Miss Charlie Ellis

On Friday we said a very fond farewell to Charlie Ellis, but thankfully she is not going far (see her recent blog).
Elephants For Africa, is reliant on our volunteer and Charlie has volunteered her time for 12 months, but very few people are able to keep volunteering and so she has decided to leave and seek pastures new. We are very sorry to be loosing her as she has worked tirelessly for EFA and all that we stand for. We know that wherever her life takes her she will remain an ambassador for elephants and EFA.
After a hectic morning working on a paper, I put aside the afternoon for organizing a fond farewell, which involved baking a cake and framing a photograph. Now I know I can multitask but this really was a challenge as I had limited time to achieve both.

After lunch I was trying to encourage Charlie back to her tent so that I could go to the kitchen (whilst the chefs were not there) so I could bake the chocolate cake – in the end I had to go and start making a cake hoping that she would not notice (of course she did but kindly pretending not to). Whilst the cake was baking, I tracked down the contact glue in the workshop-shipping container. Whilst the contact glue was doing its thing on the canvas and cardboard I ran back up to the kitchen and checked the cake – it was baked. So removed from the oven and left to cool – whist I dashed to the tent to finish the leaving present. I managed to finish it just in time to get back to the kitchen to have a master class from the chef KK in icing making as I wanted to adorn the cake with ‘ EFA LOVES THE DATABASE’ (Charlie had single handily set up our database). That achieved I returned to the tent to wrap the now dry present and grab a quick shower before Charlie, Mphoneg and I went out for Sundowners at our favourite spot at the end of the airstrip. On our way we saw the young elephant Plato feeding in the Terminalia woodland, which was an added bonus to our evening. The sunset was brilliant and Charlie liked the present and the cake tasted OK too; so all the blood, sweat and tears were worth it.

Bye Charlie, we miss you already, and wish you luck with your new adventure.