Exciting Things

Ok, well, the last several weeks have been really busy, but today I don't have too much to do, so I'm writing you an email. In this email are exciting things (I think). I hope you agree.

The ARM (Annual Research Meeting) was fascinating for me to watch and participate in a bit. People from all over the world with different water specialties converged on IWMI to give talks about their research. Many of the talks were pretty interesting, but the best part was hanging out with the people. I made friends with a group of Uzbekis who work at the Central Asian IWMI office who were particularly friendly. They invited me to come stay with them for a while, and told me that they will look into finding a problem in central asia that only I can fix so that IWMI will send me there. Sounds pretty cool! They said that if I do come, they'll feed me nothing but grilled meat and good russian vodka. Mark, my (sort of) boss told me that the last time he was there he doesn't remember much after about 9 pm. Luckily, I would get to experience Uzbeki culture first-hand before they left. The Saturday after the ARM was a Guy Fawkes party hosted by the Association of British Residents at the Hilton here. One of the head organizers for the ABR works for IWMI, so most of the staff was invited, and, the Uzbekis decided to stay for a real Sri Lankan party before leaving. I decided to go as well--for an entry fee of 2000/- for dinner, unlimited lion lager, and an evening with some good friends it was worth it.

I sat at a table with Mark (a whitman grad who works at IWMI who is a great guy), Samyuktha (the next youngest person at the office) and several other IWMI people. Across the room, the Uzbekis were seated with my good Iranian friends, Poolad and Miryam. Mark began the evening with a toast to the Uzbekis, where we all brought them glasses of some (apparently) really nice vodka that Mark had brought. This turned out to be a mistake in retrospect. The Uzbekis had brought at least a bottle each of vodka, tequila, and cognac (blech). They came to our table and toasted us every 15 minutes for the remainder of the party. It is difficult to refuse a drink when a smiling Ukranian hands you a glass, toasts, and then drains his glass. I made it home (Samyuktha's couch) around 4 am that night after a couple of night clubs and some interesting Sri Lankan nightlife experiences. I paid for my fun the next day (don't go to a party with Uzbekis without first seriously considering what you're getting into). If you want more info on my condition, I'm sure that my aunt Karen would be happy to tell you how I was feeling--I certainly haven't heard the end of it. An interesting experience overall, but hopefully not one that I'll repeat in the near future.

This seems like a good place to talk about my work to bring this email back to a more serious note (and re-establish my credibility). At the office apparently I've become somewhat of a "Man Friday" (Samyuktha aka Sam started calling me this before I informed her of the postcolonial implications of this term {she's a theory person, so she understood} and now she says I'm a schmoozer). This is because I've started doing the following things: fixing broken things (like the office coffee machine), editing people's papers (like Dave's paper on emerging water governance challenges and Karen's Nile Basin Report, and some others), and more or less getting involved with everyone's work as much as possible. I now get a couple of editing requests per week (most water engineers can't write at all it turns out) and I get asked to fix things whenever they break. It's an interesting role to play, but I like reading everyone's papers, and I have always enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together. In the meantime, I'm scoring big points with aunt Karen for editing her report, maybe even enough to make up for my night out with the Uzbekis.

I'm also making slow progress on my own governance paper amidst all of my other new jobs at IWMI. I should have a pretty good draft to submit after another couple weeks of bouncing it back and forth between the two guys who are editing that paper with me. It's an interesting process--the editing takes much longer than the writing. I'm not sure if this is because my writing isn't great, or because I'm used to turning in papers in college where editing is more of an afterthought.

Ok, now on to more interesting adventures. Last weekend I took a bus down to Unawatuna with Dave Stentiford, another whitman grad doing a fulbright here. Unfortunately, we weren't able to bring a waveski along, so we decided to rent boards instead. The only board that I could hire was a short (6'2") board. Those of you who have learned to surf probably understand the difficulty of learning on one of these boards rather than a 9 foot longboard. I wasn't deterred though, and after a couple of days of trying I was able to get a few good rides and was standing up pretty regularly. The surf was rubbish, but it didn't matter too much for my skill level. In fact, I probably would have been sad if I had missed out on great surf because I was learning. I don't have any pictures of this because it rained the whole time I was there. But, I do have some other media to share with you. On Sunday, at about 5:30 in the morning I got up, walked out to the main road from my hotel (a place called full moon, if you're ever in Unawatuna, stay there. It's $6 per person per night, with good food and decent rooms and hot water) and jumped on a bus headed along the coast. My destination was a hotel called Caballanas that rents boards. On the bus, this song came on. You'll probably recognize the first bit. I was rocking out, and getting funny looks from the whole bus. I also had the opportunity to explore the Galle Fort, an old portugese fort that has turned into a town. It's a fascinating clash of colonial style and modern business in a 3rd world country. Next time I go to Galle or go surfing I'll make sure to get some pics.

One thing that I haven't mentioned before is that I've started running on a regular basis with my Uncle Dave. We usually run for about 45 minutes several days per week, which is really nice for me. The pace is slow, and I'm running for the sake of running rather than for training for something, which is pretty nice. Our run takes us past the swimming hole, through some paddy fields (we run on the dirt bunds separating fields) across a buffalo grazing area, past the "dirty shop", along the road by the magic rocks, next to the angry lady's house, along the Hokandara murderer road, and back to the house. These are all landmarks in the area, and our runs include most of them on any given day. Last tuesday Dave and I were on minute 40 of one of our faster paced runs when we ran through the buffalo grazing area. As we turned the corner, both of us looked back to see a buffalo coming full steam after us. Asian water buffaloes look like this. I took off as fast as I could, remember my run-ins with buffaloes before. Dave, who was slightly slower than me fell behind. After a few second (felt like longer) I looked back to see the buffalo still coming, pretty close behind Dave. Fortunately the buffalo decided to stop soon afterwards, and all we got was a good sprint workout at the end of our run. Maybe we should get chased by water buffaloes more often...

I have been practicing yoga on a regular basis here, and the last week I've had an opportunity to attend some fantastic yoga classes here. A fascinating yogi whose name is paddy mcgrath is in Sri Lanka for two weeks and just finished teaching a set of classes in Colombo before her retreat next weekend (which I am attending). Her classes last from about 7:45 am until about 10:15 am and are really difficult. Lots of backbends and inversions, and then a whole bunch of poses that really require a lot of leg strength and stability. By about 15 minutes into the class I'm always dripping sweat--I always bring a towel to the classes now. Most impressive is that I'm more sore after a yoga class than I usually am after a good climbing session or a full day of kayaking. The result is that my back is getting really bendy ( I think I am on the verge of being able to drop into a backbend from standing), my hamstrings are getting looser, and I'm slowly developing some really good stabilizing muscles in places that I didn't know that people are supposed to have muscles. I'm also developing a really cool awareness of individual muscles in my body and how to control them. It will be very interesting to see what effects this has on my kayaking and climbing (and skiing!) Next weekend at the retreat I'll be doing a little over 5 hours of yoga each day, which should be pretty wild. Fortunately, Dave and Sam are coming with Karen and I to the retreat, so there will be several of us who aren't fantastic at yoga.

The last interesting story I have took place two days ago. Last thursday I received a phone call from someone who I had met playing ultimate here (his name is Richard). He asked if I was interested in making 10,000/- for acting in a commercial. I said I was, so he told me to call his friend, Christo. I called him, and he asked me if I wanted to come work on Saturday, and if I could come in on friday for a screen test. I agreed to both, and went to see Christo right after yoga on Friday. He arrived, looked at me, decided I was white enough for his purposes, and told me that no test was necessary. He said that I would be acting in a commercial for a foreign investment firm. The commercial takes place in a nightclub, so I was to wear my best nightclub clothing the next day. I have no clothing suitable for a nightclub, so I took a trip to Cool Planet (the local cool clothing store) and bought a sweet nightclub shirt and some stylish jeans. Not knowing what to expect, I showed up to the studio the next day after yoga. When I arrived, Christo immediately brought me to the back room where there was some free food and where the other actors were having their makeup done. Christo asked me what clothing I had brought, and I pointed to my shirt and my jeans. He fired a few comments back and forth with the director in Sinhala, and then told me that my shirt would not do for a european night club. Instead, he pulled an awful white turtle-neck sweater thing that was about 3 sizes too small for me out of a costume bag and told me to put it on. I did, noting that it was not anything anyone would wear to any nightclub anywhere to myself, and waited to be shuttled to the club.

The other interesting thing that I haven't mentioned yet is that all of the other people there were really young. Aside from one guy who I started talking to on the bus over there, nobody appeared to be over the age of 17 (this turned out to be a correct assessment). It turns out that this advertising company had received a request for a commercial in a european night club, and had sent people to the British and Overseas Schools (high schools) for their "foreign faces". I'll recap briefly: 10th graders, night club featuring mostly white(ish) people, wearing awful white thing, acting in a commercial... I decided on my way over there that I was just going to participate completely, do whatever they told me, and ignore the absurdity of the entire situation. It was that, or opt out on the spot. I started thinking about participatory observation and the strategy of the object to get myself geared up for the experience.

I won't go into the plot of the commercial, which was pretty interesting in itself, here, but it should be posted online whenever it gets produced. When that happens, I'll send you the link. Until then, you can call me if you want to know more about that. My job in the commercial was just to dance to the same song over and over again. about 60 one minute takes where they kept telling us to dance with more energy really takes it out of you. 3 hours later my job was done. In the interim, there were some funny things that happened:

1) they tried to make the club as european as possible, which for them meant as un-sri lankan as possible. This meant casting the least dark skinned SL's that they could find along with several half SL's. this did not have the desired effect, and the club still resembled Sri Lanka rather than the UK

2) casting HS kids for a nightclub scene is a bad idea, as most of them had never been to a nightclub before. This meant lots and lots of re-takes with comments like "boys, you have to at least get near the girls," and "don't just clap to the beat of the song, that's not dancing" (no, these weren't directed at me)

3) to improve out attitudes, the directors tried to treat us like movie stars (hah) which involved a break for soft drinks each hour. However, the soft drinks were brought around to us by a smiling man who told each of us to "enjoy your beverage sir/madam".

4) the directors told us that westerners dance with their hand's in the air the whole time. This lead to some pretty funny dancing all around

5) the main director came over to me after about half of an hour and told me to stop moving my head around so much. when we reviewed the first 30 minutes of video, I saw what he meant. The yoga that I had been doing for the last 2.5 hours had freed up my spine so much that I looked like a bobble-head doll in the video. This was especially noticeable because I am at least a head taller than all of the half Sri Lankans that they casted (and the 15 year olds).

Apparently, songs like this and this are what they play in UK nightclubs. The second one was remixed so it had less of a beat, which changed tempo after about 15 seconds.

Overall, it was a completely baffling experience. It was made slightly better by what happened afterward. After I changed, several people asked me for my phone number, and said they would give me a call about more acting opportunities. Furthermore, a woman asked me if I was interested in modeling, handed me her card, and said that she'd call me in the next couple of days. If any of you are interested in being models in Sri Lanka, there's probably room for you. I think they have a very difficult time finding white people here who will do acting or modeling. At the very least, it's a good way to make some money on the side of my IWMI internship, so I'm happy about it.

This next week I'm joining my uncle and some other IWMI people on a tour of the former war zone to look at irrigation systems in place there. It should be really interesting to see parts of the country that no foreigners have been to in a really long time now. I'll go straight from that trip to my yoga retreat, and then return to Colombo a week from Monday. It looks like I'll be in the US from December 16th until the end of January, and then back to SL for another several months at least. If you want to come ski with me in CO, I'd love to have you.

Once again, I'd love to hear from all of you, so either shoot me a quick email about how you're doing or give me a call on skype (lukesanford). Thanks to the people who have been writing me, I really enjoy hearing about what you've been up to.

Luke