The plan

(blog post pre-coffee. excuse typos and complete randomness)

Sri Lanka has two main populations - the sinhalese, who are generally buddhist, and the tamils, who are generally hindu (there's also a small muslim population and an even smaller christian population). The sinhalese are the island's original inhabitants and the tamils walked over from Tamil Nadu (India) about 2000 years ago. There's also the burghers - europeans who arrived after the 16th century - and indian tamils who arrived in the 19th century to work on the tea plantations. The tamils (the sri lankan ones, not the indian ones) are the majority in the north and eastern parts of the country and the sinhalese are the majority in the central, south, and west of the country. The 30 year civil war was over the control of the northern part of the island, which is where we worked and where we want to go. We have had to get a pass to go north, and yesterday afternoon we received it. When we worked here in 2005 we had to get passes from both sides; now that the war is over, we only need one pass.

Our plan for the month, has been to spend half the time in the south (on vacation) and the other half in the north (visiting friends and seeing the town we used to work in). Gene also has to work half the time and we had doubted that he'd be able to do that in the north - last time we were there, we had 4 hours of power a day and satellite phones that could surf the web at the raging speed of 4800 bit/s. So we'd planned a week in the south, a week in the north, another week in the south and our last week in the north.

We've spent our first week here in Colombo, the capital, and Unawatuna, a beach town. We have friends in Colombo - in 2008, Gene worked on the Sichuan earthquake with a woman who now heads the office in Colombo and so we've been staying with her and her partner in a large very relaxing house in a neighborhood with relaxing rooftop bars and good coffee shops. We've used our time here to get the pass for the north and to allow gene to work. We also went to the beach for a few days; we'd planned to head to Tangalla - a beach town with a good reputation that we hadn't been to before. To get to Tangalla, you take the train to Matara and ride a tuk-tuk (motorized rickshaw) for the last 15 km, but when we bought a train ticket we discovered that the train wasn't going to Matara that day - the furthest we could get was Galle, the old Dutch fort town. Two km outside of Galle is a beach town and so we decided to at least stop there for lunch on our way to Tangalla. The guidebook pointed to "the best place in Unawatuna for lunch" so we went, and discovered that our lunch place was the hotel we had stayed in on our way out of the country in 2005 - we'd taken a few days of vacation at the end and spent it on the beach. So we decided to stay there. It rained a bit so I took a Sri Lankan cooking class and realized that my kitchen is clearly missing a coconut shredder.

We returned to Colombo and got our passes. All online information seemed to indicate that there was no way that we'd get one -we could apply, but even if we were tamil, chances were slim. But our friend who applied for them for us had said that there would be no problem, and there wasn't a problem except that they're only valid for two weeks.

But the north has changed. We get phone calls from our friends on their cell phones. There's electricity up there. We've got a 3G modem with us and so we'll go up and see if gene can actually work from there. We'd planned to spend Christmas up there - maybe we'll see if we can get another pass.

Colombo Photos

Why?

Immediately following the tsunami in December 2004, Gene was sent to Sri Lanka to run logistics for a medical aid organization. The NGO had a few projects, but one of them was a hospital in the north that had been badly damaged - not during the tsunami, but by neglect during the intense civil war. I joined him a month later (as a logistician/ administrator for the same organization), and we spent 2005 rehabilitating a 100-bed hospital. The hospital was in bad shape - it had been running with the help of two local nurses - each working one 12-hour shift a day- and a group of volunteers, and the ER, operating theatre, and several of the wards had been shut down and boarded up. The ambulance was gone, and anyone who needed to be transferred to a different hospital had to hitch a ride. There were holes in the roof and monkeys and cows roaming the halls. The medical NGO brought doctors, nurses, midwives, and gene and I, and while the medical staff dealt with snake bites, elephant attacks, and plenty of colds, gene and I worked with a huge staff to make the hospital back into what it had been.

We built fences, repaired rooves, added walls, ran electricity, decked out a 4x4 to be an ambulance, cleaned things, plastered things, painted things, poured concrete, added furniture, built a medical incinerator, repaired bathrooms, and the list goes on and on and on...

We lived in a tent for most of that time, and survived off of delicious rice and curry and amazing coffee. The temperature was always - morning, noon, and night - in the mid 90s, the humidity was always 80%, and the monsoon rains arrived every day at 2. We were next to the equator so the sun rose at 6 and set at 6. We wore sarongs and saris got around town on bicycles. The town was incredibly clean - like portland, the rain washed away any dirt and kept everything green - and the population incredibly well educated (The Sri Lanka literacy rate is well above 90%) and completely wonderful and charming.

We wanted to stay; when we left we were beyond exhausted. We'd been surviving for months with almost no sleep, and we were so far off the grid that a phone call home or to the nearest town cost $5/minute on the satellite phone. So we went home and spent a few months sleeping. We felt horrible about this - we'd made the very best of friends and we felt like we were letting them down - we could walk away and they couldn't.

The ongoing civil had been at a ceasefire when we were there, but it started up again after we left, and in August of 2008, the town we worked in became the front line. Most of the town was destroyed or heavily damaged and the hospital -in the center of town- probably was as well. Our friends and neighbors were moved into camps and - thanks to the help of family - we wired them money so that they could buy firewood and water and rice. People died in the fighting and people died in the camps as well.

And then the war ended in 2009 and people were released and allowed to return home. They were given money to rebuild and they returned to the town.

And now - in December 2010- we're headed to visit. We've decided to bring a donation to the hospital; it's a very important place to us, and this holiday season- more than any other gift- we want that community and our friends to have it once again. Because of that, we're asking people who would otherwise give us gifts to please help us by donating to this instead.

However, we aren't entirely sure of the status of the place (but we hear there are doctors!), and if we discover that the hospital is in much better shape than we think it is, may may shift the donation to the local schools. Or perhaps peace will have finally brought prosperity to the region, and we'll bring the money back.

It will be an interesting journey.

peace,
christi

Poisonous newts

There's apparently a poisonous newt in Sri Lanka. It's gray, rather large for a newt and it waddles.. a rather quick waddle, but not quickly enough that anyone that wasn't half asleep couldn't escape from it. Its spit is poisonous, but it doesn't have much in the way of teeth, so it attacks by scratching and then licking the scratch.... if the newt remembers to do both, you're in trouble. Fortunately, no one remembers it ever doing both.

And that's why, Nadesh says, Sri Lankans use the phrase "attention span of a newt."

I don't know if this is true and I'm not planning to google "poisonous newt sri lanka" to find out. I've seen the newt - waddling across my tent floor. He neither scratched nor licked me. He was probably not a newt - just a salamander, and I have no idea of the status of teeth and nails of the Caudata order.