First days in Thailand

Well, here I am at Wildlife Friends of Thailand, having finished my second day of work. It is a culture shock in every sense and much more challenging than I imagined it would be.
As most all of you know, this is the first time I am away from home volunteering and therefore, I had no idea what to expect.
I am rooming with three other girls who, fortunately, are very nice. The room is quite basic with a couple of overhead lights, a couple of fans, a basic bathroom with a cold water shower, which we have to clean ourselves, as well as our clothes.
There is a communal room for all the volunteers (35 at the moment) where convene for our daily tasks which are varied and numerous. It is also the room where we take our meals. Always rice, which should bring back to Leah fond memories of her trip to China, veggies, great for vegetarians, and to drink, only water, so for beer, we have to go to the village to pick some up as well as any other goodies we feel like having.
Well, who are the volunteers here at the centre? Mostly, young people doing their gap year busy deciding what they want to study at university next year. Others travelling around Asia, stopping at the centre for one, two or three weeks. In that sense, I feel a bit lonely as there aren t really any other people in my age group, but overall everyone is nice. Getting a lot of reading done....
As far as my tasks are concerned, well for these two days it s been mainly with the gibbons, the macaques, the langurs, feeding them, refreshing their water 4 times a day, sweeping under their enclosures. They are amazing and the set-up at the centre is very impressive. The monkeys are rehabilitated in stages, as they have been seriously abused, some of them will never be rehabilitated enough to live in the wild. You can see it from their behaviour which is at times aggressive but for the most part, they certainly seem to adjust to each new environment they are offered. They go from being low on the ground, which is what they have been used to, to learning to swing a bit, which should be their natural behaviour, to swinging contentedly higher and higher up, which is what they are encouraged to do by having their food placed higher and higher. At times, they are able to share an enclosure with another monkey of the same species, and at other times, that isn t possible because they steal food from each other or are too aggressive.
There are also quite a few bears, a crocodile called Dundee, ha, ha, who moves although we never actually see him doing it, and a tiger who we have yet to see as he is kind of shy and hides in the bush in his huge enclosure.
Other duties include maintenance work, planting and watering trees, sweeping and other such jobs.
Very strange feeling for me, I haven t yet decided if it s for me yet, but I think it s probably too early to say,
I m still too much in the homesick phase to totally enjoy...
I ll try and post photos next time, but for now, I just wanted to let you all know out there, that I m alive and well.
Love