Mid-placement in Sri Lanka: rice and curry and Batticaloa

Posted by Devin Morrow on May 31st, 2010

Last May, Stephanie Nolen at the Globe and Mail wrote a fascinating article on LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Two weeks later, the Sri Lankan government and army proclaimed the death of Prabhakaran, and a “victory” over the nationalist group that had controlled the North and East of Sri Lanka for decades. At that point, I was finishing my BA in Politics at the University of Winnipeg, had a vague plan to go to Cambodia in the fall, and had no idea that I would end up, a year later, in the very place she wrote about, and that so fascinated me: but a place which seemed impossible I would ever have the chance to see.

A month ago was my halfway point in Sri Lanka, and I wondered for days how to begin writing this blog entry. At first, I started it with my trip to Jaffna with some of my Sri Lankan colleagues here at WUSC, because I felt that seeing the total destruction of northern Sri Lanka suddenly made the tragedy of war here bluntly and completely real – from the IOM and UNHCR tarp-shrouded ruined houses, to the way jasmine grew fragrantly on the broken walls and buildings of Jaffna, to the innumerable Sri Lankan Army bunkers scattered everywhere north of Vavuniya, to the awful transit camps we glimpsed before entering the Vanni area, and to the fallen water tower we stopped to stare at in the destroyed LTTE capital of Kilinochchi.

But my experience in Jaffna was only a few days, and a brief glimpse at the reason I am in Sri Lanka at all. I’m here working with WUSC-Sri Lanka’s Youth In Transition Project in Batticaloa. This is what we’re doing: Over the course of one year (ending this November) we are putting 1000 war-affected youth (including former child combatants and youth affiliated with armed groups) through an empowerment project that teaches them the soft skills they need to reintegrate with their communities. It also puts them into 4-month community internships that enable them to learn about their own potential and helps with capacity-building so that at the end of the training period, they are able to, for the first time, think really positively, creatively, and realistically about their future. We help them to create an action plan for their future that incorporates either further education, vocational training, employment, or psycho-social support.

Right now, we are in the middle of the project, and I pass my days busily: visiting our various project sites and internship placements, hanging out with youth who are, for the most part, eager and excited to try and speak with me and laugh delightedly when they realize that I’m actually the same age as many of them. I want to make sure that they are finding their experience rewarding, or at least useful, and based on these talks I hope to make recommendations about what can be changed in the project in the future to make it always better. Other days we visit different communities to coax families into encouraging their children to join the project, a possibility that for them may seem terrifying – many of them when they come to the project are leaving their homes for the first time since the war – but that we try to convince will be exciting and interesting and, in the long term, a really excellent chance for them to think about their futures.

I have now been in Sri Lanka about 3 and a half months, and find it hard to believe I have only 6 weeks left. So little time does not seem like enough to understand a country – it has taken this long for me to form real relationships and trust with the people I am working with in this project, and specifically to begin to understand the experiences of the youth participating in our project.

I love Batticaloa: the people, the spicy, spicy food, the ocean that sends the occasional salty breeze over the town’s lagoons, the peacocks that wake me up at 6am, bicycling down dusty lanes in 40 degrees, thunderstorms that circle us but never, ever break. And I am wholly committed to the project I are working on, even when it seems like government bureaucracy wants to smother us, and the sheer size of it threatens it to unravel at the edges.

Due to the scale of the project, I’ve had the opportunity to travel all over eastern Sri Lanka, deep into Batticaloa district, north to Trincomalee, and south to Ampara – an area that dealt with the twin blows of war and the tsunami. It is such a change, when you cross into the east province on the way from Colombo, the roads becoming rough and potholed, the sudden increase in the number of military checkpoints, but also the prevalence of women in saris with matching umbrellas, and bigger, more colourful Hindu temples, mosques and churches dotting each of the villages.

I started this post with a reference to my short trip to Jaffna, because it really wasn’t until I went there that the impact of what happened in Sri Lanka really hit me. Since then, I have been busier and busier as we push our way into the hectic centre of the project. And at this point, with only 6 weeks left (for me, the project continues, as I wrote above, to November), I feel as though everything I do here immerses me deeper and deeper into my work and into the history or what happened here – whether it be visiting the youth at their internships, attending community outreach meetings, going to the monthly UNICEF child protection coordination meetings, or joining in on games at project sites.

I don’t know how to end this in a way that seems to bring it all together. Maybe I will be able to when I am on my way back to Winnipeg in mid-July. Right now though, the idea of somehow organizing my thoughts and the way I feel into something conclusive that can accurately describe my experience here to a reader is beyond me. All I know is that when I am in Batti, I feel very, very far away from everything else in the world – but I really mean that in a way that I feel fulfilled, and that maybe, a tiny part of what I am doing here, will make a difference in the long run.

Posted in SWB