2015 June 6: The Secret Garden and Other Places

One of my favourite things to do when I am traveling is to get up early in the morning, just as the sun is beginning to rise, put on my running shoes and head out the front door. Not to run - I don't run! - but to explore. Most times I have no idea where I am going, and rare is it that I follow the exact same path twice in its entirety.

In 2002 I spent the summer in Beijing. Each morning I would leave my hotel at the crack of dawn, often not returning until late in the evening, bone tired from walking fourteen kilometers or more in the searing humidity - ground temperatures were often 50 degrees Celsius.

This was back before the era of digital cameras, and I still managed to take forty-two rolls of film! I saw sights that few Westerners have seen. For example, I visited one tiny little museum that I stumbled upon one morning that used to be the home of a very famous - to the Chinese - author. As I was leaving, the curator told me that while I was inside she had looked through fifty years worth of visitor logs, and I was the only Westerner to have ever visited the museum.

One of my favourite areas to walk in Negombo was among the myriad little streets and alley ways just to the north and east of Cemetery Road where our house was. I grew friendly with some of the people who live along those little streets, and never tired of seeing the abundance of flora and fauna in the middle of a big place like Negombo.

On June 6, 2015, I was walking along one of my favourite streets, listening to the singing of early morning birds and chattering people and blaring radios and squeaking bicycle wheels as children went off to school. I was taking photos of some of the flora on my way, when an older gentleman I had waved to and exchanged pleasantries with on several occasions asked to see my pictures. He was very impressed that I was so interested in flowers, and invited me into his yard to see his and his wife's beautiful garden - not visible from the street, all the while regaling me with tales of when each was planted and why they had included it.

True gardeners, we exchanged flower stories for quite some time as I took pictures of this hidden tropical backyard paradise. It was a very nostalgic experience for me, as many of the flowers that grow year round in Sri Lanka are ones that my mother plants every year as annuals back in Newfoundland..

 

I left his garden with handfuls of fresh roseapples, one of my favourite Sri Lankan fruits. With a texture like an Asian pear and a taste reminiscent of cardamom, I could not get enough. Steve and Elanor did not share my enthusiasm for this pink fruit with white flesh, but I ate them as often as I could. When our friends found out that I liked them, rare was the Sunday that one of the women from church did not bring me some from her garden.

As I munched along that beautiful morning, I stumbled upon a faint path that led down to the canal, where I was greeted by this gorgeous view, little seen except by the locals who use the makeshift footbridge to go to their homes in a poor neighbourhood hidden from sight from all who pass by....unless like me, they stray off the beaten path to discover the secret beauty all around.

2015 June 10: What Might Have Been

Last year at this time we were in Sri Lanka, having arrived two days previously on my husband's birthday. We were looking forward to a grand adventure - five months in beautiful Sri Lanka, one of my husband's favourite places on earth.

The first four months were wonderful without question. We traveled, we visited my husband's old friends, we ate the local food and in many ways immersed ourselves in having a grand time. I wrote many blogs during those four months to keep family and friends up to date on what we were doing. And since we have been back many of them have asked why I suddenly stopped writing before our trip was over.

The truth is...I just didn't have the heart.

At the beginning of our fifth and final month in Sri Lanka, I had a miscarriage, one with near debilitating complications and where I thought for a short while that I was going to die. After spending several days in hospital, and most of the two weeks following that in bed recovering, we attempted to put it behind us and to finish our trip on a high note.

But it wasn't the same.

This was the second miscarriage that my husband and I had had in five years of marriage. And to be honest, I have spent a lot of time since then wondering and pondering on the purpose of it all.

When I think that instead of holding a new born in my arms at the beginning of this year I just have memories of leaving a very small part of us behind in Sri Lanka....

Two small bricks that mark the place.

I cannot help but think of what might have been.

2015 February 19: Remembering the Tsunami of 2004

Lament for the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka

From October 2000 to July 2001, my brother Steve was in northwest coastal Sri Lanka gathering material for a dissertation (Negombo Fishermen’s Tamil: A Case of Contact-Induced Language Change from Sri Lanka, Cornell University, 2004). He worked extensively with the inhabitants of a small, Catholic fishing village a few miles from the city of Negombo. Last night he sent the following e-mail, with permission to publish it here.

The news just gets worse and worse. It appears that most or all of the people who were my research subjects and my friends during my stay in Sri Lanka are dead. Negombo was hit quite hard, and the people whose language and lifestyle I documented lived in frail cadjun [coconut-leaf] huts within meters of the high water mark, on the sands of the beach. They knew nothing but God, family, and fishing, and have not, to my knowledge, dropped bombs on anybody or fought any wars on drugs or mass-produced pornography and land mines; yet they are all apparently dead and we remain. Not only that: I could not have gotten my status-conferring, income-enhancing Ivy League PhD without their help, whereas they got along just fine without mine – yet they are gone and I linger on, PhD and all.

Nor can I take any consolation in their being “human beings just like us,” because they aren’t like us, not at all. They have the same DNA, they have many of the same passions, to be sure. But they also have no comprehension of our wisecracking, self-absorbed cynicism; they are (though it sounds cliche to say it) blessed with a certain childlike absence of guile. They place community above all other things and choose not to trouble themselves with the world’s problems. They do not live their lives in “I can give you 15 minutes of my valuable time” mode, ever. They always treated me like a dignitary and usually insisted on preparing excellent seafood dinners, which they couldn’t afford. There was never any suggestion that they were ashamed of their humble living quarters. Their huts were always clean, and their clothing always neat. I paid to help them build a cistern of their own (an untold luxury) in the sand behind their hut. It consisted merely of a 15-foot deep hole lined with metal, but it gave them fresh water for washing and drinking for the first time, ever. I fancied that, in buying them a well – not to mention a pile of clothing and household goods I got for them right before my departure – I was repaying them in part for helping me achieve my ambition.

Now the well and the household goods, as well as the houses and inhabitants, are probably gone, along with those of tens of thousands of others like them, all alike in their poverty and simplicity, all utterly unlike us. Maybe the old, abominable racial theories are correct, in a perverse and unanticipated way, for there really do seem to be two completely different moieties of the human race: the one, perpetually lapped in comfort, snugly insulated from the brunt of mother nature (most of the time), and able and willing to unleash hellfire and bombnation on the other half at the slightest provocation, real or imagined; the other, perpetually under the yoke of the first, always fodder for the cannons, chaff for the economic downdrafts, grist for the millstones of mother nature.

Anyway, enough hyperbole. Suffice it to say, I’m really bummed about this. Call it survivor’s guilt or whatever, but there can’t be too many people out there who’ve seen their PhD subject matter obliterated.

Steve Bonta
27 December 2004

And so it was with some trepidation that on February 19 Steve led Elanor and me to his friends' fishing village, site of about forty homes on the beach in Negombo. He wanted to see with his own two eyes that it was really gone, but still garnering some small hope that maybe, just maybe, the news reports that said that all beach communities - and the people in them - were lost were wrong.

But when we stepped onto the beach...we knew. Instead of the small close-knit fishing village bustling with the work of processing the daily catch and the raising of small children and the daily cooking and cleaning and washing...we were greeted by an open stretch of sand.

Steve was devastated. The people he knew and loved, their humble thatch and palm frond homes much like the one found below, the well that he dug for them in thanks for all of their help so that they would have clean drinking water...all gone.

For video of our visit, please click here.

Happy New Year!

What's that, you ask? New Year's in April?

Yup! According to Sinhalese astrology, the new year begins when the sun moves from Pisces to Aries, and signals the end of the harvest and the beginning of spring. It is also one of two times a year that the sun shines directly over Sri Lanka.

We began our New Year's celebrations on April 14. We went to our friends Champika and Padmasiri's house in Kochikade for the afternoon.

He is an organic farmer, among other things, and was featured in a television special a few years ago on organic farming techniques. They served us traditional New Years treats, and we toured their property, startling two very large water monitors in the process! Our driver and the elders from our church were also invited in for some true Sri Lankan hospitality.

Elanor and I left with new sandals, gifts from these very generous folks, as well as a bag of fruit that Steve helped to pick, vegetables, and sweets.

It was a wonderful afternoon!

Then, on Saturday the 18th, the local branch of our church had their New Year's celebration. Oh, the fun that we had! The organizers put a lot of effort into making this a huge success. Our day started with Champika and her girls giving Elanor a beautiful traditional Sri Lankan dress that they had made for her.

Believe it or not, Elanor and Piyumi (in the purple dress) are almost the same age. Deshika (in the green dress) is three years older than Elanor.

You can see how much we all enjoyed ourselves throughout the rest of the day by clicking here to watch the video I made.

2015 March 12-13: Kandy: Part 1

On March 12 we left the blazing sun of Negombo for an overnight trip to the cool hill country of Kandy. 

Found in the very centre of the island, it is the second largest city in Sri Lanka. It is a beautiful city with a rich cultural and religious heritage, and is surrounded by tea plantations, hills, and spectacular views. 

Kandy has been - and still is - known by many names since its founding in the mid-1300s, It is an old city - the Kandyan Kingdom was founded in the late 1400s. After the Portuguese conquered all the coastal kingdoms in the 1500s, Kandy was the last remaining kingdom on the island, and repelled all attempts by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British to overthrow it until a treaty called the Kandyan Convention was signed between the Colonial British and the Kandyan aristocrats in 1815; the last king of Kandy was captured by the British and, along with all other claimants to the thrown, was taken to Tamil Nadu in southern India, where the area where they were incarcerated is still referred to as the Place of the Kandyan Kings.

The treaty did not lead to peace. As stated here, "The story of English rule in the Kandyan country during the rebellion of 1818 cannot be related without shame...Hardly a member of the leading families remained alive...Those whom the sword and the gun had spared, cholera and small pox and privations had slain by the hundreds...Others became ignorant and apathetic. Any subsequent development efforts of the government for many years were only attempts begun and abandoned."

The tea and rubber plantations that one passes on the way to Kandy are beautiful agricultural marvels that hide a troubled past. During the 32 years of British rule following the signing of the treaty, many tea and rubber plantations were established in and around the city and villages of the surrounding hills through the expropriation of land owned by the people, who were then forced to abandon their traditional way of life to become waged workers for the British. The Kandyans refused to accept this, resulting in the British bringing hundreds of thousands of unskilled Tamils from southern India to work in the appalling conditions found on the plantations. The Kandyans revolted, and with their leaders dead, their land gone, their way of life destroyed, they rebelled by electing for the first time non-aristocrats to lead them.

Of course, we knew little of this as we traveled by bus to get there. We were taken in by the beautiful views, especially as we slowly climbed the winding mountain roads that lead to Kandy. The view of Bathalegala Rock, a 1688 foot tall volcanic mountain surrounded by lush rain forest, was breathtaking. 

Kandy is also home to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. This is one of the most holy places in the world for Buddhists. They believe that one of the Buddha's teeth was rescued from his funeral pyre, and eventually made its way here to Kandy. It - or a replica so that the original remains safely tucked away - is found in one of the shrines in the complex, encased in seven boxes reminiscent of Russian nesting dolls. The temple is situated in the former Kandyan royal complex, and includes this island which is reportedly where the king kept his favourite concubine.

After finding a hotel we went for a walk around the lake. Kandy Lake is completely artificial, constructed so that the royal family would have a place to go boating and bathing. The city surrounds the lake, and a well-maintained walkway makes a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

The next morning we went to a natural area found in the hills behind the temple.

Lush and serene, it seems a different world from the hustle and bustle of the city. We spent several hours here, walking the pathways. 

We saw over 130 toque macaques in three family groups as we walked along the sun-dappled roads. One group of 63 individuals passed in front of us. Steve and Elanor sat on the ground in the midst of another large troupe as the monkeys crossed all around them. Several large black millipedes were entertaining to watch and for Steve and Elanor to hold. A Buddhist monk in his orange robes passed us on his way to some nearby caves to meditate. A barking deer - the size of a dog, sounds like a dog - startled us just as much as we startled him. Elanor was bitten by her first leech, and bled her white sock red. 

After a passing light rain, common in the higher elevations in the hill country, we headed back to busy Kandy. Numerous websites and travel guides talk of the seedy underside of Kandy - warnings against lone female travelers, staying inside at night, avoiding the alleyways that contain seedy gambling dens, and the ever present touts trying to encourage you to spend your money at one or another establishment...for a small fee, of course.

The coolness of Kandy was a welcome respite, and while we will probably visit there again before we leave, I am glad that we decided to stay in Negombo for our five months in Sri Lanka.  Negombo is home, with its sizzling heat and blood red skies that signal more hot weather to come.

2015 March 5: River Baths

On March 5 Elanor and I went on a road trip with the Relief Society, the women's group in my church, to a place called Kithulgala, a small town in the heart of the wet zone rain forest in western Sri Lanka. 

It is where the movie ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ was filmed. 

It is also famous for its white water rafting...

...and is a popular place for Sri Lankans to take a bath.

Most houses here, the ones in larger towns and cities anyway, have a shower in the bathroom. But in the smaller villages, especially in very rural and traditional areas, there is no indoor plumbing. It's common to see wells and the Sri Lankan form of outhouse. It's also common to see semi-circular enclosures in yards, about five feet high, where people clean themselves using a large tub of water. Instead of getting into the water, you dip some out, get yourself wet, lather up, then use more water to rinse off. This keeps the water in the tub clean for the next person to use.

Which is why river baths are so popular.

We met at the church as the sun rose...

and over the next hour as we waited for some late comers and our bus, I was able to snap some great bird pics of a red-wattled lapwing who was confusedly fishing in a rainy puddle in the paved church parking lot,...

a white throated kingfisher sitting in one of the oldest trees in Negombo - at over 150 years old, it was saved when our church was built on the lot just a few years ago,...

 and this pond heron sitting on some wires.

I also saw house crows, koels, common mynas, cattle egrets, cormorants, barn swallows, great egrets, pale bellied flowerpeckers, purple rumped sunbirds and rock doves as we waited.

Finally, at about 7:20 we were ready to go, with breakfast, lunch, and an overfull bus load of women, children, and three men. With members spread from outside Negombo all the way to Chilaw, we also stopped along the way to pick up a few more people. As we passed by the airport, I saw a hawk circling overhead, and lesser whistling ducks swimming in the airport pond.

After we passed through Nittambuwa, we stopped at a little roadside pull-off for breakfast - spicy onions and fresh bread. Most women had brought their own recipe of the onions, so there was a lot of comparing of notes as each was sampled. We had a wonderful view of cattle and water buffalo in the fields below, and could see the branches of the trees swinging as monkeys hopped about.

A white-breasted drongo watched as we ate. 

After a few more hours, we arrived at Kithulgala.

We had a great time splashing about in the water, especially Elanor.

Then, time to relax as we listened to groups of men and boys playing instruments and singing in the middle of the river, on little islands, and on the shore.

After everyone had finished playing in the water and soaping up from head to toe before rinsing off, we headed back to our bus for some lunch, a pot luck of all sorts of Sri Lankan food. As it was a holiday, we ate in the shade on the steps of some nearby stores.

Completely refreshed, we began the long ride back to Negombo. Things were going wonderfully, and after about two hours we stopped to stretch our legs. I watched a little cricket being played. 

Then joined everyone in the shade of some trees, where we played a trivia game and had some snacks. Pretty soon, we saw this purple leaf monkey watching us from the nearby roof. 

And then it started to rain. When I say rain, I mean downpour. The skies opened and everything was drenched. I'm told it was a pre-rainy season rain. (You can see what I mean if you click on the coloured letters here.) We scrambled back into the bus and headed west again. Pretty soon, the rain had stopped and the roads had dried, so we were making good time despite the many road construction projects we passed.

That is, until we got a flat tire.

And like many things here, we discovered some problems - our bus had a spare tire, but no tools to remove the original tire and replace it with the new one, or a jack to lift the bus so that the tire could be replaced in the first place.

Thankfully, there was another bus stopped nearby, so our driver went to borrow their tools.

They didn't have any either.

Nor did the bus or the motorcycle or the car that stopped.

Finally, after several trips to houses we had passed and many conversations with passersby, the correct tools were found, and the flat could be changed.

In the meantime, the children had some fun playing in the nearby sandpit. 

And the women enjoyed the spectacular sunset. 

Until it started to pour again.

With only one home nearby, the owner generously allowed an entire over-packed bus load of women and children to take shelter under his carport and the eaves of his house. Lightening flashed and thunder boomed directly overhead, as rain fell in sheets so thick you could not see the field just beyond the modest home.

As soon as our driver had finished changing the tire - the poor man changed the tire in the middle of this storm - we ran in small groups back to the bus, between flashes of lightening, and quickly boarded, eager to be on our way. A few more hours, and we arrived back in Negombo.

Exhausted. Hungry. Sun burnt.

And feeling completely satisfied with such a wonderful day.

2015 February 19: Splashed by a Tamil

February 19th was a rare perfect day, as some of you may remember.

One of the things that made it so perfect was a boat ride we took in a traditional outrigger fishing boat. These types of boats are owned by the middle income fishermen, the ones who can fish up to a couple of miles from shore. These are also the same Tamil fishermen who greet me with "Where is your husband, the man who speaks our language?"

Pushing off from shore.

A whiskered tern flies by.

More terns join in, hoping for a fishy treat.

Our captain, or at least the guy in charge of the rudder!

The view overhead.

A fishing boat owned by the wealthiest fishermen - these can go several miles offshore, maybe further, and are equipped with motors, not sails.

Another overhead view.

See the little stick on the right hand side? This is the stick of the outrigger that the captain walked on in the heaving Indian Ocean to take our picture. He asked Steve if he wanted to come out, and when Steve said no thanks, began jumping and down on the log while laughing! We were sitting a few feet above the water on some wooden slats covered by a thin mattress. Notice how the boat is held together with rope! The captain also didn't think that we were getting wet enough, so he made sure that he splashed our legs with warm ocean water before we returned to shore. See how the sail is on the left here? This picture was taken just after they turned the sail. Instead of turning the boat around, the sail is changed from the front to the back using a complicated series of ropes, and then the rudder is moved from the back to the front.

Sunset two kilometres offshore.

This is the poorest type of fisherman - just a little raft, sometimes made of molded plastic if he is fortunate, and a paddle, and a net.

Hauling the boat ashore.

Steve jumps out to help.

Back on land again.

A wonderful ride!