Another Afternoon by the Ocean
(There was some sort of kite festival going on, it seemed…)And, as always, what are we looking at? Judith – head of mission – has left (sob!), and Roshan – deputy head of mission – is leaving very shortly (double sob!), but, to quote Elton John, “I’m still standing.” (That IS Elton, isn’t it?) So here are a few shots from a brunch and lazy oceanside afternoon at the swank Mt Lavinia hotel, to bid these two important and much-loved colleagues adieu. Thanks for the memories and support, guys.
The funny thing about my life right now is that, though I’m in a context that’s far less settled than what I experienced in China, my day to day life is rather a dull overabundance of office work that takes up at least 60 or so of my waking hours each week, balanced by periods where I lock myself into my room and read, at the moment, Tintenblut while listening to soothing muzak. If you’ve been following the blog, you may understand why I’ve developed an insatiable appetite for Bee Gees muzak. NOT! (BTW, if you’ve not heard of Claudia Funke’s wonderful fantasy series about the intersection of written word and “real world,” do check it out: It’s a book-lover’s series, and I think at least book one is now available in English, though I admit that I’m finding this installment a more gripping read than book one, Tintenherz). Yes, my current surreal existence does mean I continue to need regular doses of fantasy literature in order to retain a tenuous grasp on what we like to call reality.
I mean, I could report the interesting items that come up, for example on the Reuters news feed, but they’re not really happening to me, and y’all can check those out on your own time. I also don’t figure I’m well positioned to provide the weekly or monthly news summary. Oh, why not…the worst that happens is they kick me out of the country for a well-developed sense of humor, huh? For those of you don’t check the news on your own, here’s a small example of the otherworldly reality that is now ours here at Oh So Much World, So veeerrry Little Time….one fine tropical day week last week, in the course of half a day, the reports I saw could be paraphrased, in sequence, roughly as: 1) Government of Sri Lanka categorically denies Monitoring Mission (aka Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, the group charged with monitoring the now sadly tattered Cease Fire Accord that brought a much-needed respite to this truly remarkable island, back in the halcyon days of 2002) reports that it [GoSL] has agreed to renewed peace talks with those terrorists, 2) government reiterates its firm commitment to the peace process, 3) government clarifies that it is extremely eager to talk, but only if those terrorists agree never, ever to fire another shot or do anything to harm anyone ever again, no matter what. Meanwhile, from the other side of the aisle, come regular reports that every time the government breathes, more civilians suffer and die.
The sad thing is, it seems increasingly true clear that the actions of both sides are causing fear and loss to more and more civilians all the time, despite each side’s repeated assertions of commitment to the peace process. Actually, rather scarily, the tigers said not long ago (after government forces retook a small area that was strategically important to them) that in their view the government has now firmly broken the accord, and now the rest of the island will learn what suffering means just as much as the north of the island has had to learn it.
Then there’s the very strong anti-NGO sentiment on the island, much of it rooted in the post-tsunami backlash: too many NGOs who landed on the island after the tsunami, some of which maybe didn’t do the best work and some of whom probably didn’t behave very respectfully or respectably. Then there’s all the usual reasons a government and military faced with an apparent resumption of civil conflict might not want NGOs around. So you’ll probably understand one’s need to develop a shell, and it seems mine is humor.
So let’s get back to the important stuff: my life as an overloaded office worker. Whilst still in China, I enjoyed thinking that China had invented bureaucracy at a time when my ancestors were still living in caves and hadn’t yet figured out how to cook meat. Silly Paul, that’s like thinking America’s so-called government couldn’t get any worse than the living nightmare foisted upon us by the rich back in the 1980s! Come to find out that these former British colonies down here in South Asia take bureaucracy to whole new levels of development! My brain is an alphabet soup of ministry acronyms that form my daily rounds, in the process of trying to acquire visas and working permits for our colleagues (and oh by the way, for me too…). It is a good test of recall: when I don’t feel like I’m starring in Kafka or Beckett, I wonder if there’s some highly evolved alien life form taking notes of my reactions, a la rats in a maze: “it took him only two weeks to figure out how to get his application out of ministry A and all the way to ministry C! Clearly he has the ability to learn from experience.”
(No, these are NOT the same shot: notice the crowds in this one, related to the above-illustrated kite festival.)But what legacy will I leave behind, I ask myself occasionally? When I asked a Sri Lankan colleague if she’d ever worked with hanging file folders of the sort that have been omnipresent in all American businesses I’ve known since the late 1980s, she said she’d seen them on television (as in, on American television shows – how fabulous is that?!), but had never had the chance to work with them.
(But is it water polo, or water volleyball? Neither net nor goal gave away the secret…)
You understand, of course, what I mean: my life is boring! If the biggest excitement I have to report is the introduction of hanging file folders to MSF Sri Lanka, I have to think you’d rather watch reruns of Oprah. So let me not hold you back. More some time, dear friends. Let us all repeat Elvis Costello’s mantra: What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?
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Super Viking!
I begin with one of my favorite visuals here: the buses. I count at least four different cultural referents here: Lanka (Sri Lanka) Ashok (a deity, I believe, of Indian origin) Leyland (presumably from British colonial days) – and last but certainly not least for us Scandinavian-Americans: it’s the SUPER VIKING! A far cry from NYC transit buses, and rather more interesting, wouldn’t you say?
Streetside Shrines
Little street-corner and streetisde shrines were one of the first things I noticed, driving to my new home from the airport in the wee, wee hours of August 20. Here you see two shrines from street corners very close to me: here, a tuktuk parked beside one corner shrine…
Here, Buddha seated behind pennants at one down the road a small piece…
And here, the gorgeous, huge tree that shades the second shrine. Gorgeous, huge trees are omnipresent here.
Urban Contrasts
As in China, wealth and poverty, development and lack thereof rub elbows much more habitually and commonly than I’ve seen in the US. The National Blood Transfusion Center basically shares its back yard with…
These little shacks by the railroad tracks, where folks have hung their clothes on the line to dry,
This little lane with a biker, 
And these cute little shacks by the side of a very busy street.
Fruits Stands & Street Dogs
As you’d expect, the fruit stands are abundant…
As are the bananas, which I’ve learned to eat with my curry and rice in the afternoon, or my string hopper, hopper, kottu, or any of the other myriad of awesome food I’m getting here…
And after Beijing, the street dogs have been a bit of a surprise: they’re the friendly ones. They don’t take much notice of you, except the totally teeny little guy who ran along behind us on our way back the swim club late one Poya Day (full moon day off each month, celebrated by Hindus and Buddhists alike so a day off each month) – making us feel dreadfully guilty that we couldn’t take him home and adopt him. It was totally “are you my mother time” with him. The means ones are the guard dogs, who mercifully so far have stayed behind their fences: wouldn’t want them chasing after me, from how they sound at least!
Neighborhood Shots
Narahanpita Junction, very close to our office-home, complete with SAG sign: when I arrived at midnight on August 19, I thought “why has has the screen actors guild come to Sri Lanka?” But no: ’twas the 10th staging of the South Asian Games.
The neighborhood boys, off for a cricket outing on Sunday morning.
…and finally, two shots of the little lane that So Much World, So litle Time now calls home.
On the Shores of the Indian Ocean
OK, los amigos. so much world, so little time has been keeping notes for a few days now, trying to sort through the jungle of thoughts and impressions that are cropping up more quickly than cornfields in Iowa. As we near the end of week two, I’ve decided to call a halt to it and just throw them all up here on the blog, so they can ooze down into your consciousnesses like a Pollock painting. I’ll caption the photos that I’ve thrown in purely for visual relief now, so you know what you’re reading around if indeed you read any of the text. Last Sunday (the day after Chuck’s birthday; happy birthday, biggest bro – did you get all my voice mails?), I went with two colleagues from MSF-Spain (who are also trying to start up relief work here) to a really glorious beach resort just south of town, and we lay around like slobs reading and sleeping for the whole afternoon. Coming after a lovely yoga class, this was a great way to remove myself from the traffic and other joys of Colombo’s streets, and recharge my mental batteries for the week to come.
So people seem to want updates from Colombo. At the start, let me say that if you’d like an idea of the general situation, and of the needs we’re trying to address, check out the World Food Program, UNHCR, and ICRC websites: they seem to be updated fairly regularly and give basic facts that’ll interest you. Since this is my personal blog site, I don’t really talk about the work we’re doing here – it’ll be my own reactions to life in Colombo.
One week on and I’m finding the differences between Colombo and Beijing fascinating. I really love the opportunity to switch so rapidly, from a pretty established pattern and life in Beijing, through a glorious vacation in Malaysia, to what’s rapidly becoming a fairly established life and pattern in Colombo. The opportunities for comparisons and learning more about the world and how people shape their lives, and cities, and countries…well, it’s just incredibly rich for me. So much more rich, I think, than if I’d gone back to the US between assignments, for example: that more or less makes the US the comparison ground for one’s impressions of the rest of the world, and that’s just all wrong since of course the US is so out of the mainstream, in terms of how most of the world lives.
My friend Bart in Holland opined, when I told him I’d be coming to Sri Lanka, that he was glad I was finally going somewhere that really needs MSF, or something of that general tenor. I’d been laboring under the impression that Sri Lanka was actually ahead of China on most development indicators; this impression came from my correct sense that Sri Lanka’s healthcare situation is generally quite good. Indeed it is better than China’s for the broad mass of citizens so far as I’m able to tell (health care and insurance more broadly available, not a whole lot of endemic diseases of the sort that afflict millions around the world each year, like TB, AIDS and malaria). But – much as an MSF volunteer might wish it so – a country’s health stats don’t necessarily predict its development status: Sri Lanka lags rather behind China on indicators like per capita GDP and so on. Though it is well ahead of all the other South Asian nations, as far as I can tell.
But consider a few random factoids I’ve perceived: ATMs and credit cards are way more common in Colombo than Beijing. Why? Is the banking system just more open – yes, banking in China is a Byzantine, insane nightmare – or is it just a different path of development? There are far more “mixed” supermarkets here than in China: even in Beijing, you find cheese, pasta, cornflakes and other “western” foods only at the select “western” supermarkets; here just about every market has at least a few such basics. Why? I don’t think there are that many more expats here, really. Are these tastes inherited from Colombo’s colonial days? Lord knows Sri Lanka is blessed with a magnificent indigenous cuisine (when next you see me, I shall be completely round!), but perhaps the average Joe here appreciates variety a bit more than the average Jane in China? And finally, my favorite indicator: not many bicycles in Colombo, as opposed to every Chinese city I’ve ever been in (well, except Chongqing which is too hilly). Don’t know if cars and 3-wheelers per capita are more or fewer here than in China, but in Colombo the motor-vehicle to bicycle ratio is wayyyy higher than Beijing! I think this is a pity – yet, however much Beijing’s streets scared me as a bicyclist, Colombo’s seem a bit scarier.
And not just because of the occasional car bombing. In fact, mostly NOT because of that. 18 months in China quite thoroughly numbed me to worries about the many times a vehicle I was in came within two centimeters of another moving vehicle, and it’s a good thing since that happens, if anything, even more often here! But I’m not yet quite used to all the gun-toting soldiers on street corners (they don’t seem trained to point those things down at the ground…and when the car I’m in drives past in such a way that it’s pointing directly at me, I always wonder “does that gun have a safety? Is it engaged?”), or the sandbagged entrances to important government buildings or residences. Turns out while I was sunning myself in Malaysia there was a car-bombing aimed at the Pakistani High Commissioner, on August 14 (google search: Pakistani High Commissioner Colombo).
My appointed rounds occasionally take me past this spot, and I wish I could find a security-conscious (read: I’m not really sure I’m allowed to take, let alone post, a picture of this) way to take a picture of this spot: there’s sort of the burned shell of a small tree on the sidewalk, and on the wall of the building right next to where it happened, there’s a splatter pattern of pockmarks (seems they packed the bomb with pellets or something of the sort) for quite a wide radius. Then there’s the really lovely restaurant I ate in last week after a movie with a (new, non-MSF) friend. The next day, out with another (new, non-MSF – aren’t I little Joe Popular!) friend, I found out that it’s directly across the street from where a breakaway faction headed by a former high-ranking LTTE guy has set up office. (They’re supported by the government, so they can have an office in Colombo.) Now, a brief reading of the past 30 years of Sri Lanka’s history tells us that the LTTE is a bit like the mafia, in that you don’t sign up then sign out like a gym club membership. Then you add the fact that this breakaway faction (google search: Karuna faction) has been fighting the LTTE for a few years now – well, basically, many feel it’s just a matter of time until another car bomb goes off trying to target someone from that office. Result: not so much for that lovely restaurant any more. Moral: one moves on to new restaurants here for different reasons than one does in NYC.
There’s not a lot of dividing line between work and play for me here, something I’ve always managed in other times and places. I live upstairs and work downstairs; and, like last year in Nanning (before moving to Beijing), I share a house with my colleagues. Right now the colleagues are our Head of Mission (absolutely delightful and impressive French woman), Deputy Head of Mission/Logistician (Sri Lankan guy who’s been in the US, currently Berkeley, for some years), a surgeon waiting for a chance to get to our project on the Jaffna Peninsula, and me. We eat our meals and tell jokes together (the macabre humor does come out occasionally, I must admit), and of course work closely together all day long. Mercifully, as of last week we have one office staff member whom we’ve hired locally, so it’s not purely the three of us – until she arrived, it was just the expats working in the office and that might have felt a bit claustrophic. (Otherwise, we’ve got drivers, house watchmen, cook, cleaner – but we don’t work quite so closely with them all day long.) The whole mission is still a bit in startup mode: my predecessor and the Deputy HoM/Log arrived, with one incarnation of the HoM, in early June to establish accounts and procedures, set up the office/house and start bringing on board all the people to run our actual programs. Since then each HoM has basically worked a month (Judith, here now, is the third and she’s planning to leave in mid September to be replaced by another short-termer; after him, we seem set finally to get a HoM who will be here at least a few months); my predecessor has just left, and the deputy HoM/log plans to leave later in September…at which point, after a month here, I’ll be the person who’s been in coordination the longest.
This makes us, I think, a more typical MSF mission than China was – remember that MSF’s roots and core are humanitarian emergency medical relief, to populations affected by disasters (whether natural or man-made), epidemics, and so on. So very often MSF staff are flying into a wholly new place to get things started, which means finding living and working quarters; establishing an ability to receive (from Paris) and exchange EUR or USD; hiring translators, office staff, and drivers; establishing contacts with appropriate national and local authorities (usually ministry of health and its branches and offices) to establish the locations, needs and guidelines for our intervention; and then to start bringing on board the medical staff – both expat and national – needed to help people. But since our China mission was long established and I actually shut down more offices than I opened while there, I’m enjoying the rather “frontier” feel of this current work. It does mean, though, that I’ve a tendency – especially now that I have my own bedroom to retreat to when absolutely necessary, and now that I’ve got my office set up very much to my liking – to just start working any time I’m awake and not feeling completely sick of the work: so I find myself at the desk at 7AM, or 9PM, and think little of it as long as the ball is moving down the field on at least some level. (We accentuate the positive here.)
These notes have dragged on more than long enough and I do hope I’ve not bored you to tears. So I’ll close with some thoughts on the wildlife of Colombo. The first thing I noticed, right away my first morning, were the fantastic and clearly tropical bird sounds. It’s like the feeling I had two weeks ago, on my jungle-trail hike on Tioman Island, Malaysia (how long ago and far away does THAT seem now!): the kinds of sounds that – growing up – I only heard when I went to the tropical bird house at the zoo are now my morning and evening serenade. To my chagrin, I find on the downside that I’m back in the land of roaches on testosterone. Longtime NYC friends will recall my explaining that at least NYC roaches have the winter die-off to keep them in check: not so the subtropical ones I met in Taiwan. ‘Twas there that I first learned that roaches, like little boys and girls the world over, dream of flying one day – except, of course, that roaches really do when they live in the right climate! And we won’t go into the ants: imagine me putting an open packet of crackers into the freezer in order to clear a minor ant infestation, 12 hours after I opened it, and you get the idea.
But where’s the “circle of life” balance? What eats these little beasties? The lizards! Imagine me just last evening around 7:15, studiously working on the accounting at my desk, when a little shadow scuttles across some of the receipts I’m sorting and entering: the most adorable little 2-centimeter lizard that any lizard mom could possibly hope for seemed to positively squeak with fear to get out of my way when he felt my eyes upon him. But fear not, little lizard, I hope that you and all your bigger cousins will continue sharing this lovely, big house with me – and eating all those darned ants and spiders that seem intent on squatting here as well.
‘Til next time, mes amis. Send up good thoughts for peace and humanitarian space. Both are needed here.
Rain in Colombo
Yes, friends, so much world, so little time has landed in the beautiful island nation of Sri Lanka, in its capital city, Colombo. As I draft these words, it’s 7:15 on Sunday evening, and my first day in Colombo is winding down. These entries will all be about my weeklong vacation in Malaysia, not about Colombo yet. (No, these towers are NOT in Colombo.) I haven’t had the energy to bring out my camera: 1) I’ve got work to do here, and 2) I thought, considering how busy I’m about to be, I might do well to let y’all know how the vacation went and that I’m here and whole before I start documenting the streets and scenes of Colombo.
That said, I’ll provide a few small items of interest. First: Colombo is 12-1/2 hours ahead of San Francisco. Meaning no disrespect whatsoever to my hosts in my new (for now) home of Sri Lanka, nor to any of the fine people in Delhi which apparently also enjoys this magical time zone, but HELLO?! Half-hour time zones? Not a good idea. Too confusing. I recommend an international commission to ban such ideas in the future.
A further note, from the jaunt I took around my neighborhood in between rain storms this afternoon: I am a short walk away from the Ministry of Coconut Development’s Agency for Coconut Development. This is true. Photos in front of the agency point out the many things that can be done with coconut fibers, wood and other parts you never even knew a coconut had. Coconuts, one suspects, are a prime product of this fine nation. More later, my friends!
But what are we looking at, you ask? Kuala Lumpur, KL to those who want to be in the know, boasts the world’s tallest buildings, Petronas towers. These are they – the round spiky items with the little pedestrian footbridge between the two, about half way up. The general public can go to and walk across the footbridge, but I’m not sure about climbing all the way up – I tried neither, since it’s always nice to keep something for one’s next visit.
I did, however, go the viewing platform of KL Tower, the world’s fourth tallest communications tower (KL, for all I loved it, does seem a bit obsessed with size comparisons…) Thence the aerial shots you are seeing, taken a mere 36 hours ago or so, as I whiled away the time between arriving back in KL on my morning flight from Tioman Island (aka paradise – see below) and catching my evening flight to Colombo.
Friday afternoon I took advantage of the necessary dive-recovery time (before boarding an airplane, you need rest time for your system to recover and vent all your excess nitrogren) to take a long walk up the spine of the island, partway along the jungle trail that connects Tekek, the main town, with Juara, a little hamlet on the east side. It felt rather like being in the jungle or bird house at a zoo: especially as the sun got lower on the horizon toward 6:00, the monkeys came out and jumped around in the canopy; birds started singing in tones and songs that told me I wasn’t in Kansas any more, and the light under the dense jungle canopy got dimmer and dimmer except where the sun slanted in.Here you see the self-portrait I feel obliged to take every time I’m in some new and unusual place where my inner Ohio-boy can’t quite believe I really am. There are also several general shots of the trail, the jungle, and the cute little rest stop that someone lugged all the way uphill to install for us weary hikers that had toiled our way up that high mountain-hill (tallest peak on the island is about 1,100 meters) through the tropical haze.
(so much world, so little time....) 