Ehra building week
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Elephant Human Relations Aid
When elephants and humans both need the same sip of water, someone usually pays the price.
Water
When elephants and humans both need the same sip of water, someone usually pays the price. And in Namibia’s northwest, the odds have rarely favored the elephants.
Broken water tanks, uprooted pipes, windmills toppled like toys, and fields flattened overnight. Fear and frustration build fast when a season’s worth of water or crops vanishes in a single visit, and too often the response comes stamped with a hunting permit.
EHRA (Elephant Human Relations Aid), a Namibian non-profit founded in 2001, decided there had to be a smarter way: protect the villages’ water, create separate drinking spots for elephants, and teach communities how to read elephant behavior. The payoff: fewer confrontations and fewer casualties on either side.
Because sometimes the real fight isn’t between humans and elephants, but against the idea that sharing space is impossible.
School Partnership Programme
Each year, students from around the world trade classrooms for the arid vastness of Namibia. One week is spent helping out at a rural Namibian school: building, painting, fixing what’s needed. The next is spent deep in the desert, learning to navigate by compass and spotting free-roaming elephants
Fire
In his presence, no secret feels too personal to share. No heartbreak is safe from being broken down by a laugh. No fragility too awkward, no language too tricky, no past too heavy.
Everything softens around a fire.
The building week
Their backs never seem to ache. They mix cement as if it were cake batter and lift rocks as though they were daisies. The volunteers, on the other hand, are slow, fragile, inefficient, and almost comical in their attempts to keep up.
But luckily, a wall doesn’t speak. The stones don’t remember who carried them, and the cement doesn’t care if you need a chair or take too long to stir.
A wall is just a wall: it protects water.
Duty Team!
Two volunteers, one sentence, served every three days: cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and scrub every pan and plate that comes with it. The other two days? You enjoy the quiet luxury of rest and the rare comfort of someone else doing it all for you.
