ABDF

Thursday, April 2nd

Hi everybody!

Well, first of all, I want to finish up the story of the phone lines being down the other day. The cause, or rather justification, was a big TMVP-Pilliyan faction shindig in town. All the top leaders of that particular faction were attending a meeting, and so for security reasons, the lines were cut. It wasn’t, as I had thought, some big military offensive or LTTE counter-attack in the North.

Speaking of which, the estimates are that the Tigers now only hold an area of about 7 miles long by 1.3 miles wide. There are still several tens of thousands trapped in the zone, probably being used as human shields. Imagine all those people packed into such a tiny area, and all the might of the military focused on that little bit of land. I shudder when I imagine what those poor folks are going through. I don’t know, maybe I’m naïve but if the LTTE truly cared about the Tamil people, shouldn’t they let all the civilians out, THEN battle it to the finish? I oppose war of almost any kind, but to involve helpless civilians in such a way makes me loose sympathy for the cause, if you know what I mean. Also, if you’re trying to gain world support, this is not the way to do it, verdad?

Back to more mundane things. Remember last year, when I described how amazed everyone was that the rains were lasting well into April? Well this year it’s the opposite. There hasn’t been nearly the normal amount of rain, and folks here are starting to talk about drought. I’ve noticed that the water level in the family well is about a foot below the water stain that marks normal years. Additionally, I’ve noticed that, according to my handy-dandy electric thermometer and humidity thing, it’s about 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than this time last year. While there is always hope for more rain, I suspect we are in for a long, hot, dry year. I worry about the impact on the rice paddies, as Sri Lanka is already barely self-sufficient in rice. I suppose that this back and forth is a manifestation of the beginnings of climate change; certainly that is local opinion. Sri Lankans, along with the rest of us, are starting to wake up to the issue.

One thing I noticed was that, what with the dryer weather, there are fewer mosquitoes than this time last year. Last year the extra rain disrupted the mosquitoes’ reproductive cycle, and now the lack of water seems to have done the same this year. That’s a big silver lining, as far as I’m concerned!

I was driving back into town today, after visiting some project sites. I noticed a sign that gives the altitude of Batti as 2.5 meters, or about 8 feet above sea level. I reflected that conservative estimates of ocean rise 50 years from now will be 10 feet. That means that (possibly) within my lifetime, Batticaloa will be inundated and abandoned. Will people found and build a New Batticaloa further inland, or will everyone just drift away and find homes elsewhere?

As I said, today I went out of town to look at project sites. Two of them are new possibilities, and the third place I visited was our computer lab at Kaluwankerny School. I am pleased to say that the computers and the lab are heavily used, and the room looked clean and well taken care of. The computers, too, are clean and still look new. One needs repair work, which will cost about 6,000 rupees or around $54, but that is the only repair and maintenance issue.

Sunday April 5, 2009

It’s funny how things happen. I wrote on Thursday about the water shortage. That evening it began to cloud over, and for the past couple of days we’ve had a decent amount of rain. Not enough, but it helps. As I write this Sunday morning, it’s bright and clear and hot again. The rain was nice while it lasted.

In other domestic news, Dog is now gone. On Thursday Vihas, the boy who lives downstairs, succeeded in chasing him off. Dog’s been back a couple of times, but since I was asked to keep him out, I have no choice but to do so. Poor thing; I hope he’ll be all right.

Jerry, my friend from the UK, came to Batticaloa on Friday; and so the work on the Periyapulmalai School Rehab Project begins tomorrow. Aside from this Jephcott Charitable Trust funded project, he has 21 wells to dig. Unfortunately, this is the wrong time to dig them; it’s properly done during the height of the dry season, to make sure a suitable depth is reached. So I’ll be keeping an eye on the wells later in the year, to make sure they were done properly.

This morning Jerry and I went out for a typical Sri Lankan breakfast called Masala Dhosa. Dhosa are pancakes made from rice flour; the batter is slightly fermented, so it makes little bubbles. Dhosa come in two kinds: masala, which is the size of our pancakes and about as thick; and paper dhosa, which are quite big around, thin and crispy. Sort of like a crepe back home. Paper dhosa usually have a savory of lightly curried vegetable filing inside, and are either rolled into a long tube or folded into a square pouch. As I said, we had masala dhosa. It comes with two side dishes; one a sort of thick and tangy vegetable broth, and the other a green paste the consistency of canned tomato paste, called chili sambal. The sambal is quite hot; the kind of heat that sneaks up on you after five or ten minutes. You tear off a piece of the dhosa, sop up some of the broth, and dip it into the sambal. While it isn’t what we Westerners would think of as breakfast food, it’s really tasty. Very often the simple foods are the best.

In fact, there are very few dishes in Sri Lanka that we would categorized as breakfast foods; if you come here you have to give up that preconceived definition. You can get a few expensive western style products in the shops, such as oatmeal made in Malaysia, but really, if you can accept the thought that breakfast can be hot and savory, there is a lot to enjoy here. I don’t eat Sri Lankan every breakfast; I do like my toast and jam, eggs, and oatmeal (which I don’t normally eat in the States), but I occasionally like to go out and have the local stuff too.

I’m a bit envious of Jerry. After his stay in Sri Lanka he’s going on something of a Grand Train Tour through South Asia. He’ll fly to the south of India and take the train all through the country; Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Varanasi, Delhi and Amritsar. From there he had planned to go to Lahore, Pakistan, and train south to Karachi; he even got all the permits and contacts lined up, but since right now the Taliban are killing foreigners and there is all manner of political unrest, he’s skipping that part. From India he’ll fly to Iran, and take the train through that country into and through Turkey. Then he’ll be on the famous Orient Express from Istanbul all the way to London. Quite an adventure, eh? Ah, some day…

So Friday a very uncomfortable thing happened. I had stopped at the train station to see what time the Colombo train was arriving, as I had told Jerry I’d meet him when he disembarked. The train was an hour and half late, so I drove home to wait. Just outside the station I used my mobile to call Jerry to ask him to let me know about 15 minutes before he arrived. I got on my bike, and before I had driven 50 feet I was flagged over by a policeman. It quickly became clear that all he wanted was to practice his English but I’m always hesitant to tell the police why I’m here; most of them are Singhalese and view Tamils and those who help them with deep suspicion.

It turns out that he lives in Batticaloa with his wife and kids, which tells me that actually he’s a TMVP militiaman. Recently as part of their “disarmament” program, some TMVP cadres have joined local police and security units. Normally I’d be all for locals joining the police force; one big problem here is communication with the community. Typically the police only speak Sinhala, and the locals only Tamil, which leads to a great deal of misunderstanding and resentment. However, the TMVP is accused by some of a lot of human rights violations, including child soldier recruitment, abduction and torture. Remember my friend who I helped ransom last year?

Anyway, this guy and I are chatting, and he says he wants to be friends, and what is my mobile number? I was sort of at a loss on that one; he’d probably seen me use my phone so I couldn’t say I didn’t have one. I could accidentally give him a number with one digit wrong, but since he’s a cop he’ll probably see me around town a lot this year. Honesty is usually the best policy, so I gave it to him, hoping that he would never actually call. Well he did. About 20 minutes later, he called me just to say hi and did I want to come to his house to meet his family? I explained I was waiting for a friend to come to Batti and I would be busy all evening.

Later, when I went back to the train station to get Jerry, he called again, saying his shift had just ended. I told him again that I was busy, and maybe some other day. That was Friday, and so far he hasn’t called back. I hope he won’t again. Last year one of the police chiefs in Batti, a Sinhalese man named Chandrasinghe, decided to be my friend, and it made things very awkward. (Fortunately his one-year stint in Batti was up in December and now he’s presumably back home in Bentota.)

Usually I’m happy to be friends with anyone, young, old, rich, poor, country, city, whatever religion, etc. But here in Batticaloa the police are generally regarded with fear, as they are seen as being in cahoots with the TMVP and other unpopular militia groups. Few people are brave enough to go to the police, even with normal non-political police issues.

To be honest, most police nowadays are merely trying to do their job. They just want to uphold the law and avoid getting shot at while doing it. Fair enough. But in the recent past the police did a lot of things that went far beyond maintaining the rule of law. So while it’s great that the role of the police has diminished in terms of politics, the fear their past had engendered will take a long time to go away.

On one hand, it’s problematic to integrate the TMVP cadres into the force. The TMVP is still feared, despite several well-publicized disarmament ceremonies in the past couple of months. There is a sense that some cadres have committed gross crimes, such as torture, and that justice has not been done. Nor will it, if they are now members of the police. You can imagine the shock of a former abductee to see his or her abductor and/or torturer wearing a police uniform manning a checkpoint. It hardly improves the image of the local police!

On the other hand… the government sees integration as one way to dilute the military strength of the militias, and to give them an investment in the future. And it does help the communication problem.

On the third hand… I wonder. I wonder if the conflict were to begin anew or the militias were to switch allegiances again, just to whom these new police and security personnel will be loyal – their militia or the government? On top of that, these guys now have access to police and security weapons caches.

As you can see, peace can be a very complicated thing to carry out.

As you all hopefully know by now, I teach an informal English conversation course to the four staff members of Synergy, a local organization. We meet three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for an hour or so. In the past I’ve referred to my students as “the kids.” Last Week I decided to do something a little different. I showed them the movie “Hairspray.” Not the recent musical remake, but the original John Waters comedy version. It has a lot of music and dancing, and the costumes and such are pretty extravagant. It also has the underlying storyline of the civil rights struggle in 1962 Baltimore. I figured that the kids would enjoy the music and dance, and relate to the civil rights message.

It went over very well. They were able to follow along OK; the subtitles helped a lot. I think it took a bit for them to get the racial equality message, but by the end they were rooting for the young interracial couple. But what they REALLY enjoyed was the music and dancing. The music was that pre-Beatles rock-n-role music; you know Chubby Checker and early Motown and all that, and the dancing was mostly the old dance steps like The Pony, The Continental, and The Madison. They had never heard this kind of music before or seen the steps, and as the culture here is very musically oriented, they were fascinated. Now we are slowly going over the movie again, defining new vocabulary (some of it very colloquial, like “I’m going to the record hop tonight!”), and trying to talk about the larger meaning of what they were seeing. Some of the scenes hit home, like when a young black couple try to get into a white-only dance. So I think over all I got my students to not only have a good time, but to take away some food for thought.

I was thinking of showing them either “Gandhi” or “Malcolm X” next. Well, those might be a bit too heavy and complex for their English level right now. Then again, maybe not. The best way to learn is by being challenged.

Dog showed up just now as I was writing that last paragraph. Somehow he got on the property, and came upstairs to my place, wagging his tail and whining pitifully. I shooed him away unenthusiastically. I really wish the Irish couple had not adopted him. To quote: “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Gay Paree?”

Hmm, well, I can’t think of anything else interesting to tell you right now. So I will close, and try to get this posted.

xoxoxxoxoxoxo

B.