A Week Back in Chaos and Unpredictability!

OK so it was only a 3 week trip away but there are things you simply forget about living in the third world tropics after a luxury trip to the gourmet world of Oz. To top that when we arrived in Singapore on our return home we discovered our flight to SL had been cancelled - due to the antics of the LTTE and SL government the airport in Colombo now only operates in day light. So we were put up in one of the stunning Shangri-La hotels – big comfy firm bed with soft white sheets and duvet, and an endless buffet of foods from everywhere including a chocolate fountain to have on your ice cream. So we weren’t complaining about an extra night in somewhere still nice and hot but oh so organised and different! Then it was back to swollen feet, sweatiness and heat, and living in the 1950s!



Wednesday

Board our flight to Colombo, a packed plane full of smiling Sri Lankan faces (I suspect they had also all been put up in luxury hotels for the night). Endure a not so great plane meal, and a fast and furious landing at Colombo airport. I think they were probably more scared of the sporadic anti aircraft fire from the less well trained trigger-happy SL army as much as any attack from the LTTE.

After a strangely efficient journey through immigration and customs we were greeted by the grinning face of our driver Udara, looking well and wearing one of his navy blue England tops. As we packed our bags into the van we agreed we had obviously got used to the cold in Oz as we were sweating away in the ever so humid air, lungs finding it hard to breath. Our journey home was easier than usual as today was a SL holiday so very little traffic on the road and a lovely sunny day to appreciate the beauty and chaos of the island – rough blue sea, groups of people dotting the road enjoying their rare day off.

The holiday is Vesak Poya – 2 days off work and drink to mark the birth, enlightenment and passing away of Buddha (though the SL government had gone a little too far this time and ordered the hotels, bars and wine shops (off licences or bottle shops to you and I) to serve no booze for a whole week!). Vesak Poya is celebrated as a festival of light with beautiful lanterns suspended from porches, trees, telegraph poles, tuktuk mirrors, and the like, plus lovely simple strings of bulbs lining streets and houses. There are also other odd contraptions of light, strange shapes like synthetic tumbleweeds on sticks - lights with white stems and red tips lining the road of one village we zoomed through.

Back at the ranch with no idea what to expect (we’d had visions of squirrels multiplying and fighting the spiders, ants, cockroaches and frogs for best position in the house) we peeked through the door opening it a crack, getting prepared for shock, but all seemed fine. Our landlord had been in and given the place a sweep; sadly he’d also removed the knicker-clad squirrel nest to reveal a half eaten Buddha statue – oops! The only addition to the wildlife seemed to be lots of black baby frogs hopping around the front and back doors no bigger than a baby’s shoe lace knot. After a 2 hour clean, an early dinner at the spaghetti place, and bumping into a lot of people we knew we felt back at home.

Thursday

3.14am and I awake to flashes of lightening outside the window and dash next door to unplug our recharging laptops, it’s amazing the things you forget – living in the tropics you should never leave anything plugged in that is likely to get zapped. The storm continues for the rest of the night rumbling on until I give in and get up at 7am to work on my (battery powered) laptop and finish writing my CV. As I sit the sky gets darker and darker as though someone is pulling a blackout curtain over the house, and the rain increases so heavily that we have little streams and waterfalls running through the garden. In true monsoon style the lightening is most spectacular continually flashing in the sky and the deafening claps of thunder send me scurrying back to the safety of the bed. Imagine a car driving through an empty underground car park and the noise of it driving over rattling grids and manholes, multiply this noise by about 1000 and that’s how the thunder sounds – incredible crashes which shake the house and shake my nerves.

By 9am the garden is so flooded it’s not possible to walk across, the bank at the back is having mini mud slides, and the paddy field we overlook has become a lake – suddenly we have luxury accommodation overlooking a lake! However, not so luxurious is the drive, now a river which we have to wade through to get out – it comes up over our ankles as we paddle through trying to avoid any floating snakes on our way. There was no point trying to swim to work so this was a good day for unpacking and getting sorted. A lot of the day was spent marvelling at our 8 bottles of Aussie wine all safely brought back wrapped in skirts, jeans and jackets in our luggage, now taking top spot in the fridge. This is all pretty much done in the dark as we have no power until 3.30pm and the storm continues ALL DAY!

At night we get our friendly local tuktuk driver – Kosala – to take us to Asanka’s family’s house in a beautiful little village called Berutuduwa 4km inland from Seenigama, not that we could see much travelling through villages in total blackness as all the power had gone. Asanka’s house is lit with candles and we are the first to arrive – quite a few people are lost due to the lack of lights anywhere, the Aussie volunteers are awaiting a flat tyre repair with their tuktuk, and others can’t get here because there is no power at the petrol station for them to get fuel. Sri Lanka!! We had a lovely evening with delicious food and a chance to catch up on work and life in Seenigama/Hikkaduwa.

The biggest bombshell is that I discover I’ve written myself out of my job – oops! Last December I wrote 4 proposals for volunteer assignments to the Foundation one of them covering most of my job. This was to give myself a push to move on. The aussies that applied found my job one of the most interesting so we have a new girl starting here in July to do sports. Now I need a job, preferably in an NGO in SL but I’m open to ideas and options!

Friday

3am I awake to a huge bang and forks of lightening filling the sky, another spectacular and scary storm outside and another sleepless night! I get up at 7 to complete darkness and flooding in the garden again. As I sit on the loo I look to the left of me and there is our resident frog in his spot on the loo-brush looking up at me. The bathroom is his territory and he wasn’t terribly fazed when I cleaned the room on Wednesday, just hopped out of the way of the mop. I wonder what he thinks of us coming and going, he’s had 3 weeks of not having the door opened for him and I guess now we are back there will be plenty more insects for him to munch as we seem to attract the mossies to the house.

At 9.30 Priyantha arrives to take me to work, his tuktuk in tact after almost floating us back to the house last night. The road outside work is completely flooded and there is no power. Everyone is a little disheartened about everything from the work they are being made to do to the weather and I wonder what I’m doing back and also how I can help them move out of it all. Depressed by my lack of ability to offer them fruit picking jobs in the UK I decide to leave early and head home at 3 to get some writing done and chat to Bron about my lack of job after July and what we should do. No conclusions made.

The rain stops to allow us to head to Harmony for dinner, we decide we will cook at home tomorrow night! Hikkaduwa out of season can be a little dead; there are apparently 10 tourists in town and only a few of us whities still working as volunteers. We head home for an early night, wade through the drive and flop into bed still on Australia time hoping for no storms and a good night’s sleep.

Saturday

I awake at 7am, no storms, no rain, and sunshine! The birds are happy, back in the garden making a racket and picking at all the things brought about by the rain. This includes endless mangoes - our trees are raining mangoes as steady thumps land on the ground ready for a delicious mango smoothy in a few days time. Bron is happy as he’s back to photographing all the birds (ones with wings) and is pleased with the electric blue kingfisher posing outside the window for endless shots to be taken of it. We discover our squirrel has returned – at night it had obviously been checking out the now vacant space where its nest once was feeling miffed with our landlord and wondering if it could build again. The floor below the Buddha shrine was scattered with statue debris - small white bits of plaster, and the drying sheet (draped over the chair by the book case leading up to the statue) had tell tale little squirrel footprints on it.

Clearly a day of wildlife, and not all nice – getting back into my toy washing machine routine I take the powder box down from the kitchen shelf and as I pull the bag of powder out of the box a weighty black spider emerges, crawls across my hand and over the table cloth which is bright yellow further highlighting the ugliness of the creature. My screams bring Bron running with the broom and the landlord running to the house looking very pale and concerned. Sri Lankans rightfully will never understand the western phobia of spiders, he walks away head in hands wondering just who he lets his house to!! He thought I’d electrocuted myself!

The day improved after that, we went to our luxury retreat of the Lighthouse Hotel to start our fitness campaign which is basically to get fit again and stop walking around like old people. Feeling energised after 2½ hours there we braved a trek around Galle town to get food for the house and a blind tuktuk driver to take us home. We had a text from Bron’s friend Colin, currently in Thailand but lives in Scotland, to say he’s arriving tomorrow morning. So after organising Udara to pick him up at 5am we tucked into a delicious meal and one of our sacred bottles of aussie red wine – a delicious Pikes Eastern Shiraz. Wonderful….

Sunday

I get up at 7am to get the house a little more ship-shape for Colin’s arrival including cleaning his room, ridding it of the dead cockroach we killed last night, and making up the beds. The squirrel has been using the room as its main route into the house climbing through the bitten mesh in the top left corner of the window, so there was yet more squirrel debris to deal with. Bron emerged about 5 minutes before Colin arrived, clearly suffering from that extra glass of wine. Colin thought Udara was a mad driver (although he’s the safest we know!) so was a little shocked after his drive down – and this was a Sunday at 6am with no traffic, he’d have had his eyes closed all the way if it had been a week day!

After filling Colin in on the wildlife and scaring him about snakes, spiders and squirrels we headed off to trusty Buddes - the best spot on the beach for breakfast, before having a quiet afternoon in the house, and later an overly expensive dinner. This was due to the fact that all the places we eat in have closed for the season and only a few restaurants are open, the one we chose was the Moon Beam Hotel that thinks it’s in the heart of Colombo with its pricing – we won’t be back.

When we returned there was an enormous spider taking prime spot on the bathroom sink, as if there to prove to Colin that such horrors exist in our little jungle house. The boys bravely tackled it with a broom and a bottle of Baygon, leaving the bathroom door closed for the spider to shrivel and die while they could have a much deserved Bacardi and Coke. Colin did the honourable and flushed the monster down the loo. However, when Bron went in next it was déjà vu and another dead spider’s body had replaced the first, even bigger and uglier – we’ obviously killed a copulating couple, or killed the male before the female managed to eat it. Nice habit some of these monsters have?!

Monday

Back to work, and boy was it back to work with a bang! One of the aussie volunteers, Zac, has decided he’s had enough or working at FOG mainly due to the organisational structure being so far removed from how he believes an NGO should function. He cannot cope with the top down structure and thinks that the Foundation will be very hard to sustain without total inclusion and backing of the community. He has many valid points and is brave to head off to somewhere new. He’s done some fantastic work here and wherever he moves on will be lucky to have him. We also had some UK trainers pull out – they were going to do some much needed team building workshops for the staff but after meeting with the head of the NGO, who basically told them the staff would forget the training in a week so it was a waste of time, they justifiably rang me to explain they were not prepared to go ahead with it. BBC Leadership programme coordinators would tremble in their boots at the way the Foundation is managed – top down without the understanding of the huge benefits of training. Hey ho! I also discover my guys are thoroughly pissed off as they been having to do menial work while I’ve been away (this always seems to happen when I go away) so sport needs a kick up the arse again to get them back doing what they should be doing – coaching the kids and organising competitions rather than buying food and drinks and serving at FOG functions.

We all went out for dinner with Zac to support him – a difficult day with staff crying, people threatening to leave, and Zac having to hold it together for them all. Again most of Hikkaduwa was closed, probably giving Zac a further reason to move to Colombo and escape a dead town!

Tuesday

Back to buses. Time to stop the luxury of getting tuktuks to work so back to standing in 35 degree heat waiting for the bus with everyone else. Always something I dread, but once on the bus it’s a lovely trip to work through the town then along the coast and then always someone asking me questions as I walk with them from the Seenigama stop down to work: “Are you married? how long will you be here? how many family members do you have? what is your country? Sri Lanka good country.. good people.” - pretty much the same every day. Work is bloody hot and like a building site with builders everywhere, scaffold platforms moving constantly and you have to be careful not to walk into a plank or a SL builder’s crotch as Ynys nearly did when she walked out of my office (which since she walked in had been blocked off by said mini scaffold platform and one of the plasterers). They are frantically trying to finish the centre before 1st June – the dust gathers on my computer and I’m sitting hoping I’m not going to be coming down with something asbestos related! I get a lot done and then come home on the bus again after an encounter with a very happy village dog that usually follows me to the bus stop and is clearly very pleased to have me back to continue this routine. Back to total darkness in the house, no power for no reason so it’s out with the candles and off to the fridge to grab a Bacardi and coke as there’s not much else I can get done in the dark! Bron and Colin have been touring the coast in a tuktuk travelling to the stunning coastal villages of Weligama, Marissa and Unawatuna.

A wedding invite arrived from a good friend in the UK today tempting me back in June and back to a world so far removed from this one. 2 very different lands that I love for very different reasons. Well if I can find a cheap flight I’ll be back, if not it’ll be end of September.

The above is my first week back and as you can see no day is the same and these are just some of the things I can remember, a lot has been missed out! Off for a cold shower and a night out in Hikkaduwa town – it can’t get more exciting than that!!!