ZZZZT!

For a country that outlaws homosexuality, the guys here have eerily good taste in jewelry.

Saturday was my last day at the centre. After 6 weeks with my coworkers, I felt it was appropriate to come up with gifts, and so I spent a week drawing portraits of all the staff. Some came out better than others, but people seemed to like them. I hadn't expected the staff to come up with gifts for me, so I was floored when B. handed me what turned out to be a beautiful and funky necklace that I'll actually consider wearing. Meg got one too. They're small gifts, nothing too fancy, but he nailed my taste. I was amazed.

Many other staff members gave us small jewelry items as well. I think it's a hint. Meg and I don't wear much jewelry normally, and I didn't bring any beyond what I was wearing, so I was looking fairly unadorned for most of my stint in Hambantota.

M1 showed up to work to say that the children weren't coming because there was some large tsunami-related event going on that day. So nice of them to tell us. All the staff had already shown up to teach. It was ok though, because that meant we got to hang out with the staff more. The van to Weligama was supposed to arrive around noon, and then we would head to the Youth Environmental Foundation.

The van arrived. I won't get into the good byes, but they were rough. I'll really miss the folks at the centre.

Anyway, so the van showed up. I managed to drag myself into the office to meet my new group of coworkers, and ohmygod they're tall. I'm not even close to the tallest one anymore. I think that may have even been the first thing out of my mouth. Three guys, all about 5'10" or 6'. Good lord. They towered over all of us.

The guys were really nice. Their english was quite good, and they were very sympathetic to the fact that we weren't at our best. We piled into the van, swung by Thushari's house to grab her, the kids, and the grandmother, and set off. Thushari and the rest of the family were going to Matara for a school competition. Matara is right next to Mirissa, so they hitched a ride with us.

This brought the van population to 9 plus our luggage. I was crammed into the very back seat with Dinesh and a few bags. Dinesh is a college student and staff member at YEF, and his english is incredible. He's practically fluent. We spent a lot of time talking about YEF, my stay in Sri Lanka, and the States. Dinesh was (and continues to be) extremely curious about developed countries in general. He wanted pictures of everything (like nuclear power plants) and was dying to know how Americans were different from Sri Lankans.

About 45 minutes into the trip, we pulled over and stopped at a very odd stretch of land along the coast. The dirt was bright red, and almost no plants grew, save for some very small grass. Dinesh told me that this was a very famous beach because an asteroid struck. Hence the lack of plants and red soil. The beach itself was absolutely gorgeous. It was like something right out of a tour guide. I joked to Dinesh that all of my friends would be morbidly jealous, and it seems that this was the right thing to say. He is now obsessed with taking us places for the express purpose of luring all my friends to Sri Lanka. I tried to explain that you're all completely envious anyway, but my words fell on deaf ears.

The rest of the van ride was not particularly noteworthy. We dropped Thushari and the gang off in Matara and continued to Weligama and the office.

At this point, it was probably about 7pm or so, but it felt much later. The day had been exhausting. And when I walked in to meet the staff for the first time and saw no females, things got that much worse.

This requires background information. In the States, I am quite comfortable being a leader. People seem to fear me for some reason. They follow me. I am happy with that. But here, I don't speak the language, I'm female, and I'm foreign. I've gone from "tyrant" to "little sister." Hmph.

The staff were all quite nice. They're a really great group of young guys who put their heart and soul into the YEF. And they're very organized. It's actually wonderful. A consultant's dream come true. We met them, and then we went to our dwelling.

We are staying in a guest house, fairly close to the beach. It's like a tropical paradise. Palm trees are everywhere, as well as exotic flowers and animals (we found a scorpion yesterday). We have a room with a bed and a living area. The guest house overlooks a vegetable garden, and it's quiet and secluded. This is the off season, because of the monsoons, so we're the only ones staying here.

This is a huge change from Hambantota. Hambantota is in the dry zone, so there is very little rain and it's quite hot. It's also full of bugs. Mirissa is in the semi-monsoon zone, or something like that, so the temperature is much more reasonable, there's a lot of green, and there are very few mosquitos. We don't wear repellant here, and we don't sleep under mosquito netting. I love it.

That was all of Saturday. We crashed pretty hard, and then Sunday came.

We slept late Sunday morning, and we were still eating breakfast when Dinesh and Thusitha showed up to talk to us about the projects we would be doing. We hashed out a scope of work, and then they showed us the beach.

Mirissa is famous for its beaches, and with good reason. They're picturesque, very close, very clean, and very safe. The surf is calm and it stays shallow for a long time. I can tell we'll be spending a lot of time here. We went swimming later, and it was great. The water was warm, and it's one of the most pleasant beaches I've ever seen.

The really nice thing about staying in a tourist town is that the locals are fairly used to seeing white people. It's just not that uncommon. So although we still get honks and waves, it's not nearly as bad as it was in Hambantota. On the other hand, people here have learned that tourists will give out "bon-bons" if they ask, so we get requests from the kids.

Monday was a holiday, so we didn't go into the office. A good thing too. Meg got sick again, most likely because of the food. Fortunately, it wasn't serious and she was better later that day.

While Meg was curled up in bed, Dinesh and Harshana, the IT guy, showed up to talk about the web page. This was a bit frustrating. Harshana goes to college in Colombo, so he's only around on weekends, which is when we have our days off. But he really wants to work with us, both to practice his english and to learn from us. So our weekends are now Friday and Saturday.

Tuesday was our first actual day in the office. We arrived around 9 and immediately Dinesh set us up with a bunch of informational videos about YEF. It was a big help. YEF is basically a very organized network of volunteers who take on really ambitious projects, such as building relief housing for tsunami victims. And there's no website because we haven't developed it yet. But once it's done, we'll let you know.

The thing that really stands out about this staff is that they're super organized and really eager to help us get things done. I love it. I think this will go really well.

As previously mentioned, the staff is very intent on learning english. Although about half the staff can speak quite well, almost fluently, they're all dying to learn more, to the point where they want formal english lessons from us. We started out today with "favorites" and then moved on to slang, idioms, and finally epithets. What started out as a simple lesson in color ended with the staff members all cursing at each other in english and laughing until their sides ached. Dinesh told me later that it was the most fun he'd ever had at work.

Manoj, the executive director, was also hanging around for this. I was concerned about introducing this sort of material into any class (it was all Meg's idea), and when Manoj walked in, I figured I'd be on the next plane back to the States. But when he realized what we were doing, he sat down. Then he asked for a notebook. In fact, all of the staff were taking copious notes.

The last couple nights, the CRC people have been calling us. They want to know how we're doing, and they want to make sure we're ok. As far as I can tell, everyone in Sri Lanka is quite confident in their ability to host foreigners, but they don't trust anyone else to do it right. So there are many questions about how the food is, how the room is, if we're doing alright... it's really sweet.

And now for something completely different. Power has been a recurring issue for us all through this trip. For starters, Sri Lanka uses 2 different kinds of plugs. I'm not sure why; maybe there's an amperage difference or something. But it means we're always scrounging for connectors. And there just isn't the same amount of electronic support. There's usually 1 outlet per room. Only 1 socket. This put a strain on our laptops.

We bought what seemed to be a really nifty power strip. It can take any plug format, and each socket is individually switched. Then one day I plugged in my laptop. There was a spark, and the socket went dead. We pulled the strip apart to find some of the worst craftsmanship and soldering I've seen in a long time. We managed to fix the thing, but it wasn't pretty.

A few days later, Meg's laptop power supply died. There are 2 parts: the brick and the cable, and she wasn't sure which one was faulty. She decided to test by plugging in the cable and...can you guess? Because it was pretty dumb. She stuck a pair of scissors into the bare plug. She wanted to see if it sparked. Well it did. It also fused the scissors to the cable and tripped the circuit breaker on the room.

And then last night, there was a spark, and Meg found a break in the wire. So she cut off the offending cable and spliced the rest back. This seemed to work, until I got woken up very early this morning to hear Meg tell me that she'd just electrocuted herself on my laptop, and we had no power. ARRRGGHH!

The lack of power was the more worrying issue at that point. No power means no fans. We can't open the windows at night because the bugs will fly in, so we rely quite heavily on the fans to keep the room livable. Within minutes, it was stifling and miserably humid. And all the bugs came back anyway.

I tried to sleep, and Meg was wreaking general havoc trying to get the power back. The breakers were all fine, and so there wasn't much she could do. She contented herself with shining her LED flashlight in my eyes.

The power returned after some good while. Meg electrocuted herself again, and then it was shown that by wiggling the power strip, we can flicker the power in the room. I have some not-so-nice words for any ECE folk who didn't teach her enough to make this work. I am grumpy this morning. I am also not going within 10 feet of her power strip. There are enough outlets in the room that I don't need to.

We're going back to Hambantota this weekend. Partially, we want to hand over a database, but also we just want to see friends. I hear that W. has been asking after us a lot, and he wants to know why we haven't called the centre yet. So we'll do that today.