'My cat has a hemorrhoid', and other firsts

Random things I have done for the first time ever in the past 3.5 weeks in Sri Lanka

1. Tried to maintain a blog. (Fail. It's so hard to sit at your computer in the evening after sitting at your computer most of the day.)
2. Been to Kandy-land to CouchSurf with CouchSurfers. (Kandy is a town in the hill country in the centre of the country. It's cooler and jungly and really heaven away from the fumes and chaos of Colombo, sometimes... especially with the excellent and thought provoking company that CouchSurfers provide)
3. Worked at an NGO founded by E. F. Schumacher, author of 'Small is Beautiful'. (Fine, volunteered. Amazing to be somewhere where people are there because they really believe in what they are doing, and can discuss the ethics of intellectual property rights [TRIPPS is evil and patents don't stimulate innovation any more], the best place to get buffalo curd or 'mikiri' [down south] and everything in between while exchanging bits of vegetarian rice and curry lunch packets which come wrapped in banana leaves.)
4. Been on a field trip to paddy fields. (We talked to conventional and organic farmers and their families. One farm couple had been to hospital for 2 days after an acute case of pesticide poisioning, using the recommended dose of a far too concentrated project. Their house had no doors and only rudimentary walls, but when, after taking notes of the event, we suggested we could get compensation for them, the lady said they didn't want money, they just wanted it not to happen to anyone else. Talked to another farmer who has been cultivating traditional paddy varieties organically for years with great success, who bemoaned the death of food sovereignty and security and agricultural culture - sowing songs, harvesting poems - with the rise of industrial agriculture. He must have been close to 70 years old but was so beautiful and active and sprightly and keen to do whatever he could to spread the cultivation of these much more resilient and biodiverse rice varieties which I'm investigating. Apparently they're also good for controlling diabetes. He also gave me jasmine blossoms which I put into a glass of water later that day; they bloomed and gave off the most wonderful fragrance...)
5. Done battle with the various immigration authorities and NGO secretariats of Sri Lanka. (Bureaucratic hell. Plus the government has fun portraying all NGOs and INGOs as the devil, full of people who supported the war and angry infertile feminists. Or something.)
6. Been to a swanky beach resort with oversalted food, beautiful rooms, creepy dodgy dangerous people on the beach and surprisingly unclothed cinnamon oil massages.
7. Moved in with the geilste couple ever. (Man-Dan, the climate change expert from work, editor extraordinaire, ex-juggler, champion of after-work Bombay sapphire and tonics, part time soul funk DJ, proud creator of dangoes - frozen mangoes, and his wife Lady-Dan, monitoring and evaluation queen of Oxfam Australia in Sri Lanka, doer of a thousand jobs, winner of official title of Nicest Person Ever, maker of best middle Eastern vegetable thingies, maker of best Sri Lankan polo curry, both of whom are very convincing vegetarians, rescuers of abandoned kittens, founts of knowledge and sound advice, and generally hilarious to hang out with. But Lady-Dan works too much.)Lady Dan!Man Dan aka DJ Misodisko
   
8. Eaten buffalo curd for breakfast almost every day. (And used the terracotta pots it comes in to plant tomatoes, beans, beets, kangkung, basil, thyme, peppermint, oregano and rosemary on my balcony.)
9. Created a vegetable and herb garden on a balcony. (No veges so far but not bad for 1 week, beans are so beautiful! They grow and grow and grow!)
10. Created a makeshift wardrobe out of knots, a piece of washing line and some hangers.
11. Played ultimate frisbee. (Awful in the heat and yet somehow painfully fun, even at 6am, despite the fact that my hand-eye coordination is worse than a one eyed, two legged goat with Parkinson's disease. Scored two goals though!)
12. Developed a relationship with a giant cockroach called Archie. (He lived in my bath drain and we would share a shower every evening. One day he climbed on my hand after sitting on the showerhead instead of his usual perch on the rim of the bath, so I let Gene have him...)
13. Had enormous, beautiful whipspiders in my home.
14. Read Milan Kundera's 'Immortality'.
15. Made a back scrubby-scrubby thing by finger knitting with coconut fibre rope.
16. Paid tax in the form of cake. (To my wonderful neighbour and colleague and rescuer of three legged kittens and landlord, Sandya. She lent us the oven, she gets one quarter of everything that comes out.)
17. Co-habited with rockstar rescued kitten-cats. (Gene Simmons and Ziggy Stardust. You figure out which is which.)
18. And yes, discovered that cats can get hemorrhoids. (Poor Gene.)

Bean in the big smoke

- What country you from? Japan?
- No, New Zealand!
- Ohh...
- You?
- Sri Lanka!

4 days in Colombo and I wonder if I should just make myself a Made in NZ shirt to save myself the trouble. There are next to no New Zealanders on this island, but there are plenty of expats (that always reminds me of 'cowpats'... too much time on farms) - I'm staying with a sweet-as-strudel Austrian guy who's helping to develop 2 technical colleges here, and have met a dude from the Thai embassy, another Austrian, a Sri Lankan/Singaporean/Malaysian dude, and an Austrian girl studying homeopathy. And things being the way they are, everyone knows EVERYONE, and everything goes by word of mouth.

Like apartment hunting! Food here may be cheap as chips and much more delicious, but housing is not. And if I'm going to be able to work well, I need to find my island of calm in the midst of the chaos, the cars, the fumes, the swindling tuktuk drivers, the honest tuktuk drivers, the crows, the crowds, the cricket-players-in-the-alleys, the shrines, the signs, the saris, the sellers, the pelicans and the press of intensely friendly humanity that is Colombo.

It looks like work will be busy. The organisation I'm interning for, Practical Action (www.practicalaction.org) was founded by E. F. Schumacher (father of Buddhist economics and author of "Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered"), and they are totally participatory and staffed by amazing people. My first assignment is going to be an economic comparison of conventional and organic rice farming; their organic rice farming project went very well and is being expanded, so they want to know why, and just how good it is. I'm hoping to supplement this analysis with a more complex comparison including the ecological, social and political effects of these two methods of growing good old Oryza sativa.

Right now, the industrious buzz of almost 6 million people trying to make their fortunes is floating 24 storeys up around the apartment tower, and it's incredible to think that the war only finished here last year with the crushing of the LTTE (and the mass displacement of lots of civilians) up in the north. And after stopping to chat with a Sinhalese tuktuk driver and his Tamil friend, it's unbelievable that this population of what must be the world's most beautiful smilers was embroiled in such a bloody conflict for so long. And then you just have to think, thank YOU, Britain, for coming in here and starting it all in the first place.

But then the drivers try and charge you some outrageous rate, and you laugh and start to haggle, and you feel better, because you realise people are resilient as rats, they are masters of survival and besides, things usually work out ok in the end.

Fariz (sp?) and his tuktuk

Oasis: Vesak day lanterns in the temple on the lake

Pelicans on the platform!

Candy-coloured houses

On the back of a tuktuk: Jesus never fails, but even so, you can't help praying when you're on the roads in Colombo