Sri Lanka Farewell

Here I am after two weeks in Sri Lanka. Two weeks seems like a lifetime ago, and at the sametime, it passed so quickly.

Our last day in the field conjured up some mixed feelings. It was very rewarding to see the results of all of our hard work and I felt priviledged to have the chance to contribute. At the same time, it is unlikely we will have the same group of people all together at once in the same place. Furthermore, I am not sure when I will be back to Sri Lanka to see the fruits of our labour (although hopefully it will be sooner than later!!!). Hopefully we will get updates from Kumara and the future Zurich fellows on how our site is doing.

After we cleaned up the site we all headed back to the guest house for some lunch. After lunch, half the team said their goodbye's. Mark and Paul had to head back to Colombo to catch their return flights to the UK. Kumara, Upul and Dr. Jayatissa also had to get home as well.

The rest of the team got cleaned up and headed out for dinner to celebrate a great trip and Louise's birthday at a nice restaurant up the street. Apart from the visit from the local inebriated expat it was a great time.

The final day saw us up early to collect propagules for the Rainforest Rescue International (RRI) nursary. We were on the
road by 9 and headed to one of the villages that RRI were helping to establish a nursary for. The goals of this nursary project was to empower the citizens to grow their own plants for a variety of purposes. Various shrubs, flowers, trees and other groundcover were planted to help prevent soil erosion during the heavy rains. Another objective of the nursary project was to grow plants to harvest for food and other purposes (ie. bamboo and teak). The last component to the project was to beautify the community and provide an aesthetic effect. The community members that we met took a lot of pride in their gardens, and for good reason. They worked very hard to gather the water each day from the well to water the plants since the government has not hooked up the power as yet.

As Alice mentioned in her posting, life in this village were not without some very significant challenges. Firstly, the village took in Sri Lankans from all walks of life who were homeless or displaced after he Tsunami and put them together in the same area. Naturally, there were disagreements, general cultural clashes and issues of jealousy. Add to this, the fact that the government has still not activated the power or water three months after the first residents moved in and you can imagine how life could be somewhat frustrating. All things considered though, I got the feeling that the residents, although extremely frustrated about the power and water situation are thankful for the support and assistance they have received. There are numerous other communities like this around the country that are a direct result of the outpouring of support of people around the world in the weeks and months after the December 2004 Tsunami and the coordination of this support by a plethora of non-governmental organizations.

After visiting this village, we went to see Dr. Jayatissa and some of his colleagues at Ruhuna University. The Ruhuna campus had a distinct university feel and was beautiful in it's architectural design. The Ruhuna campus was designed by famous Sri Lankan architect, Geoffrey Bawa. I was fortunate to see a couple other designs of his as well. On Thursday evening we joined Benjamin, his wife Vincenne and daughter, Adelaide, for dinner at a hotel and restaurant called THe Lighthouse in Galle. This site was also designed by Bawa and was impecably integrated into the surrounding landscape, or should I say the landscape was integrated into the views from the hotel. I was also fortunate to see his former office which is now a gallery and restaurant in Colombo.

Once I have a chance to reflect on my time in Sri Lanka and am over my jet lag I will enter another posting.

In the interim I would like to thank all members of our team. I enjoyed meeting and working with all of you and will be sure to stay in touch.

Cheers
Chris