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Here's another big email about Sri Lanka, I hope you enjoy it. Maybe the longest one yet. Unedited as usual, so please excuse the inevitable typos.


On November 23 I drove off towards the northeastern part of Sri Lanka in one of two matching Toyota Land Cruisers bearing the emblem of IWMI in the side. With me were:
Uncle Dave--Deputy Director General of IWMI,
Tuashar Shah--An IWMI researcher who has published several books and hundreds of papers on water management, generally thought of as a guru in the field, flown in from Delhi
Samad--Director of the south asian IWMI program, flown in from Hyderbad, India
Manthri--the Central Asian Director, flown from Uzbekistan
Ari--the guy who planned the whole trip,
and me.
Colin, the Director General of IWMI was supposed to come instead of me, but he had to run off to another conference or something, so I got to take his place. We drove over to the Batticaloa district, which is where a lot of the fighting in the civil war happened about two years ago. Our goal was to assess the irrigation situation there and see if there were any projects that IWMI could start working on in the area. Apparently the Gal Oya irrigation system (the one we looked at most) was the system used for developing a model of water governance called Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) which has been implemented throughout South Asia. However, nobody has really studied the Gal Oya system for about 20 years, so nobody knew how PIM was doing there. In the interest of making this email shorter and more interesting, I won't give you a day by day account. Instead, I'll share some highlights and observations.

The first thing that really struck me on this trip had very little to do with the trip itself. In the car, I began thinking about how things are named here (roads, mostly). The first day, we drove down a road known as the "17 Hairpin Turns Road." It was always referred to in this way, even by our drivers and people who we asked for directions on the side of the road. The "official" name of the road is someone's last name or something, but it's known for it's turns (for good reason, it was a scary drive with busses coming the other direction. Think Mokey Dugway). In Colombo, roads are named in a similar way. Roads always refer to where they go. The Galle Road connects Colombo to Galle. There are at least 10 Colombo roads that come from the center of the country towards Colombo. In this way, road names in Colombo also change depending on where you are going. The road that connects Pelawatte to Thalawatugoda is either the Pelawatte road or the Thalawatugoda road, depending on which way you are going. Some roads don't use this naming system. The roads that don't use this have their official names changed on a regular basis. The road atlas of Colombo has two appendixes for road name changes--for the last two iterations of names. This of course means that people often refer to the same road by different names. It is impossible to give phone directions here without a good working knowledge of landmarks, and Google Maps has given up on directions in Colombo (despite trying to stay up to date on road names).

I guess I'll consolidate Sri Lankan quirks into one section of my email and talk about Sri Lankan english here. some of you have probably already noticed this in my speaking or writing, but I'm beginning to start using the colloquialisms that Sri Lankans use. However, I'm still far from speaking the dialect that Sri Lankans speak and understand. I had a particularly frustrating experience that demonstrated this to me. I was in the car with a guy working for a Japanese NGO called "JEN," trying to ask him some questions about irrigation in the area. Here is a rough transcript of our conversation (I wrote it down right afterwards)

Luke: Can farmers grow rice during both the Maha and the Yala seasons?

JEN guy: "I cannot understand..."

Other guy in our car who became my Sri Lankan English (SLE) interpreter for the exchange: "He is asking, the farmers can be growing it the patty during the Maha and the Yala?"

JEN: "No no, only in the Mala they are growing it"

Me: "If all of the tanks and canals were restored, could farmers grow two crops per year?"

SLE Interpreter: "The farmers could be growing it the patty twice if they were restored tanks and canals, isn't it?"

JEN: "Yes it is!"

Me: "Before the war, did any farmers use agro-wells to irrigate their crops?"

SLE Interpreter: "Before the terrorism conflict, farmers were using it the wells for patty irrigation?"

JEN: "No no, it is not"

And so on. I'm sure most of you have had the frustration of not speaking another language well enough for you to get your point across. This was an oddly similar experience, except that I wasn't speaking my own language in a way that they understood. Rather, my english had to be helped along (the grammar had to be destroyed) before the Sri Lankan working for JEN got my point. It was a really odd experience. Another thing about Sri Lankan english that I picked up on the trip was the use of the terrorism trope straight from the US. The LTTE is often referred to as " The terrorists." The war is often called the "terrorism conflict." It might have been that we were in a post-conflict area asking about the effects of the conflict on irrigation, but it seemed to me like people in SL have picked up on the use of "terrorist/ism" even more than people in the US have. One person I spoke with told me that he likes Obama because "he is beating the terrorism".

People asking me about Obama after finding out that I was from the US also happened quite often. The head of the Irrigation department asked me a question about Obama after I had questioned him for almost an hour about his irrigation system. He asked what I thought of Obama. I responded that I think he's doing pretty well, but it's still too soon to judge a lot of things. He seemed pleased, so I asked him what he thought of Obama. He responded with only one word: "good". After a couple minutes of silence, he said, "blackest president?" I said yes, he is the blackest president of the US. He responded with a strong head bobble and a smile. On the last day of the trip, one of our drivers approached me seriously, and asked "do you think that american wrestling is real? I correctly guessed that he was talking about the WWF, and told him that I didn't think it was real. He asked "really?" I said, "no, in fact I know that it is not real." He looked a little disappointing as he walked away.

I won't bore you all with the details of my meetings with Water Users Associations on the trip, but I will say that I found the process very interesting. Because my uncle and I are white, and we drove up in nice cars, and probably a host of other reasons, the first thing that they always did was ask us for money to fund some project. IWMI doesn't fund projects in the same way that many NGOs do, so we don't actually go and drill wells, or hand out a chunk of cash to fix a canal. Rather, we would study the feasibility of developing groundwater resources or help the irrigation department decide how to manage water in canals better. The next thing that was really apparent was that the irrigation department had spoken to all of the Farmers Organizations before we got there to make sure that we got the point that they needed more money to renovate some canals that led into the former conflict zone. This got more and more irritating when each farmer stood up and told us they needed the same thing, and when we asked what else, they said the same thing again. it would be really interesting to go to this type of meeting without the irrigation department there, translating everything that the farmers said for us.

If this is interesting for you, shoot me an email and I'll tell you more about these meetings. If not, no worries.

The other really interesting thing from the trip that I'll comment on was the experience of going into an area where there had been a war going on two years earlier. All of the police and army outposts (there were a lot) were enclosed in several lines of stacked razor wire and then dug in. Bombed out buildings were pretty apparent in villages in the area, and concrete structures bore the marks of gunfire. The people who were re-settling this area really have nothing, as most of them were forced to leave everything behind when the war displaced them. They are getting a lot of funding help from NGOs, but that help seems to me to be not very well directed. We noticed that there were a number of cheap things that NGOs could have done to improve water access enough that farmers could grow vegetables with slightly more security and make a slightly better living. As it is, most of the people there work as migrant labor on fishing boats or on others farms. I've been in a bunch of situations where I've thought about my privileged position compared to a lot of people in the world, but nothing really prepared me for getting a glimpse of people really living on the edge. A lot of these people were just doing what they had to do to survive, and that's it. It made me appreciate the work of IWMI a lot more.

On the last day of our trip, we traveled to a university in the east to give a talk about water and try to get involved with some of their students. The hightlight of this was that I was introduced as "Doctor Lukey Sanford." We talked about IWMI, Tuashaar gave a fantastic speech about the questions that he had after looking at the Gal Oya system, and the Irrigation professors spent about an hour trying to answer his question. We were served the traditional Indian Chai and sweet bread that we were served everywhere we went. Immediately after this, we began a 12-hour drive down the coast to the yoga retreat that we had planned for the weekend. At about 8 pm after 10 hours of driving I remembered that it was thanksgiving day, and Uncle Dave and I had some cashews to celebrate. It's impossible to get the feeling of thanksgiving or christmas here with perpetual 85+ degree weather and palm trees and the beach.

The yoga retreat was actually something that I had agreed to as one of the conditions of coming to SL and staying with my aunt and uncle. Before coming, Karen said that she would be taking me to the retreat, and I sort of had to agree before coming. I'm sure it wasn't actually a condition, but Aunt Karen can be a little intimidating sometimes. Anyway, on thanksgiving day I found myself driving to a yoga retreat which would involve 6+ hours of yoga every day. I was more prepared for this than most of you are probably guessing right now. I've been doing yoga almost every morning with Karen, and the week before my trip to the east I attended a 2.5 hour long class with Paddy (the instructor who I sent a video of last time). Oddly, she seemed to like me, complemented me on a somewhat regular basis in front of the class, and even used me as a demonstration once or twice. Uncle Dave and I developed a theory about this. Paddy's best students almost only get yelled at for not doing things right, but her not-very-good-but-try-really-hard students like Uncle Dave and I get lots of encouragement. Anyway, the encouragement helped to offset the slight feeling of dread I experienced driving up to the yoga retreat.

At the hotel we met Karen, Nicholas Roost (my swiss/australian mate), and Samyuktha. Nicolas is an Osteopath who is in his fifth year of medical training in australia who used to work for IWMI. Uncle Dave says "he's my biggest failure. He finished his post-doc with me and then left the water field forever." Really, Nicolas discovered that he was more passionate about medicine than he was about hydrological modeling. I'm sure a good number of you are skeptics of Osteopathy (I was a little bit), but after talking with Nicolas (and getting a treatment from him) I'm convinced that its an effective way to treat certain things. Not best for everything, but neither is any form of medicine. Anyway, he turned out to be a great guy who I'm sure I'll keep in touch with.

The yoga retreat begins every morning with a bell wakeup call around 5:15 each morning. You get up, and go meditate until around 6. Then, you do pranyama breathing for about an hour (not my favorite, but interesting to try and probably good for increasing my concentration). We would then switch to a 2.5 hour session of backbends, headstands, warrior poses, trying to twist myself into a pretzel, etc. About 45 minutes before the end of the session, the hotel guy would bring out food and set it on the table in the same room that we were practicing yoga. It was all I could do each day not to run over and grab a rotti in-between poses. When it was dinner time, nicolas sam and I would grab food and go sit up on the rocks behind the hotel and watch the waves roll in and crash on the rocky shoreline there. A very yogic way to gorge myself.

We then had time off until the afternoon session beginning at 4:00. I spent the time off swimming in the ocean, bodysurfing, playing frisbee with Nicolas, and playing beach paddleball with Sam (she might be better than me at this, much to my surprise after her stream of "I have no hand-eye coordination" comments). Each day I found that I was pretty exhausted when it came time for another 2+ hour long session of yoga. The first night, Sam Dave and I had planned to escape for a little bit of "toxin replenishment therapy" (read, beer). Last retreat Dave got in a bit of trouble for ordering a beer and getting caught, so we decided to be a little sneaky about it. Much to our surprise, Aunt Karen endorsed the concept and even had a bit of beer herself. wow.

After 3 days of this schedule, my body was slightly more accustomed to the torture that I was putting it through, and my backbends, handstands, shoulderstands, forward bends, and just about everything about my my body felt better. My knee really gained some good flexibility that I'm trying to keep with daily yoga practice since the retreat. I ended up having a fantastic time and getting a lot closer to Nicolas and Samyuktha.

I've already probably gone on too long, but I'll share a couple more short stories that I find pretty amusing with you.

Every morning one of the sounds I wake up to is a trishaw carrying "bunnes" which are sweet buns that parents buy for their kids on the way to school. The bunnes carts all have a tune that they play (like the icecream truck). Everyone who lives near Colombo can hum it for you. A few mornings ago I heard a bunnes cart playing a song that wasn't the normal one. The sound activated deeply suppressed memories of disneyland, and perhaps the most boring ride in the whole world: it's a small world. The bunnes cart was for some reason playing the "it's a small world after all" song. Uncle Dave's comment was: "walt disney is taking over the world." he might be right.

The last one is another completely random thing that I did at IWMI. The daycare kids were having a christmas party, and for some reason the guy who they had lined up to be Santa Claus couldn't do it. So, as usual, someone walked up to my desk with a problem that I alone could fix. They wanted me to play santa claus. I hadn't done it before, I'm to skinny, too young, and too tall for the costume. They didn't care, so I agreed. I'll head off the question that all of you are asking in your minds right now at the pass. Yes, there are pictures, being uploaded to my flash drive right now. I might even attach one to this email if I get them before I send it. I put on my santa outfit, grabbed the staff that they made me (who knew? santa carries a staff? I told them I'd never heard of this bit of santa iconography before, but they insisted) and my bag full of presents that the parents of the kids had wrapped for me to deliver, and walked down to the daycare. Oh, and I had a big pillow stuffed down my shirt. It might have been sticking out a little at the bottom. Pictures will tell. Most of the kids were enthralled, a few were terrified (I would have been, I'm sure), and a few were really giggly. I handed them their presents in between "Ho Ho Ho's" and "Merry Christmas's". All of the kids came and sat on my lap for photos. They handed me a plate of sri lankan santa food (a wadde, a rotti, and a piece of cake), and I jetted out of there. "Back to the north pole, there's lots of work to get done before christmas!" I was later informed that I left my santa staff in the daycare, and several of the kids were very distressed by this. "How will santa ever get his staff back??" I'm sure their parents were able to placate them.

I'm back in the US on December 16th, so give me a call if you want to hang out. As always, write me an email. I love reading your stories. Happy Holidays.

Luke