Time to lend a hand...

As one of my audit team goals for the year we decided to do some volunteering. A few ideas were juggled, including cleaning grave stones and weeding local parks.... however the most popular by far was helping out at an animal sanctuary.

Pakuratahi Farm Animal Sanctuary is a safe haven for injured, neglected and abused animals. It is a place where farm animals are allowed to live out their lives to a natural age, free of cages and overcrowded conditions. Pakuratahi Farm Animal Sanctuary is constantly growing and has many farm animals, including: sheep, cows, hens, roosters, ducks, geese, pigs, goats rabbits and horses. It is also home to many other animals who are in need of love and attention. These include: emus, donkeys, doves, guinea pigs, turtles, monkeys, cats and dogs.

They aim to rehabilitate all the animals and where possible find them loving homes. They will never put a healthy animal to sleep. All the animals there have a history and a story... the monkeys came from a circus, one of the dogs was born with a disfigured leg and so was going to be euthanised at birth but he is living happily at the sanctuary, they have a cat with no tail, a pigeon with no feet, a bird with a broken beak..... the list goes on. This picture shows me with Ned - with the disfigured leg. Ned is actually a super star having appeared in the film King Kong which was filmed in New Zealand... also one of the pigs provided the noise for the T-Rex when it was fighting with the big ape - famous animals!!!

As a team we decided to give a hand and help them out with some work so we arrived just in time for a delicious packed lunch and then set to work. The boys of the team rescued a dog kennel from the bottom of the hill where it had blown during a gale, repaired it and restored it to the correct location. Some of the others dug a path but Lin and I were volunteered to build a compost heap.

I should mention at this point that I was a little unprepared for this kind of work, having left my wellies (Gum boots or Gummies now) in the UK with all my gardening tools so I had to make a quick dash to 'The Warehouse' (like the Range) the night before to stock up on essential items...

After building the compost heap and filling it with, among other things, monkey poo, we felt we deserved a break and so went to visit some of the other animals... this was one of my favourites...
Flemish Giant bunny... she was so cute but I did feel like I was being unfaithful to Hocus and Pocus when I asked if they were up for adoption... I know I can't have a bunny when I'm in a one bed flat with no garden but we hope to have a house soon, and then there'll be no stopping me :)

We dug holes for the posts for a big bunny run for those two but didn't have any concrete to mix to hold the posts in place - as you can see from the pics it was a beautifully sunny day and it was really hot work but it did make a nice change from being in the office.

After the hard work it was time to start the camp fire and cook some dinner - veggies only of course - so we sliced up pumpkin, kumara, carrots, courgettes, onion, mushroom and capsicum, put them in tin foil with a spoonful of olive oil, some salt and pepper and put them in the embers of the fire. After a hard afternoon's work it tasted delicious!!!

We were then treated to some 'Damper' which is like scone mix that we put on the end of sticks and roasted over the fire - tasted like smoked scones - a bit weird with jam and butter but good none-the-less! in the pic above you can see (from left to right) Sophie - Henry's daughter, Henry, Thai, me and Dax. It was a really 'feel good' afternoon and I think we did help them out a bit :)