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