It’s certainly exhilarating to travel to Africa. This is why we do all we can to encourage tourism and, in fact, will plan group trips in the near future to several African countries for our donors.

However, such trips for business are time consuming, expensive and often less is accomplished to help elephants during these trips than in meetings in the United States.

This is why we are focusing on a big picture strategy: policy making, water infrastructure problems, reforestation and herd management, all of which effect the world’s largest elephant herds.

These crucial issues can sometimes be resolved by phone calls, writing influential articles, developing relationships with key decision maker and meetings with ambassadors of African countries in Washington, DC, thereby greatly reducing time and travel expenses. This is what we describe as the macro vision – our big picture strategy.

Yet, at the same time, on the micro level, we will always answer the call to rescue only one elephant no matter where he or she may be in the world.

Indeed, we are presently working very hard to rescue one beautiful little forest elephant from the Abidjan Zoo in the Ivory Coast and, although it will require much time and hard work, we are confident we will succeed.