Of Elephants and Obama

On the first day of Spring in Magdeburg, the sun appropriately rose brightly and the temperature spiked to a balmy 50 degrees. So I took a long walk and spotted crocuses poking through the soil in the park and many different species of bird that I am as yet unable to identify. And once I was convinced that Spring had really arrived, I came back to my apartment to blog.

Spring means that we are doing daily presentations at the Tierisch Nah Arena at the zoo, so we've been busy with that endeavor. It's a daunting task to try to improve their program because anything I propose has to be explained in German and I then have to write my training plan in German or convince the head keeper that what I want to do would be a good addition to the presentation. He and the curator decided the program this year is too short, but since this season's show is already upon us, we needed to find some animals that were easy to acquire and quick to learn. This discussion all culminated in the decision to get two rats for me to train (the previous rat, who is three years old has been retired) and also an egg. Luckily I am not expected to train the egg, but once it hatches into a Brahma chicken, I will be expected to teach it something. The behaviors I train are totally my decision (no need to convince anyone in German this time), so if anyone reading this blog has an idea for something they would be interested in seeing a rat or a chicken do...I'm open to ideas.

The department that cares for the program animals also cares for the elephants and rhinos, so even though I am not an elephant or rhino trainer, sometimes I get roped into helping out with a few things and spend time in what literally translates to the "thick-skinned house." This building, constructed in the old zoo style, is mostly of concrete, and with the high ceilings, echoes like a giant cavern. When the keepers are working with the elephants, their deep voices (all the elephant trainers are men) carry through the building and remind me a little of going to the Greek church when I was a child. I think the similarity must be the sound of someone speaking in a foreign language, confidently and with a bit of a drawl, and the drawn out phrases resounding in the concrete rafters.

All of the doors in the "thick-skinned house" are heavy metal slabs that take some heave-ho-ing, even from the larger men, and there are resounding clangs all through the building when we shift animals from stall to stall or from inside to outside. My favorite door is the one between the back hallway and the elephants' indoor enclosure. This door is only human-sized, not meant for elephants, and sometimes it is left open so that when I am walking down the hall, a trunk might be mischieviously snaking out to feel around the door frame or sniff out treats. There is a small slot in this door so that when it is shut, the keepers in the back hallway can peer through and view the enclosure. Often though, when I have attempted to look through by standing on tip-toe and putting my eye directly up to the slot, a giant, dark-lashed elephant eye has been staring right back at me, blocking all view of anything else. Because of the elephants' frequent use of the peep-hole, I am now uncertain as to its original purpose--was it inetended to let the people keep an eye on the elephants, or the elephants keep an eye on the people? Most recently I have been allowed to help clean the animals by giving the rhinos baths, which mostly is just spraying them with an expertly aimed hose, and helping keep the elephants clean by brushing the dirt off of them. This is accomplished through what must be a comical routine to anyone watching, where a 9-foot elephant rolls over onto her side and a 5-foot 2 inch keeper vigorously dislodges dirt from the wrinkled skin using a push-broom.

In the kindergarten, the biggest news these days is that we have two new children in our class. They are four-year-old twins, whose mother is Canadian and has been speaking English with the girls at home. For me, this is a big change. I have grown so accustomed to gesturing wildly and speaking slowly and repeating myself often and to just giving up on explaining difficult concepts because none of the children understood. Suddenly, there are two lanky red-headed children who understand everything I say. It was almost unnerving at first. The comforting part of their presence is that they automatically gravitated toward me, which is the opposite of what all of the German children did; I never had to work extra hard to get the English-speaking children to warm up to me, and in fact, I have to sometimes suggest that they please don't cling quite so much or maybe just let me have a bit of space for a moment. I am also interested to see what happens when they interact with the German-speaking children. They have only been at our school a week and already I have overheard some interesting mixtures of German and English in conversations where children use both languages to make themselves understood.

On their first day, the English-speaking twins arrived at the kindergarten peeking out from behind their mother's knees. She introduced me to them by saying, "This is Suzanne; she comes from The States. Who else do we know from The States?" (The correct answer here is something like Uncle Josh) One of the twins exclaimed, "Barack Obama!"