When I was young, my family lived in a village in Myanmar, near the North Bago Yoma Forest. My dad was a businessman and had a big machine that made boards from logs. The wood could be used for tables, floors, roofs, and so many things. My dad stayed for a long time in the forest for his work, sometimes three months at a time. The forest had many kinds of trees, including big teaks, padauk trees, and iron trees. My dad exported those kinds of wood from Myanmar to other countries.

When I was in seventh grade, when our school closed at Christmas time, I went on a trip to the forest with my mom and two brothers. My dad had not come back home for a long time because he was too busy with his work. We missed him so much. First, we drove in the car for two hours. After that, we rode on a boat in a river for 45 minutes and then walked 30 minutes along a muddy road. It was a difficult journey for our family. Finally, we arrived at my dad’s wooden house. Although we were so tired, we were happy because we saw my dad. The wooden house was very long and small. It was built on stilts. It had a long ladder to go up and one small bedroom at the top.

My dad showed us the elephants and how they pulled the fallen trees and helped the men cutting them down. We were so excited and happy because we were seeing big elephants close up for the first time. When the elephants trumpeted, their sound was very loud and could be heard throughout the whole forest. I was scared, but the elephants listened to their trainers. We wanted to touch an elephant’s trunk. The trainer told one elephant to sit down, and it did so right away. When I touched the elephant’s trunk, the elephant stayed still, quietly and nicely. Then we fed the elephants sugarcane and rode them with their trainer around the forest. They were not uncomfortable with people. As I rode my elephant, I saw many kinds of birds in the trees, such as woodpeckers, parrots, and doves. I also saw colorful flowers among the branches, such as purple orchids, wild pink roses, and white jasmines, as well as small trees all along the way. Those plants grew wild there. Birds’ songs and the sound of the small stream we followed made me feel peaceful and relaxed.

On Christmas night, the forest workers sang Christmas songs and played a guitar. We ate roasted wild boar, which had been captured in the forest. The workers in the forest were mostly Christian. Our family is Buddhist, but we respected the workers’ Christmas songs and sang happily with them.

That night, I saw so many mosquitos in the house. If mosquitos bit us, we could get malaria. My dad worried about the mosquitos, so he kept a log fire burning under the stilt house the whole night. It was so cold at night in the forest at that time. The smoke kept the mosquitos away from us and gave us warmth. We stayed in the forest three days. We had to boil water to drink every day because water from the stream was dirty and could make us sick. We also couldn’t take a shower during those three days for the same reason.

I got many gifts from the forest. I saw beautiful nature and the usefulness of elephants and trees. The forest made me think, showed me new things, and helped me understand my dad’s hard work. He wanted a good future for us. I will never forget that trip. It was my first and last time in the Bago Yoma Forest.

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Aye Win grew up in a village in Myanmar and worked as a schoolteacher there. Now she lives in Brooklyn. She has a daughter in second grade. She studies English in Karen Schmauk’s CLIP class at CUNY’s City Tech. At one of the LR18 photo shoots, she showed the editors wonderful photos—some featuring elephants—of her family’s trip to Bago Yoma Forest.