chartandwaters

Ello, am alive and well and hanging in Hikkaduwa, a little popular tourist town that’s also the hub of a lot of tsunami-related NGO activity. The big presidential elections were Thursday—they happen every 6 years—and with them came a curfew since election results are frequently accompanied by some form of violence. Everyone was well prepared for the elections and subsequent curfew and chose a place where we could hunker down for the day of, the day after, and the day after that, and of course we stayed in the south, where militant-related violence is (very) minimal—in fact no one’s actually given me an example of it here, as opposed to the north or east, where it’s more common.

There are a few different themes I’ve decided I want to learn more about while I’m here, including arts-related relief work (as broad and all-inclusive as that sounds), and the NGO community is pretty small and generous with its time so it was easy to get to meet a lot of people quickly. I love how forthcoming they are, and there are so many interesting things about people who picked themselves up from wherever in Dec. or. Jan to see the tsunami’s affects, then found themselves still here 11 mos later, immersed in many different kinds of projects. One of them is a cameraman Sunil who is Sri Lankan but had been living in Canada since ’87. He had just become a cameraman in Canada when the tsunami hit, and he came here in January to see what was up and started filming. He’s still filming 11 months later, watching NGOs come and go, studying the entire scope and extent of the relief work and the changes in people’s lives. Pretty cool. Through him met briefly a local couple, two artists who are dividing their time between here and Sydney. The boyfriend, who disguises himself as a surfer, said, why not come see my paintings and they were just amazing, the kind of work where you enter the room and are instantly struck by how beautiful they are, then he showed me his Masters thesis, finished a couple of years ago, a short theoretical discussion of the art project he did for his Masters, and damn if I didn’t find myself reading and taking notes on aesthetic theory that night in my little room. (Since I really like aesthetic theory but rarely read it, this was a good thing.)

I can’t bring myself to see a single towering Buddha, that is, to make the trip that would require it. If any one thinks they can persuade me to do so, please try; otherwise I don’t see it happening as the interviews and what not are more interesting to me right now. Sorry for the brevity of this and more soon, Gabi