For more information about Heart of Ganesh: heartofganesh.org
One video of the abuse that elephants are subjected to — that’s all it took for Sundari SitaRam to decide to sell her Vancouver yoga studio and buy a plane ticket to Southeast Asia.
At the time, SitaRam had spent 25 years as a yogi. She owned her own studio, Shanti Yoga Center in Vancouver, and was as happy as a clam with the family that her classes had created. That was, until one day in December 2012 when she heard the term “temple elephants” on a podcast.
“I sort of spun around,” she said. “(It) had me shake my head in dismay and dig deeper.”
With a few quick clicks on her keyboard, she found a video of Ganga, an elephant kept chained outside the Gangaramaya Temple, a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka.
Upon seeing it, SitaRam stopped cold.
“I saw the worst abuse in the name of religion. … I couldn’t bear it,” SitaRam said. “They were the people whose books I read and the people I studied.”
After one night of sleep, SitaRam said she woke up and knew that her life had forever changed.
“I knew what I had to do,” she said: find a way to help these elephants.
Months after she found her new calling, SitaRam traveled to Thailand and Sri Lanka to gain a deeper understanding of why some elephants were being killed and some kept in captivity — and to see Ganga for herself.
Her yoga family helped her fund a seven-week trip, where she visited and volunteered with a number of organizations already working to resolve the issues surrounding the animals’ poor treatment and their rapid depletion from the planet. (Many types of elephants are on the World Wildlife Organization’s endangered species list.)
She learned about phajaan, the act of beating elephants until their spirit is broken and they submit to be trained for tourists’ entertainment.
“It wrecked me, right there in the middle of Thailand,” she said.
When she traveled to Sri Lanka and met Ganga, she saw the animal was on urine-drenched cement, unable to lie down or turn around and had no ready access to water. She described the experience as “a crisis of disbelief” that haunted her for the better part of the year.
“I went over there to save the elephants,” she said. “I came back with all of this in my heart.”
And so, SitaRam, a 50-year-old woman from Camas, founded Heart of Ganesh and became the executive director. Ganesh is a god that has the head of an elephant that is revered in many Eastern religions and is commonly esteemed in yoga.
The nonprofit aims to educate and empower people to make better choices for wild, endangered and captive elephants around the world.
But in some cases, SitaRam said, saving the elephants meant shifting the socio-economic reality of a place more than 8,000 miles from her home.
Even before they were recognized by the federal government as a registered nonprofit, Heart of Ganesh already had one of its projects underway in Sri Lanka.
Project Orange Elephant aims at resolving the human-elephant conflicts in the jungle villages of Sri Lanka, where people have rice paddies in the paths regularly traversed by wild elephants. The elephants trample on and eat up the rice, and villagers try to deter and disrupt this, resulting in the death of more than 70 people and 200 elephants each year, according to the National Zoo.
“They can clear years of work in one evening,” SitaRam said.
That loss, she said, spirals into poverty that is felt for generations.
“If we don’t help the people, they’re going to kill the elephants; and it’s not because they’re bad, it’s because they’re poor,” she said. “Resolutions are in our hands. We can fix this, and I plan on it.”
In April, Heart of Ganesh gave 18 families in these villages 10 orange trees each to plant around their rice fields. The benefit is twofold: the scent of oranges deters elephants, and the plants also give the farmers a new crop to eat and sell.
The organization’s approach, SitaRam said, is all about compassion.
Other projects include printing field guides that explain humane ways to deter elephants from crops. The organization is also about to launch a letter-writing campaign that would flood the Sri Lankan government and the Gangaramaya Temple with 1 million letters each, thanking them both for their humane treatment of Ganga in an effort to gently nudge them in that direction.
“We have no desire to blame or shame,” she said. “We will not enter this confrontationally.”
SitaRam said that the problem with the poor treatment of elephants is not an us-versus-them scenario. The United States is the second largest consumer of ivory next to China.
Locally, she’s trying to bring awareness about elephant captivity, both in the circus and zoo industries, and has made one presentation at a local school.
And because Americans contribute to the elephant tourism business, Heart of Ganesh has in the works a voluntourism program that would provide travelers an elephant experience that acts as an alternative to the traditional models that result in abuse.
When she thinks of the impact she hopes Heart of Ganesh will make on the world, SitaRam said she thinks of the first time she saw an elephant being beaten. Her guide turned to SitaRam and said: “There are bad people everywhere.”
“I knew I had to change that statement to there are good people everywhere,” she said.
