A Weekend on the Coast - As Paul's Head Spins

It’s been one helluva month since I last wrote. I’ll stick with what’s been the pattern since my little booty landed here in Sri Lanka: run the text of my (totally As The World Turns) personal experiences and life of the past five weeks all around these photos from a glorious, truly glorious, weekend I’ve just had down the coast a piece (65km or so) in a little town called Induruwa. You will note, perhaps, that the text is heavy and worrisome, while the photos are beautiful and light and fluffy. Pictures paint a thousand words, but comparing my pictures with my words illustrates for you this confusing life So Much World, So Little Time is now leading. I don’t know whether I’m going or coming – none of us does, right now, in fact.

The beach in front of my guesthouse, looking south...

...and north.

The view from my guesthouse window on Saturday morning. Yummy! (Big, big ta out to Stephano - our PPD anesthesiologist now back in Italy, who with Judith and Essam spent a night down here while he was awaiting a chance to get up to the peninsula to do his work - for giving me the card for this great guesthouse!)

Since most of it’s on official websites (MSF sites, heck even the Sri Lankan government’s peace secretariat had a little piece that mentioned us - go ahead, google it!) now, has been reported on Radio BBC Sri Lanka and many newspapers here in the country, my personal stories will, in fact, refer to the MSF situation here a bit.

But if you want more facts, more details, I strongly recommend you copy the following link and paste all of it into your browser window (Mom, the people in the library can help you with this: and you WANT to do this), which will be active for some period of time after the date this is posted: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/2006/10-19-2006.cfm. It’s an interview with MSF France’s director of operations about the healthcare needs we’re here to address, and the immediate obstacles we are facing in our quest to address those needs. Other good sites for current updates on Sri Lanka are usually ICRC and various UN sites, such as UNHCR (high commission for refugees) and World Food Program. A good search engine will take you there, and they know much more than I do. And I urge you to find out: I’m told last week’s suicide attacks in Habarana and Galle got front page coverage in parts of the US; but the tragedy (not an overstatement) of Sri Lanka is deeper and has lasted much longer than those two events. I sort of think Americans, as citizens of the world’s most powerful nation (and one that has now arrogated to itself the right to act as the world’s policeman) owe it to the world they dominate to at least have some idea of the lives people live elsewhere. So go ahead – surf the web for ten minutes and find out a bit! [grin] [i have to do that because when i do a smiley face, it shows up on the blog as junk]

Induruwa Village Temples & Marshlands

Monet might have liked it in Induruwa, too, huh?

So. What’s Paul’s life been like since last he wrote. I mentioned that – after five weeks here – I’d suddenly become the longest-standing member of the coordination team. And then, on the quiet Saturday morning of September 30, I was my usual early-bird self and first to grab the newspaper, to see the following cheery lead-story headline on one of the major English-language dailies here: “Four INGOs to be booted out over links with Tigers: Carry Tiger emblem on vehicles, stationery.” Though they got our name wrong (MSS instead of MSF) to me it seemed pretty clear we were one of the four being discussed – especially since we had been hearing for more than a week from the Department of Immigration (to which my rounds take me fairly often) that some form of “black list” existed and that we would soon be kicked out of the country. Then, during our morning meeting – we work half days most Saturdays - in walks the postman with the official, registered letter from the Department of Immigration telling us we have to leave the country by October 7.

The stupa looks old, but I've no idea if it is. The temple entrance, stupa, and marsh shots from above are all in Induruwa village, inland from the coast and my guesthouse where the real people live, basically. It was GREAT to be able to run without being nearly killed by a million cars and tuktuks or asphyxiated by exhaust fumes. I don't run in Colombo anymore - just swim at my fabulous local swim club, and now I've started playing some tennis there as well. Yippee!

Induruwa Village Sights

There followed – as you’ll see in the website article I’ve pointed you to – a period in which various higher-ups from within MSF visited us here in Colombo, and we sought as many meetings as we could have with government officials and others who might be in a position to help us clarify the things being said about us and the government’s objections. Naturally the allegations are ludicrous and MSF didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t do any of the things referred to. I’ll leave the official information to that website article I keep referring you to. (Did I mention you should check it out?) This is my personal blog so I’ll stick to what it’s all meant for me. I mean, enough about the suffering and deaths of thousands in Sri Lanka so far this year…how’s it affecting my tanlines, darnit! (that’s self-mocking humor, friends…just in case anyone out there wants to get into a snit and say INGO workers aren’t taking the situation seriously)

One friend spoke of the air of tropical decay that hangs around so much in Sri Lanka. But it's sure pretty in its decay, isn't it?

That colorful SL flag over a village trail on my Saturday morning run.

After missing a chance to capture two other fish-sellers peddling from their bikes with manual scales hanging off the back (aural image: the calls they make to let people know they're coming by with fish for sale), I decided I really had to try for you folks on your barka loungers back home. It ain't Peoria, is it? (Chuck?)

It’s been a roller coaster. We pulled our team out of the hospital in Point Pedro on the Jaffna Peninsula, which was very hard for all of us – we exist to be operational, to bring care to people in need…pulling our team out means since October 1, we’ve had no medical activities in the country. This ain’t easy. Right now we’re down to just me, a head of mission, and a small national staff team here in Colombo – that’s it for MSF France. The other two sections working here in SL have even smaller teams – and we’re all waiting for the day it’ll be safe (enough for us, which in a context where extra-judicial killings happen all the time means no false accusations still standing, and "only" the danger MSF expects in a context of conflict and civial war) and feasible to have surgeons, emergency medical doctors and other specialists back in hospitals and mobile clinics taking care of people who need them.

Boating on Madu Ganga

The mother of all rivers is The Ganga, known to the English world often as the Ganges. The Ganga is THE Ganga. Other rivers are lesser gangas - so you'd have Mississippi Ganga or Hudson Ganga. Sunday morning I was able to join several friends for a paddled boat ride on a large estuary called the Madu Ganga, in Balapitiya south of Induruwa. And oh yeah, this is creative reuse of USAID tarp - no doubt used orignally in temporary post-tsunami shelter - to create rain and sun protection on the boat. Talk about useful development aid!

The lilies were lovely!

This is the best shot you'll get of the boat, taken as this guy had just wiped the deck so we could all board a high and dry boat - it's a catamaran, in a way, though without a sail. (Does that make it not a catamaran??)

On a personal level, I gotta admit this hasn’t been easy. I left China on very short notice – leaving behind a country I’d grown to love deeply (and hate some of the time, as well) and where I felt very comfortable and really quite at home; leaving an office where I knew the ropes and an AIDS project that I was proud of, with the possibility of other projects opening in the middle future. Not to mention, of course, the pride in having successfully handed over the Street Children project to a national staff team that – with strong guidance from my beloved Margaret Ward, former MSF FieldCo – has apparently been just doing fantastic stuff since MSF said goodbye on March 31 of this year. I’m a flexible guy and love the excitement and variety that comes from working in these contexts – but I had sort of wrapped my mind around Chinese lessons, and vacation plans (seeing friends or acquaintances here and there in China, Japan and Vietnam) and so on based on being in BJ through December.

Some local kids enjoying the river: unlike our firewood collectors lower down, they didn't seem to be working hard.

Coconuts and cinammon are among the local crops we saw. We gorged on fresh coconuts.

I'm flying!

Collecting firewood on the Madu Ganga.

Guard's hut: they sleep here to prevent freshwater prawn poachers from the collecting nets.

Clouds over the Madu Ganga. It's inter-monsoon season, clear almost all mornings with downpours around 4 every afernoon and all evening.

So I told MSF I’d be ready to stay in SL through December, then after six weeks it looks like I may have to cut it all short and be at loose ends in Paris or the US again – because there is no way I could finish this mission now, and then head out for another one right away. I’d simply have to take a couple months to clear my head from the boomerang whack of these recent months before I’d feel stable enough to head back out to a new (and likely unstable) context again. And closing an office, let alone a whole mission, isn’t any fun for us administrators: we’re the ones who handle final payments to employees and shake their hands and say “thank you so much,” always keeping tissues on hand for the inevitable tears. We’re the ones who make sure the houses get cleared out and the rental deposits get paid back…and yada yada yada. It wasn’t what I came here for, but I was prepared to do it – I’m here to do the work MSF needs, not to complain about it. Then we’re staying, but as you’ll see from that blog article (have you read it yet?) we don’t know for how long, and we really don’t know if we’re going to be able to get medical teams here again and we don’t know how long we can wait, when there are urgent needs in other places as well. And so on.

Views from the Train

You get the idea. Roller coaster is one way to describe it, and not a bad way either. Just about every day since September 30 I’ve gone through at least one full cycle from “Damn, I really don’t want to leave: there are people who need us, there’s really good work we can do here, it’s a fascinating and truly beautiful country with tremendous history, and I’m not ready to give up yet” back over to “Oh god, I can’t take any more of this, get me out of here, and oh by the way tortilla chips do not exist in Sri Lanka and how can a Californian live without tortilla chips for longer than a few days???” And then usually back and forth a few more times, all in one day. That means as of today I’ve cycled through it all at least 24 times, and I’d have to say it’s more like 50 times that I’ve made my peace with leaving (“ok, we’ll visit the folks in Bargteheide, see the friends in Rome and Zurich, then eat torilla chips and bagels with jalapeno cream cheese every day for a month in San Francsico, then we’ll be ready to work in Sudan for six months”) then recommitted to staying, doing good work, keeping focused, keeping the national staff focused and energized and not too depressed or worried. I’ve had a few headaches, I gotta admit.

After nine weeks stuck in the office aka house, with never an escape from the city except the two day trips I've previously documented, you can imagine I was more than delighted simply to find myself out of the office, on a train that hugs the beautiful coastline very narrowly as it travels south - I traveled third class, which meant an open carriage exactly like the C train cars in NYC except that the doors are open so you get the fresh sea breeze, and vendors pop in and out selling various delectables.

Turtle Hatchery

So that’s really it. Here we are: can Mom and Steve join me at Angkor Wat in late December and early January while I take a break from my work in SL, or will I be back in the lower 48 for the end of year holidays? Will MSF be able to meet our mandate and take care of populations here in SL whose access to medical care is severely reduced, or will we sadly have to leave, and redirect our teams to other areas? Will Paul have access to salsa and tortilla chips, and bagels and jalapeno cream cheese, in 2006? Or only in 2007? Stay tuned to the MSF websites, stay tuned to So Much World Turning, So Little Time, and maybe you’ll find out!

Down the coast a piece from Induruwa (between Balapitya and Induruwa, in fact) is a turtle hatchery that was destroyed in the tsunami. Yes, the tsuanmi affected the west coast as well as the east coast of Sri Lanka: think of it not as a wave, but as a succession of risings and fallings of the water, and think of that risen Indian Ocean wrapping itself around the island. The southwestern coast was pretty badly hit, though not as badly as the eastern coast. In any case, this area is unique in that five species of turtle lay their eggs there, and the guy who runs this hatchery pays local folks to bring him the eggs rather than selling them at market (he pays more), then he buries them, and keeps the hatchlings for three days in tanks before releasing them to the waves at midnight. It's very cool. I thought of Howard, of course, and his Zuni turtle fetishes. He gets donations, and derives some income from tourist buses that visit and buy things from the gift shop - but the large restaurant where he fed them was destroyed in the tsunami, and all what little was left was looted in the aftermath. Eek.

Restaurant Guardians?

After our outing on the Madu Ganga, our group settled into a gorgeous Ganga-side hotel restaurant for a rice & curry lunch. (I'm getting better and better at eating with my hands. American kids would love Sri Lanka: you get to play with your food, and eat it with your hands!) These guardians stood at the entry to the restaurant area, and the gingerbread-fringed Victorian house was a little side house that I guess can be rented for a group.

What's Nice in Colombo

The weekend after all the hubbub, when our home had settled back down to a fairly small complement of only four expats (a surgeon and a nurse both waiting in case we were able to restart rapidly in Point Pedro...they're both gone now), I used the weekend to see a bit of Colombo just in case it was my last chance. I was determined to find some nice spots. And I did find a few. Sadly, I only found a few. Colombo's not bad, but it'll never be on my top 10 cities list. It'll never be on anyone's. There are abundant reasons to come to Sri Lanka, whether for the natural beauty and beach vacations or for historical and cultural tourism in the great ancient capitals of Anuradapura and Polonnaruwa and other such places, or for the dozens of other great places and the generally wonderful people - who really are wonderful, except those who are trying to kill each other. And then there's the food. I mean, yeah - there's TONS to like about this country. So you see, it's all a bit confusing. In any case, do enjoy these views: they're about as good as Colombo gets, to be honest.

Look - it's Colmobo city hall!

Look - it's a great big Buddha in Vihara Mahadevi Park!

Look - it's city hall with a great big Buddha from Vihara Mahadevi Park!

(Hmmm...there's something symbolic in the fact that they're both facing each other. Or is there? Politics and religion mix here much the way they do in the good ol' land of my birth.)

Downtown Art & Architecture

Hindu temples, here, are called kovil. This one's pretty much in the heart of downtown. I really do love living in a city - in a country - of such religious diversity. Especially when the land of my birth has fallen prey to rabidly insane self-righteous Christian lunatics who insist on some self-serving divine right to force their narrow-minded interpreation of truth down everyone else's throats. (But no, I'm not bitter. Not at all.) Ramaddan is ending today with the festival of Eid al Fidr here in Colombo (random fact: Ramaddan starts and ends on different dates in different countries, based mostly on when the moon is in the correct phase or position), and somehow I've been even more aware than usual of the Mosques and Muslim presence in Colombo and when I went south; and of course the dominant religion is Buddhism, of which this Boddhisatva - also from Vihara Mahadevi Park downtown - is a symbol. I've no clue about the stone pillar (on the edge of VM park - didn't bother to cross the street to find out more), but my guess is it's a monument to the religion of mercantile colonialism as practiced by the British here for a couple hundred years after the Portuguese and Dutch took their turns trying to dominate this poor island.

Temple on Lake Beira

...And a downtown sunset as seen from one of the canals leading out to the ocean. This city has most of the elements necessary for true beauty: coastline, water in the city proper (Lake Beira occupies a big chunk of downtown, but they just don't do very much with it; and there are little canals in many neighborhoods that sadly look more like sewers than like the goldfish-filled canals of Lijiang [cf So Much World, So Little Time January 2006 edition], tropical climate that creates much lush growth ... but it just doesn't any of it hang together. Colombo, I know you, I've worked in you, I've found lovely spots in you ... but Colombo, you're no San Francisco.