunteers now have a chance to see these amazing creatures up close. You'll provide essential support to a respected elephant foundation in Kegalle, helping to improve the treatment and protection of elephants all over Sri Lanka. You can assist the mahouts (elephant-handlers) with the daily care of the elephants, work with a mobile veterinary unit and help with charity work. This project offers a mixture of hands-on animal care and office-based research and administration tasks. Like human children, elephants also need love, care and attention. The elephant orphanage centers in Sri Lanka lack crucial resources and desperately in need of more able-bodied volunteers to assist them in providing optimum care for these loving mammoth creatures.

Your responsibility as a volunteer:

Your major role as a volunteer in elephant orphanage is basically to assist the Mahouts in elephant caring and providing food. Likewise, the majority of the volunteering work deals more with the day-to-day aspects of running the orphanage rather than specialized research work. Your work includes cleaning out the elephant enclosure in the morning, bathing elephants in the river, feeding elephants, managing the food, assisting in other construction and maintenance works. If you have some knowledge about veterinary science, you can also check up or treat the elephants when needed. There may also be other opportunities to do other things around the orphanage; however this is subjected to the availability of work at the orphanage at the time of your project.

Skills required:

Working in an elephant orphanage is an easy job. So, you do not require any specific qualifications and experiences to work in this project. Your love and compassion for animals and especially for elephants is the main requirements that needed to work in elephant orphanages.

Location Descriptions

RCDP-Sri Lanka's elephant orphanage project is located in Kegalle, a small beautiful town about 85km from Colombo to on the way to Kandy, a rural hill area. The orphanage is accessible from Colombo by car, bus or train. It is one of the tourism hub in the country established as a sanctuary covering 25 acres of lush forest by the Sri Lankan government in 1975. Recently the sanctuary has also started an elephant breeding program.

Arrangement of room/food/supervision

RCDP-Sri Lanka arranges room, food, and supervision for our volunteer from the very beginning to the end of the program. Volunteers stay with host family during the first week of language and cultural program. Host family arranges you a separate room providing Sri Lankan meal thrice a day. During your work as a volunteer, you will also live with host family in warm, welcoming and pleasing environment. They provide you a separate room. You may have to share shower and bathroom facilities with host families. We can also manage you to stay in hotel with little more additional fee, if you like. Volunteers will have 24/7 access to our office in Sri Lanka by e-mail or telephone. Our staff also will visit each volunteers in every one to two weeks to acknowledge their situation and to have feedback of the program.