Animal Generator Craft!

Growing up, I always loved these books. They were the ‘monster-makers’ the ‘character generators’ SO I thought to myself- what if we used endangered animals from Phong Nha, Vietnam, and made a little animal flipbook! You’ll see those characters in the attached document. That being said, the document is simply a template, if you wanted to create a different animal to attach to the list, be my guest!

How you’d go about that: cut out 12- 4x3” rectangles from your printer paper. Set aside three per animal. Make sure you are drawing all of the animals with the paper in a vertical orientation. Now it’s time to draw! One square will be the head, one will be the torso (middle body) and one will be the feet/ the back of the animal. Draw this for each animal before assembling in the steps below.

Assembling is the easy part. You just cut out all of the squares and take some glue to the tops of all of the individual sheets. Stack the heads first. In whatever order you have the heads, you’ll stack the mid section and the behind sections in that order. Take all three sections and you’ll glue the very bottom sheet onto the 11x4” base card.

Color them up and flip through to the different animals- you can mix and acth and invent animals all your own!

Diving further into Phong Nha. If y’all don’t know, Phong Nha ke Bang National Park is part of the Annamite Mountain Range along the Western Border of Vietnam. It’s so close to Laos that where we were trekking was only 40 km away from the border. Ever since UNESCO claimed Phong Nha as a world heritage site in 2003, the range has been closed off to outsiders and only folks with a permit are allowed in. At first you might think, ‘that's a violation of our freedom to roam’ because that’s initially what I thought too. But if you really consider what sits inside this gem of a place, it was never to keep us out, but to protect what sits inside.

What lay inside the vast, rugged wilderness of Phong Nha? Not only does it house the largest cave system in the world by volume, the Son Doong cave, but it is full of endangered animals. For decades poachers would traverse the terrain hunting these rare animals, sometimes having no recollection that they were hunting a species that’s on the verge of extinction. Starting as a preserve in the 1980’s, moving up to a National park in the 90’s, and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the 2000’s, Phong Nha houses the coveted Saola, the Himalayan Sapria flower, multiple endangered Langurs (monkeys), the Sunda Pangolin, Munjacs, and so many other plants and animals. 

While I did the trek, I was extremely impressed and inspired by my team. The men at Jungle Boss carried bags bigger than themselves full of food, pots and pans, tarps, essentially building our camp once we arrived to the camp site. They’d been doing it for most of their lives, so their muscles were able to adapt to not only carrying the load, but hiking these narrow, steep, jagged rock-covered trails that we ourselves as hikers found difficult at times to overcome. Captain led the way. He was a local to Phong Nha who grew up hunting the area for his family. That’s one thing I think we need to think through a little more on the side of hunters and poachers. Hunters don’t go in trying to be the “bad guys” we see on TV. They hunt because they need food for their family. It’s eat or be eaten, and if you grow up a certain way believing that something is right without anyone telling you it’s wrong, you’re going to maintain that frame of mind. But just because you grow up believing something, doesn’t mean you don’t have the capacity for change. What I found interesting was that the UNESCO designation and inability to hunt turned a lot of the hunters into tour guides. Captain was the BEST tour guide because he grew up in the forest, him and his brother discovered some of the biggest caves, and where there was no trail, he would make one because he knew exactly where he was. Furthermore, he has this incredible dream to start programs for the local kids to get them back into nature, teach them how to survive the jungle just as his ancestors taught him. Pretty darn cool!

This craft is to play and have fun with animals, but it’s also to understand what it means to be unique. Each one of us is pieced together by things we love, things we don’t like, experiences that shape us and lessons that break us down only to build us back into better stronger people. Much Like Phong Nha we are full of things unique only to us. What I loved about this experience was that even in the rain, the mountains were stunning. If anything, because of the rain the colors were that much more vibrant. Life will be filled with sunshine and rainstorms and our brains must spend time in fog, but I’m convinced that once the fog lifts with the reminisce of the rain lingering, that is when you can really see how beautiful life is.

Enjoy crafting!