A healing JOURNEY with RHINOS

HELENA KRIEL WAS LIVING a high-flying life. Early on in her writing career, she won the Steven Spielberg Award for Screenwriting and was suddenly launched into Hollywood as an A-list screenwriter. All the doors were flung wide open. Born and raised in Johannesburg, she split her time between South Africa and Los Angeles, moving wherever the next project took her. When she fell in love in LA, she settled there with her partner, thinking she had finally found the place where she belonged.

‘I was the ultimate romantic,’ Helena says. ‘When I finally found the guy I thought was The One, it was all very exciting. And then everything sort of collapsed.’

A writer’s strike in Hollywood caused a massive speed wobble in Helena’s career and, after seven years together, she realised her partner wasn’t the person she wanted to be with after all. ‘When you find the person that you think is right for you,’ she says, ‘you have all these dreams of belonging: I belong with this person; I belong in a family with this person; I belong in a house with this person. You feel like you’ve come to a place where you can say, “I belong.” And then when all of that comes unglued, suddenly you start questioning where you belong now.’

In a state of emotional confusion, Helena retreated to her roots to find her bearings again – she came home to South Africa. When the opportunity presented itself to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary for three weeks, Helena welcomed it with open arms. ‘I packed up my stuff, headed north and got further and further away from everything,’ she says. ‘The road was getting bumpier and the trees were getting thornier, and everything was getting wilder and wilder. I didn’t know where I was headed.’ The most important thing at that point was that she was headed away.

When she arrived and found out