1/10/2019 - Sri Lanka Day 11
Turtle Bath 🐢🛁
We spent the entire yesterday and today afternoon giving the turtles a bath. Lifting these humongous creatures really need lots of strength, for the smaller size one we were able to lift them out of the tank alone or cooperating with two, however Mal (the turtle center coordinator) will help us lift them out. We thoroughly realized the Chinese saying “老鼠拉龜”, you have no where to grab a hand on. 🐭🐢The turtles need to be bathed once every 1-2 weeks, mainly to scrub the moss off their shell. As most of their shell are damaged by fishing net and a turtle was injured by an insane guy using a wood chopping tool on a turtle shell intend to eat and drinking its blood thinking that will help with longevity. Another one having trouble to eat because a fishing hook got stuck in his throat. Good news is, one of the turtle is mostly recovered the front flap issue caused by fishing net and should be ready to send back to the ocean next month. ☺️ Just by looking at the damaged shell already make me feel bad inside, touching it and feeling the crack with my fingers make me angry. Poor animal, so beautiful and does no harm to human were seriously hurt because of our stupidity.😡 We are using very primitive tools to bathe the turtles, a piece of coconut shell, sand and water, using these natural ingredients, so organic and local by just what is available. We continue to clean the tanks which require lots of labor, we all worked very hard to have the walls and floors of all tanks scrubbed and sand drain out. The turtle project is about to complete, we will conclude the project by cleaning the beach and autographing the wall for memory. Working at the turtle conservation center is hard labor, lifting, scrubbing, digging, cleaning, soaking in salty water everyday, including my own sweats. I am very impressed by Mal for he is working non-stop during the year (no vacation, just off the weekend)to keep these turtles living with dignity and preserving them by keeping their offsprings strategically reproduce.
I will walk to the baby turtle tank everyday to start off the day just to see the swimming turtles like a black dancing flower will make my day and forgot all the labor. I prayerfully said in my heart that these newbies will live long(some live 20-30 years, some can live 300+ years) and stay strong in the sea! 🐢💪🏻
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