Local Teen Helps Save Thailand Elephants

By Jane Cassie

Loop Abroad program director

This Fourth of July, Madison Firkey, 16, of Hampton, wasn’t at the beach or watching fireworks. She was half a world away, in the Hoi Ya tribal village in the jungle an hour outside of Pai, Thailand. She’d arrived in Thailand only days earlier, and would spend her first week living and working in the jungle among the tribes of Hoi Ya.

Teaching English, building a dam, and painting a school were just some of the ways that Madison was able to help the village. In return, she learned to plant rice and had plenty of time to get to know the children of Hoi Ya and share stories with them.

Madison traveled to Thailand with Loop Abroad, a summer and spring break program based in Boston that arranges trips for American high school students to visit and volunteer in Southeast Asia. This July, three teachers and seventeen high school students headed to Thailand for Loop’s “Plight of the Thai Elephant” program. Students lived in the jungle for one week of cultural exchange with the village while they studied some of the many challenges conservation efforts in Thailand face today.

For the next two weeks, Madison and the rest of the students lived in the city of Chiang Mai and filled their days with cultural and environmental experiences, including an overnight trek and a visit to a tiger sanctuary to interact with baby tigers and discuss the pros and cons of different models of conservation.

The students, from high schools all over the country, spent the final week of their trip living as volunteers at the Elephant Nature Park (“ENP”), a world-renowned conversation effort in Northern Thailand home to approximately 40 rescued elephants. The elephants there have been saved from abuse in the trekking or logging industries and now are allowed to form their own herds and live safely and naturally. The ENP depends on volunteers to care for these animals. Weekly volunteers feed and bathe the elephants, provide medical care, perform other necessary chores, and fund the elephants’ care and feeding through their donations.

Each student on Loop’s program created a conservation project during the trip. Madison created a set of lesson plans and workbooks for learning and teaching English, and had copies of the workbooks published for use in Hoi Ya and surrounding villages. Loop will be re-creating copies of Madison’s workbooks and providing them to English classes on future projects in Thailand and Cambodia.

Madison will be a junior at Phillips Exeter Academy this year.