Sri Lanka Journal- Andew and Annette Dey: 3/4/2005

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Links from Andrew and Annette:

Pro Photographer Dixie's web site

Mondo Challenge set up Andrew and Annette's trip.

Unawatuna is the village where they're staying and working

In the north, Andrew and Annette are working with Norwegian People's Aid. NPAID is partnered with the German organization called Arbeiter Samariter Bund.

Bensonwood.com

Andrew

Our last full day in Kilinochchi. The morning meeting of our shelter team is efficient but subdued: Material supply all set? Any need for special trucking? Annette and I will lay out more shelters today.

After the meeting, Annette and I load her bike into the back of Roy’s Tata pick-up truck. We have already given away to Esan the bike that she bought me for my birthday. It will allow him to bike to relatives to spend the night, rather than sleeping at the NPA office. We are planning to give Annette’s bike to Sadana, an eight-year old girl who lost her father and several siblings in the tsunami. On the way out of town, we buy a soccer ball for Ishandan, Sadana’s cousin. In a tragic symmetry, Ishandan lost his mother and two siblings.

Esan drives us to Vadaramachi East, and works with us to lay out twenty more shelter locations at Maruthankerny, the second camp. This leaves only twenty more of the ninety-five shelters for Roy and the others to lay out after we leave.

At the Arasady camp, we check on the progress of the preschool. Annette has guided to completion the third iteration of the timber roof truss. She tells Tony and Roy that in our absence, they simply have to ensure that the carpenters duplicate this particular truss. We are pleased to see that the footings for six of the twelve concrete support columns have been poured, and the rebar cages that will reinforce these columns are in place. We had hoped that the preschool would be further along at this point, but we are confident that Roy and Tony will be able to oversee its successful completion.

We stop by the house of Sadana’s grandparents, where Sadana and her mother have been living since the tsunami. Our construction team has been using the fenced yard around the house for storing construction materials such as tin sheets and bags of cement. We have been paying Sadana’s grandmother to cook curry-and-rice lunches for Roy, Vimal, Kumar, and our vehicle drivers—and for us when we opt to have lunch on the job site.

Because we are feeling rushed on our last day, we decline the offer of curry and rice. Sadana’s grandmother calls for her as we are pulling the bike out of the back of the truck. When Sadana realizes that the bike is for her, she hides shyly in the folds of her grandmother’s sarong. Her grandmother nudges her toward the bike, and she approaches it for a closer look. I usually feel awkward about photographing moments like this, and today is no exception. However, when the money for the donation comes from someone else, documenting the gift usually seems to make sense. In the case of the bicycle for Sadana, we are using money that Benson Woodworking has made available for just such purposes. We give the soccer ball to Sadana’s grandmother, and explain that it is for Ishandan.

As we are about to leave, Sadana’s grandmother motions for us to wait a minute, and disappears into her house. Sadana follows her. They reappear several minutes later bearing a large plastic bag filled with what look like short, pale yellow sticks. I recognize them as pulukodial—the dried shoots of the palmyra tree. We have seen them hanging to dry on lines strung between trees. To eat it, one breaks a chunk off the shoot, removes the stringy fibers that cling to it, and crunches away. The texture is woody; the taste is something like corn flour. In fact, pulukodial is often ground to make a nutritious flour.

In addition to being charmed by Sadana, I have been struck by the poise of her grandmother and grandfather. There is nobility in the way they conduct themselves. She is an attentive and generous woman. He is a tall, lean fisherman with a smile that is quick and engaging. I imagine that it took Sadana’s grandmother many hours to gather and prepare so much pulukodial. We thank her for the gift, and tell her that we hope to see her and her grand-daughter again. I wonder if we ever will.

We head back to Kilinochchi for a quick lunch and a final meeting with the steel fabricator. Annette carefully reviews with Tony and the welder the various steel components required for the trusses. After a brief debate, Annette, Tony, and I decide to return to Vadaramachi East to lay out the last batch of shelters at the third camp, Thalaiyadi.

We arrive at the camp late in the afternoon. The sun has started to sink, and the heat of the day is beginning to dissipate. In an hour, we have laid out the remaining twenty shelters of the fifty-five at this site. Roy will be pleased. As we are walking back to our Land Cruiser, we spy a volleyball game in full swing at the dirt court by the road. The teenage boys who are playing beckon and holler for us to join the game. We smile and continue on, anxious to make the drive to Kilinochchi before dark.

On the drive back, Annette, Tony, and I are each enveloped in our own thoughts. I try to note with precision the now-familiar landmarks of the trip that we have made nearly every day for the past five weeks. There’s the billboard in Maruthankerny with the hand-painted beach scene glorifying a battle in which the Tamil Tigers vanquished the Sri Lankan Army. Back on the A-9 road, we pass the truck stop where trucks that were not able to make the northern border crossing by 5:30 are parked for the night. One truck driver is washing the gaily painted metalwork and varnished teak sideboards of his truck. Others are bathing in the fresh water pond. The toddy shop appears to be doing a solid business this evening.

The stretch of road that reaches down to Elephant Pass is mostly coconut plantations and paddy fields. Tony honks his way through a casual herd of cattle. Just north of the pass, two soldiers with AK-47s slung on their backs search for something in the underbrush. Their camouflage-painted Mitsubishi 4x4 with the blacked-out windows is parked nearby.

We enjoy our last in a long series of dramatic sunsets over Elephant Pass. The red of the sky hints at the blood-stained sand below. We pass the salt evaporating plant just south of the pass, and the massive, rusting armored bulldozer that stands as a memorial to a courageous Sri Lankan Army soldier and the suicide bombing that he foiled. On the sides of the A-9, lagoons that had five weeks previously been filled with brackish water are now collages of puddles and mud. The waterfowl are pleased. I recognize Black-winged Stilts, Little Green Herons, Large Egrets, and Painted Storks.

Just north of Kilinochchi, we pass one of the minefields being cleared by NPA deminers. The deminers have put away their rakes, visored helmets, and body armor for the day, and are relaxing in the nearby camp that is their home for three weeks of each month. As we approach Kilinochchi, the two-wheeled vehicles with which we are sharing the road grow more numerous: motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles, most carrying two or three people—and sometimes four. A tall, vertical, red-and-white striped checkpoint gate marks the beginning of the town proper. The checkpoint is not manned, and I have not once seen the gate swung horizontally across the road. We cruise past drab and quieting stores in the gathering darkness, and arrive finally at the NPA office.

………………………………………………………………………………

At the I-9 Restaurant that evening, I chat with members of the European delegation about their careers in international development work. The locations sound exotic—Mozambique, Vietnam, Kosovo—and the work challenging. I am struck by the vastness of the need for this type of work, and the minuteness of the contribution that Annette and I have made to it. A koan on which I have been musing lately is “how do we know when our work here is done?”

This sense of infinite need is reinforced when Dixie, the photographer, tells us about his work with street children in Bombay. Four-and-a-half million children live on the streets in India. Dixie has been working with the hundreds who make their home in and around the Bombay train station. Many of them come to the city from northern India, hoping to escape poverty and abuse. They invariably find in the city that their difficulties are magnified, but returning home is next to impossible without the intervention of an aid agency.

Children who have hitched a ride on a train to Bombay will be subject to their first exploitive encounter within ten minutes of arriving. Most end up as pickpockets, drug dealers, or prostitutes. Dixie has helped to set up an educational facility in the train station—“many of these children are quite smart, and they have a desire to learn.” He is also working on a project funded by UNICEF that will result in an exhibition of photographs and excerpts from interviews with children. By documenting the realities of street life in Bombay, and exhibiting this work in villages in northern India where many of the kids originate, he hopes to encourage some of them to reconsider jumping on a city-bound train. Dixie acknowledges matter-of-factly that even this undertaking will not make a dent in the problem.

The conversation turns toward the sustainability, on a personal level, of doing international aid work. The stories Annette and I have heard of broken marriages have reinforced our sense that the lifestyle of aid workers is not particularly conducive to family-life. We have also come better to appreciate the relatively luxurious accommodations and high salaries enjoyed by aid workers, as compared with the local staff. We might have imagined when we came to Sri Lanka that we would be living and working closely with locals. After five weeks in the Vanni, however, we were hankering for alternatives to curry and rice, and looking forward to the freedom to travel at will.

“No matter how closely you work with the locals,” states Karin, a career aid worker who is slated to move soon to Kilinochchi, “you will never become one of them. There will always be a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

I had heard this sentiment expressed in similar terms by other aid workers. An NPA technical advisor described his relationship to the locals in terms of his military background: “In the army, I was an officer, and I was in charge of enlisted men. There was a necessary divide between us. I guess I have carried over that same attitude to my work with the local deminers.”

Perhaps because Annette and I have been approaching our work from the perspective of volunteers, rather than professionals, we have not experienced this divide in the same way, although we have had awkward moments. Five weeks earlier, NPA had sent a driver to Unawatuna to pick up Annette and me for our first trip north. The driver arrived on a Sunday evening, because we were starting our journey early the next morning. When we invited the driver to join us for dinner that evening, at first he was confused, and then he declined. We left a plate of food on the table, and he ate it during the night.

Several weeks later, Annette and I turned down NPA’s offer to supply a vehicle and driver for the weekend that we spent following up projects in Unawatuna. We would have been worried the whole time about whether the driver was enjoying himself, or had enough to do. Our professional coworkers seem to find our attitude amusing. Annette caused several raised eyebrows the day she invited Esan to join her for lunch at a local restaurant.

We could imagine staying in touch with several of the locals with whom we have worked here, in addition to a number of the ex-pats. The bonds that we have forged with the likes of Roy, Vimal, and Esan are stronger than the connections we made with locals in the south. This may be because the work in which we were engaged in the north was more intense, or perhaps it is because, once we moved beyond the initial reserve and began to build up trust, we found that these people are in many ways like ourselves.

At a pause in the discussion, James holds up his beer glass and offers a toast in our honor. Good old James. He will be the first to acknowledge his minor failings—including difficulty getting out of bed even with alarm clocks ringing on each corner of his mattress—but he has brought invaluable diplomacy and charm to this challenging work.

My response to his toast is brief: “We appreciate the opportunity to work with you, we have enjoyed our time here, we are glad that we could be helpful, and we are looking forward to going home.”