Taming modesty to work with elephants

    I’m standing with my back to an elephant lean-to in the middle of the Cambodian jungle hiding my embarrassment. 

     I have split my pants. Raggedly and badly. 

    The split exposes my left, underwear-covered butt cheek and cellulite puckered upper leg (I am obese). 

     Just minutes earlier, I was whacking a path through the jungle with a machete to help mahouts and volunteers clear land and shear tree limbs to build a pig enclosure. In the jungle of Cambodia. 

     I think I need to stop here for the whole back story. 

     It is 2015 and I am in Sen Monorom, which is the capital city of the province of Mondulkiri in Cambodia. I am here for two weeks, volunteering at the Elephant Valley Project. The non-profit rescues elephants and returns them to the wild. The Cambodian culture is such that a mahout accompanies each rescued elephant. 

     The non-profit works not only to rescue the elephants, but to help the mahouts become self-sustaining. So what we are doing today is creating a pig enclosure in the middle of the jungle to provide the mahouts with a source of food and income. 

     Back to my split pants. 

     After we clear the land, we use the limbs to create a fence framework then pound corrugated metal sheets onto that frame. 

    

    As I bend down to hold the corrugated sheet in place, a stealth briar branch, which has escaped all of our machetes, grabs onto my pants (I do not know this.) 

     As I stand up and move on, my pant leg stays behind and rips, apparently too thin to resist the capture. (It is hot in the jungle and I had packed accordingly.) 

     Parts of my body I would never expose are now exposed. 

    Immediately, I seek to hide my rear. The nearest place is the elephant lean-to. That’s where my dear volunteer coordinator finds me. She offers the only covering she has, out here in the jungle: her emergency sweatshirt. 

     Tie the arms around your waist,  she says. The shirt can act as a cape. 

     She’s 98 pounds. I am obese. The arms of her shirt don’t reach around my belly. 

     So I stand and think a moment. I can leave (they’ve offered me a way out). Or I can stay, swallow my pride (my body shaming is terrific) and keep working.

     It really isn’t too hard to decide. 

     Here I am in the middle of the Cambodian jungle, surrounded by free-ranging elephants, harvesting bananas for them, sleeping in a jungle tent, listening to wild monkeys, building a pig pen. 

     I don’t want out. 

     So I go back to work and enjoy this amazing life.