September 2003, Trincomalee, Sri Lanka

Still in Trincomalee, the scenic coastal town to the North East of the island, there are so many small anecdotal events I need to relate to the interested eye. While driving into the interior villages, for example, it is difficult for me to express in only a few words the brief encounters of wonder I beheld. I remember insisting my driver to stop the vehicle to capture through my camera lens the pair of school boys in their school uniforms (blue shorts and white short sleeved shirts, half tucked in and half hanging out of their shorts, a justified and most appropriate appearance at the end of a school day, each no more than two and a half feet high, probably third graders) standing by a tree bark with their note books and pencils out, teaching the two Army soldiers how to read and write the Tamil language. The Sri Lankan Army is made up of mostly Sinhala recruits, exclusively so for duty in the war zones. Most Sinhalese do not know their other national language – Tamil – because they have never had the inclination nor the opportunity to learn.

I got down from the vehicle with my colleagues and after exchanging pleasantries to put them all at ease, started chatting with the soldiers, who instantly warmed up to someone speaking a familiar language, probably after months of lone languishing by this tree bark along the highway, separating great big jungles on either side, their makeshift security post. It turns out the ‘little teachers’ were conducting their lesson for the soldiers as they have done for the past so many weeks to then.

Getting into the groove of conversation, I could tell they were thankful for the brief distraction to their duty, if only to talk for awhile about their loved ones back in their villages. One young soldier, sheepishly told me about his girlfriend, blushing all sorts of colours despite the sun-darkened skin after months of standing out there in the harsh sunlight, with only the trees, the skies and their archaic guns for company. They were engaged to be married, he told me. I inquired when the wedding was to be, he looked down, scratched one boot with the other, and told me, his smile half fading, that it depended on when he could get leave from duty. I could tell how exhausted these troops were, with added tension during the so-called ceasefire.

The other soldier told me that what he missed the most was helping his old and ailing father in the family farm. This year, a drought persisted, he said, which meant the loss of yet another harvest. Wryly he added under his breath that his father’s ailments were brought on more by the pressure to pay back his growing debts after the purchase of fertilizers and insecticides at exorbitant prices and not so much from physical reasons. He said that is why he had opted to enlist with the Army, as he could support his father to some extent with their debt repayment. He also told me he had started saving for his two younger sisters’ marriages in the future.

The ‘little teachers’ had stopped their lesson for a play-break. The soldiers’ mirth returned at the display of the boys’ pranks and we left them to their antics. Driving off I remember saying a quick prayer that these little ones would not grow up to borrow the racial hate and prejudices fostered by their elderly predecessors as my generation had had to, and that instead they would grow up to a nation where each respected the other – where the old could learn from the young, where joy existed between people despite their ethnicity, and where humanity came together to fight the more potent evils threatening mankind – poverty, hunger and the daily struggle to survive.

Everyone loses in war…some more than others:

Driving through several villages on our way back into Trincomalee town, we made another stop at a Sinhala village hidden amidst acres of paddy fields. Our book research before heading to Trincomalee had indicated that this particular town was cited as a possible location rich in ‘case-studies’ for the purpose of our own field research. We found that sadly, we were right. Making casual inquiries from random villagers in their farms, we soon found our way to a tiny mud house by the side of a deserted field, with no sign of life for miles around it. As we tapped on the wooden plank that was positioned for a door, an elderly woman in a traditional ‘redda’ (cloth in Sinhala) and ‘hette’ (blouse in Sinhala) came out. Her eyes looked young, although we were surprised to see the lines that had forced their way onto her otherwise pleasant face. She seemed to be alone, however, as was expected of all village folk in Sri Lanka, she smiled at all of us and invited us in after we briefly explained to her the purpose of our visit. I shivered on her behalf as to how trusting she was of all of us. We could tell what a lot she had been through in such a short time in her life.

There was hardly a piece of furniture in the tiny sitting room of the one-bedroom house. But returning from the room she brought with her one wooden chair and a mat that she placed on the floor, inviting us to sit. She perched herself on the hard floor and asked us more about the purpose of our research and about ourselves. When she was satisfied with our responses, she began to relax a bit more. With the encouragement and the assurance of one of my colleagues, she began to tell us about her daughter. She was smiling as she spoke. With carefully selected words, she relayed that these sorts of things were now expected after so many years of war. She told us that her daughter had been raped, believed to be by a soldier, when she was returning from the field, having served her father his lunch. The girl was 16 years old and had just sat her first level secondary school examination. She had come crying home and collapsed into her mother’s arms. They had decided not to relate the incident to her father, for fear of the consequences of his irrational but protective anger. She softly told us that he loved his children, and was especially proud of his daughter, who was as a simple farmer. He had used to call her ‘mage pahana’ (my lamp in Sinhala.)

Several days before the examination results were due, the girl had committed suicide. It was then that they had realized the emotional and psychological weight their young daughter had been bearing all those months. The experience had destroyed her innocence, her peace, her freedom (for she had needed her mother to go everywhere with her after that) and her hopes for the future. They received word from her school soon after that the girl had done extremely well in the examination and was eligible to study in the science stream of the senior class so that she had a good shot at entering the university (Sri Lanka’s free education system enables free entry into one of the 11 universities in the country, only based on merit, annually increasing the competition among students to obtain an enviable spot among the limited capacity for intake into the local universities.) These were, however, hopes and aspirations that had died along with the girl. She was, among many, just one of the casualties of war.

While we were struggling with our own thoughts, especially us girls among our group, to think of the right thing to say to this grieving mother, she had called to one of the passing villagers and had asked him to bring by two bottles of a local soft drink. She ducked back into the kitchen outside the house and brought with her an assortment of four glasses to pour the drink into. She handed the glasses out to us, with apologies that she could only afford two bottles. We struggled even more. Here was a woman and perhaps a family on the brink of starvation with a failed harvest and a violated and dead child, and she was apologizing to us for her lack in serving us. But we knew from our travels that to refuse the hospitality of a villager anywhere in Sri Lanka would be considered offensive and unkind, and so we accepted her hospitality with sinking hearts. I have always and continue to marvel at the generosity and selflessness of all Sri Lankans no matter where I traveled in this tiny island.


Life and times in a refugee camp…

Back in town, we stopped at a refugee camp (the politically correct term being ‘welfare center’) close to a predominantly Muslim area. The camp had been in existence for 13 years at the time. Refugee camps, by definition, are temporary locations of refuge, where people are housed for a while until they can return to more permanent shelters where they may regain some amount of normalcy and conduct their lives. Not so in many locations in Sri Lanka. And definitely not for the now more or less permanent residents of this refugee camp in Trincomalee town, located a stone’s throw from the main Police station and many other imposing government buildings.

We were led through the narrow alleyways that separated rows and rows of mini shelters made up of boards and plastic, with some woven dried palm leaves placed on top for roofing. It was a bevy of men, women and children walking hither and thither. Children did not go to school most of the time and the men did not go to work. They were fisher folk, displaced from their original homes during the war years. Even though they were now resident close to the beach, the Navy restricted them from seafaring due to the threat of LTTE gunboats that tried to encroach into government terrain every so often, erupting in a sea battle. This meant that able-bodied men were sitting at home, walking about aimlessly with no hope of a livelihood to sustain their families independent of government support. No doubt, the frustration, the seemingly endless uselessness that boiled inside of them must have been great. We were informed by our local NGO guide that this was one of the main reasons the residents often got into brawls between them – underneath the superficial conflict over relief supplies or water, lay the need to vent deeper feelings of anger, emotional tension and fear of a bleak and hopeless future for them and their families.

Children rarely went to school not only because the kids in the camp were made to feel unwelcome and unwanted by the children in the regular schools in their adopted location, but also because parents had to stay behind to fight for the weekly dry food rations and supplies of water, kerosene and cooking oil that were supplied by the Government. There were no specific dates of delivery and so they could not risk not being at home to collect their rations, which were supplied upon inspection of the refugee ration card given to each family.

While my colleagues were questioning a few families, I walked around with a Tamil colleague of mine, playing with the children who gathered around us curiously. My eye suddenly caught sight of one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen in my life. She was slender, of average height and sported flawless and gleaming brown skin. She wore a loosely fitted bright red printed dress. She had just had a bath and had her long dark hair tightly folded into a large bun with a towel at the nape of her neck. She was wringing some washed clothes. She saw me and smiled – a shy smile, but with mischief dancing in her large, black and beautiful eyes.

I made my way towards her with my colleague and asked her her name. She introduced herself merrily and inquired of us. After we had in turn introduced ourselves, I asked her her age, she replied she was 18. She looked much younger. I asked if she lived with her parents, at which she gave a throaty laugh and said she was living with her husband. I was speechless. I could tell she was not surprised at how shocked I was. Pointing to her stomach, now presenting a slight bump under her dress, she told me she was pregnant with her second baby. I was not sure which I was more shocked at – the seeming years of experience of adult life for such a young age or the fact that she had acquired an aura of wisdom and fearlessness about her that seemed to have left her undeterred by the inquisitive questions of an older, yet unwise city girl like me.

She went on to relate that she had moved to the camp when she was only five, and that at 16 she had fallen in love with a boy who was also a resident in the refugee camp. They had ‘married’ a year earlier and now they were having their second child. I could not believe what I was hearing. Here was a girl, younger than myself, who had literally lived her whole life in this camp and had met, fallen in love and married within this camp and now had given life to the next generation, who perhaps will spend some or all of their lives in this camp as well. It was painful, sad, shocking, amazing and intriguing all at the same time.

But I remember jotting down in my notes the realization that what seemed to me like just a refugee camp that sheltered the displaced and homeless affected by the war, was also an active microcosm of life. People experienced the joys of birth, found romance and made love, celebrated marriage, brought up children, quarreled as neighbours, as husbands and wives, and fostered friendships built in community living, and at times also sorrowed over the death of their loved ones inside this camp. Life existed in this ‘refugee camp’ as in any other village or town elsewhere in the country. What was temporary and a blight to the landscape to passers by was a permanent way of life and the only reality known to those who lived inside the camp. Thirteen years of communal living meant that a community, an identity, a way of life was born and fostered through the years. The only way they could cope with their reality was to accept their transitional status as real life and to transform it into everyday living. I was awash in wonder as I said goodbye to that girl and the members of her ‘community’.

These are only some insights I had in the beautiful district of Trincomalee, but they have left me and my perception forever changed and I am so thankful that I encountered them along the caravan stops of my life over the years. Perhaps in letting me in on their realities, they have let me share in their experiences and keep with me a little of the strength, the purity, the wisdom and love they have acquired through their trials and their lives. And for this, I am forever indebted to them.