A few of my favourite things… Tuneful response!

Sent to me by a friend in response to the previous posting - too funny not to share!

Shiny white teeth with dark chocolate complexion

high heels on bikes whiz in every direction

foods oh so spicy that your tongue will sting

these are a few of my favorite things

(sri lanka, sri lanka, sri lanka, sri lanka --to the waltz rhythm of the strings)

full moon's a day off and no one's complaining

after one cookie the poor kid's refraining

worn out morning wall by evening in bling

these are a few of my favorite things

when the pace slows

when the fan blows

when camps drain the tap

I list by mass email my favorite things

and then i go take a nap

A few of my favourite things…

In the weeks since I landed in Sri Lanka, I have been writing about my various observations of what I considered different and/or eccentric. I think it’s time I also shared some of my favourite things about Sri Lanka, the thoughts of which normally just make me smile.

1. This really is Smiling Lanka

A few days before I traveled here, a friend sent me an article about Sri Lanka being rated as one of the happier countries in the world. I’m not sure yet if the population here would agree, but I have chosen to take on the article’s phrase of ‘Smiling Lanka’ – people here have some of the brightest and sweetest smiles. And the smiles always come as something of a surprise, contrasting a previously staid/serious expression. Let me also add something that may seem racist in our new-age realm of political correctness, but let me emphasize that it is truly being expressed in admiration: most Sri Lankans I have met, especially up here in Jaffna, have a dark chocolaty brown complexion, and when they smile, it shines through, and their eyes just sparkle. It really is a happy smile.

2. Helmets, handbags and high heels

It seems that, in a country where there is still much gender discrimination, women have picked some battles, and won. Women, young and old(er), can be seen decked out in their finest saris, whizzing around town on their motorbikes. They may be subjected to harsher social rules and such in their daily lives (gender based violence being somewhat prevalent), but I love that this doesn’t come in the way of their bright red motorbikes, and there is no question about women having access to this basic practical transportation solution. You go girlfriends!!!

3. Poverty has bred good manners

I have already been to a few activities with children from areas that are underserved/underprivileged (insert euphemism for poverty here), and I love that these children are always perfectly combed, that they find ways to entertain themselves as they wait for things to happen that might interest them, and that when the ‘Cookie Lady’ comes out with her tray of cookies, they only ever take one.

It is highly possible that these children barely have two meals a day, and they only ever take one cookie, and never come back for more. Those kind of good manners humble me.

4. This place is clean, clean, clean!

When I told a Sri Lankan I’d met at the office in Colombo that I was coming to Jaffna, the only thing he said to distinguish them from others on the island was that they were very clean. He was right. Just to give you an idea: we provide water to the IDP camps in Jaffna, and had to actually cut the supply off for a few hours a day because people were running through the water at twice the speed… because they were showering three times a day. In the interest of having enough water to last through the days, we had to cut it off for a few hours each day, restricting their showers to just two a day.

In the villages, you walk barefoot into homes and some offices, and you do so with some comfort knowing (and feeling) that the floors are constantly being swept, because here everything has an air of having just been cleaned, and for the all the heat and humidity, people smell sweet throughout the day.

5. Things happen in one day… well, most things.

Picture this: I’m walking to work in the morning and I notice a house’s outside wall has had its colour worn out, which is especially noticeable on the posts of the gate and the little statuettes on top. As I walk back from work at the end of the day, the wall has been painted and decorated (the halves leading up to the gate are painted green and white in large checkered boxes) and the gate posts have been manicured back into their original design. This was all one coat, I suspect it might be worn out again by the same time next year, but I loved the one day transformation.

6. Poya day

I have now learned all about Poya day, the one day a month of the full moon, which the Buddhist tradition signifies as a day of celebration and worship. (If you want to learn more about it, check out: http://www.mysrilanka.com/travel/lanka/festivals/POSON.HTM) This also translates into the simple fact that we get a day off every month. If you’re wondering how our organisation agreed to such a thing, apparently a very smart deal was struck: staff agreed to work 15 minutes extra every day to be able to be granted their Poya days. In Jaffna, where practically nobody is Buddhist and the days have no particular religious or other significance, they do the same and take the day off. These are people after my own heart… And even though, as expats, we still need to have some presence in the office on that day to ‘hold down the fort’, I bring you back to the basic point: one day off every month! Score!!

7. The food!

Sri Lankan food has been described as the hottest food of the South East Asian cuisines. I will happily confirm that, although I am constantly told that the food I am being offered has been tamed to a fraction of the usual spices. I would also like to go on record as saying that this is one of the more delectable cuisines I have had the pleasure to explore. My main problem is that I cannot describe any of the dishes to you as I frequently don’t know what I’m eating. I can usually make out that it’s vegetable, meat, chicken or fish, but that’s about it. I won’t know what to order at a restaurant from just the menu, I won’t know what to say to another Sri Lankan when praising their cuisine (or asking for a recipe), and one of the reasons why this doesn’t really bother me is because I have liked everything I have tried so far. And since I hardly expect to be able to cook any of my dishes here (where olive oil is sold in 250gr. Bottles – enough said!) it is such a comfort to know that I can blindly spend the year trying out a continuous array of dishes.

8. The calm… the calm…

I say this without a hint of irony or sarcasm: the slow pace, the lack of public activity, the quiet, it is all just so… calming! The heat no doubt contributes to this as well, and it contributes to the ease with which I transition into sweet afternoon naps while reading a good book, underneath a softly lapping fan and a cooling air-conditioner. And since there’s nothing else happening anywhere, nothing I need to consider or feel guilty about missing, these naps are ever so sweeter.

And the earlier the days end (and they wind down quickly after the sun sets), the earlier they start. So you slowly crawl into bed close to 10pm without a hint of the stress that used to keep me alert till midnight, feeling you’ve lived a full, long day, and that there was nothing else you could have done today but didn’t. That alone is a pretty calming thought.

Cohabitating with the bugs

There is a lush, deep, green quality to the landscape in Sri Lanka. Though Jaffna has sandy and rocky patches, the green, where it exists, is staidly present and striking. I know nothing about gardening or agriculture, but presume that part of this lush quality comes from the humidity, that seems to contain the atmosphere in pockets, nurturing a slow, full growth of foliage.

One friend, who had previously visited Sri Lanka, told me to imagine all the greenery I had ever seen in the UK, US and Lebanon, combine it, multiply it, and then I would approximate what I might see in Sri Lanka. I think he was referring to the central parts of Sri Lanka, but still, he wasn’t too far off.

What nobody ever points out, however, is that this glorious manifestation of nature does not only involve foliage, but does, quite naturally, come with an assortment of bugs, and birds, and bugs, and chipmunks, and bugs, and frogs, and did I mention the bugs?? The birds and geckos and others can sometimes create a disruptive cacophony, but are amusing for the most part. The bugs, however, are a different story. They are so ever present that I have already begun to normalize to the situation, assuming at any point in time that if I feel an itch or a tickle that it is not a fallen hair, it is not a loose string from my clothing, it is not a figment of my imagination – it is, quite simply, a bug of some sort. And acting as normal does, I no longer attempt to flail said arm or wave the bug away, a simple and effective flick or slap rids me of the insect once and for all. (I spend a lot of my time washing my hands…) I also no longer look too closely to figure out what has given me this bite or that (a true city girl, I only ever recognize the mosquitoes’) but rather marvel at how they found a path between my skin and clothing to manage that bite. Yes, I am quite easily entertained.

These bugs so belong here that they seem rather comfortable in their existence; they don’t move any faster as our footsteps and swooping hands approach, they’re just not easily scared. This brought on a happy realization: that for all the environmental speak against insecticides, over-construction spoiling natural habitats, and such, I was finally in a place where the insects faaaaar outnumbered us, and where they had their own places to live and thrive that were just as nice as mine. Thus with the playing ground equalized, I could fight back with all I’ve got! I was now free to cohabitate with the bugs armed with my insect repellent, mosquito net, house spray, and VAPE! I was free to build fences and trenches, set up traps, free to run generators, and seal all my doors and windows shut as I blast my air conditioner. Indeed, with the playing ground leveled, all was now fair in my own little war. You may say that I used to do this before – true, but not without a hint of guilt and shame at the luxury of it all. Now, these same actions come with a clear sense of guilt-free entitlement.

I can live with that!

Settling in...

As I write this piece, I am sitting in the living room of my temporary home, the guest house, watching a movie about Cuba on cable TV, tickled by a little breeze that is being encouraged by a hardworking ceiling fan, and I felt for a moment that I could be pretty much anywhere. I took that as a sign that, after a little over ten days in Jaffna, I believe I am, for all intents and purposes, more or less settled.

I probably won’t consider the process complete until I find a place of my own, which has proved to be an interesting challenge in our little town of many houses. The old and the new houses are up for rent for the same reason; the owners have long fled the war and are living abroad. That is not to say the ones that are being newly built stray very far off the usual design staples: bathrooms are generally small, as are kitchens, which do not make space for refrigerators and only accommodate the ‘stove-top’ type stoves (no ovens in sight). Once I realized this was the general style available, I returned to the first apartment I had seen when I arrived. A week in town and a few house visits were all that was needed to normalize the apartment design, which I had first thought was being made as concessions for floor space and ‘new innovations’, and certainly didn’t think it was the norm. I now have to deal with another issue: exaggerated rents brought on by newly expressed demand.

The end of the war and the re-opening of the main A9 highway linking the Jaffna peninsula to the rest of Sri Lanka has brought with it a lot of interest for business development potential; which means that there are more goods in the stores, people seem to have positive outlooks on potential job opportunities… and that companies are asking about houses to rent out as guest houses for their surveyors. Only one or two have actually rented the houses so far, but the simple presence of expressed interest after years and years of none means that landlords are multiplying their rents to see how lucky they might get. I just happen to be entering the real estate scene at this point, as the rents are vaulting, and before landlords have heard enough “That’s outrageous!” to adjust their rents back to something normal. (Just to give you an idea, my potential landlord wanted $300 a month in rent, the usual rent for a similar-sized house is $90. See why I think they’re just throwing out numbers to try their luck??)

In any case, we’ll just wait and see how that turns out. And that outcome and moving date will not only translate into the unleashing of my photos and decorations onto walls and table tops, but will also signify when I can have consistently hot showers with a newly-installed hot-water head (Jaffna’s standard bathrooms have one tap – and not a hot water one – so my showers are planned by sun-hours!), and when I can double or triple up my mattress so that I can sleep on my sides without waking up to bruises, though that has not yet stopped me from having a good night’s sleep.

In the meantime, I am slowly getting to know my new town… and it is sweet. When I first arrived, I likened it to a town I’d visited in Southern Yemen; it was hot and sticky, and the buildings and roads seemed stuck somewhere in time, an arrested development of sorts, but cable TV, mobile phone networks and internet had arrived. When I took my first walk through town and found the bus station, and the two-block-squared town centre, and heard about the extensive Jaffna University program, I likened it instead to the town my father grew up in. Just to be clear, I loved Yemen, and what could I possibly hold against the town that nurtured my father? So, yes, I am liking the tiny town of Jaffna.

One way in which Jaffna differs from both towns, however, is in its abundance of dogs and other animals that roam the streets. This is a population that is clearly gentle towards animals – I mean, I have never seen so many animals live to such ripe old ages as some of the dogs on these streets. So in the city of few cars, the true perils I face when walking to and from work each day mainly involve not getting startled (read: jump-out-of-your-shoes-startled) at some of the friendlier dogs that decide to charge towards me and accompany me (interestingly never quite coming any closer), and avoiding stepping into any of their doggy poop. The main plus from this is that I no longer hear the numerous “Hello Miss”, “Good morning” and other strained English greetings from passing bikers. As friendly, and innocent, as it all is and as quaint as I found it at the beginning (especially when some would try to indicate their additional fluency with a drawn out “Good evening” or “How are you?”), it all got a little tiresome after a while. And so I have now become one of those callous foreigners who ignores these continuous greetings, occasionally responding with a smile, and being distracted by the dogs helps ease the weight of this antisocial behavior on my conscience. The absolute peak of these experiences happened today as I was biking back from town. I had once again underestimated the distance back, was getting very hot and tired, and was focusing solely on maintaining a pedaling rhythm that would get me home faster. Suddenly, a motorbike slows down to my pace and the rider starts speaking to me. My first opportunistic (and survivalist) thoughts jumped to the possibility that this was someone I knew and I could latch on to him for speed as I had seen so many other bikers do as they chatted with their motorbiking friends. Not so. It was just young man making small talk, asking me where I was from, and then, cleverly recognizing that I must work for an NGO of some sort (what else would foreigners be doing in Jaffna?), started telling me of his time working for an NGO. I believe what followed was some form of a brief CV – I wouldn’t know as I stopped listening when I realized that he could not serve my purpose, and that I was wasting too much energy on listening rather than pedaling.

Though I must admit that I was sad to see him go in the end, if only because I could see that he reached the intersection I was aiming at much quicker than I did.