Wrapping Up with an Old Journal Entry

"But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place."

- James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

It’s fitting that on my last full night in Sri Lanka, I should have been befriended by a religiously mystic lawyer in the spice aisle of a grocery store.

He stopped me with the simple observation “You look like you’ve traveled to India.” And then “Have you seen the Himalayas?” I’m still unsure if the first was a compliment, considering I was quite smelly and dirty while traveling in India, and have no idea how he picked up on it. We commenced talking about the Himalayan foothills in Darjeeling, American corporatocracy, international relations, and how, exactly, I ended up looking for spices in a Cargills at 8pm in Nugegoda. “You’re special,” he said, clearly holding nothing back. “You were Sri Lankan in your last life, I can see it. That’s why I had to stop and talk to you.” Well…gosh. Thanks, mister.

Really, my whole summer has been characterized by serendipitously landing upon many such absurdities, both emboldening and embarrassing, good and bad, and my task has been to accept and take in stride the seemingly dialectically-opposed nature of…pretty much everything. As a good example, the lawyer was as conversant in the details of the South Asian Agreement on Regional Cooperation (SAARC) as he was about the finer aspects of forgiveness, the nature of prayer and divine blessings, and the process of seeking our purpose in life. I feel, rather simplistically, perhaps, that our drive-to-specialize in America gives us the impression that extra-disciplinary pursuits such as these are frivolous, and that to succeed, we must devote our entire selves to one pursuit. Most lawyers I know wouldn’t really care to make pilgrimages to the holy sites of a religion that is not their native one, in a land that is far away, for example. This man had just returned from one such trip, and it was clear to me that such people can teach me a lot about which values are worth maintaining and which are less important. Bridging the gap between the metaphysics of a mystic religion (in this guy’s case, some combination of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as far as I could gather) and the nuts-and-bolts requirements of a career in law is a task this man seems to have a good grasp on. I can do without the chaotic divinity, I think, but I would nonetheless love to continue learning to recognize and step around, if necessary, the dialectic divisions my culture and upbringing have instilled in me.

So, what have I learned here? I’ve had innumerable realizations and epiphanies and have only begun to recount them in this blog. I’ve also felt up a great number of feelings, emotions, and sensations I’ve never felt before, which is important and startling for someone who spends so much of his time thinking in words and certainties.

Not all of my experiences have been good, and I’ll certainly need a couple weeks to decompress before I can, out of good faith, write anything about the bad aspects of my time here, if I even feel it’s necessary to do so. What I do know, however, is that I’ve not learned nearly enough. Every day, every train ride, every alleyway explored – each had something to offer me, and this summer has been overflowingly-ripe with opportunities for me to learn what I have to offer in return. It’s a strange, scary, fantastic process of growing up (!) that I’ve touched on here, and I’ve done my best to keep growing as positively as I could, in response to the great, the good, the bad, and the ugly. In fact, I believe that the moment we cease feeling we are students of the world is the moment we cease to be forces of good, and that it is by (intelligently) drinking fully of what the world has to offer that we become useful to our fellow humanity.

Some might argue that you needn’t travel 9,000 miles away to be useful to the world, but I really can’t speak highly enough about the benefits of traveling the way I’ve been so fortunate to travel. The “world” I lived in before this trip is no longer there, and that’s a good thing. When I return to Bloomsburg, PA; Boone, NC; and all the rest of America-the-beautiful, they will not be the same ones I left, and not merely due to the passage of time in the interim. They will be different because my perception of them in the global sense will be so radically changed that they will, I’m sure, be differently-colored over the next few weeks and hopefully longer. And they will also be different because I am a part of them, and I’m different from what I was when I left. My role in the world is far-from-settled, but my overarching aim is to become an agent of good in America. I am my country and my country is me. (How’s that for pulling together the disparate ends of the dialectic, huh?!) It will be good to be home, I know, but it will also be strange and may be uncomfortable in some ways. Don’t be surprised if you cross paths with me and I seem…out of it. And don’t be surprised if you see me do the Sri Lankan head-wobble, which seems to be a non-linguistic way of saying “Yeah, sure. Everything is fine. We agree with one another!”, as I may have picked up the habit of trying to be agreeable to others.

On my last day, I spent my time with my boss and his family and dozens of their friends as they celebrated the twelfth birthday of their daughter. This was a wonderful way to be sent off, and I was reminded that no matter the occasion, a bold combination of food, fun, and friends is the surest way to make it an auspicious one. The joy of the group was palpable, and since the birthday was seen, halfway seriously, as the “most important day of the year!”, it was a wonderful opportunity to once again be reminded that happiness in life is compounded (with interest) by sharing it with family and close friends.

I’ve also come to realize with greater clarity that the past six or seven years of my life have been characterized by what I can only think of as a myopic view at what is wrong with modern humanity, and my work has been towards understanding how we can remedy our myriad ills. What I’ve almost-completely failed to do is to really take stock of the powerful beauty and wonderful trends that still exist and are still maintaining their sovereignty despite being assaulted by the negative forces of the world. As I sat tonight on my veranda, for the last time, I watched the wind whip the giant banana leaves into ribbons and felt a sense of moment-ness that I’ve graced only a few times this summer. I was reminded that despite the violence that characterizes the modern world system, much good still happens. Those ribbon-leaves will still photosynthesize tomorrow! My work is cut out for me: sucking the marrow out of life, as it stands, requires a much greater approach than what I’ve known thus far. It’s time for me to not fall into the same old patterns, and to start living a life of joy, happiness, and wisdom. My journey has taken me 9,000 miles from home for three months, and it has given me the courage to do this. And now I’m coming home!

Things I've Learned in India, in no particular order.

I've not learned so much in so short a time as I have this past week. Even thinking back to my one-week-ago self makes me feel like a stranger. I’m now happy to report that India still offers a chance at having a journey in the sense I've always yearned for; at any given moment while here, I had no idea what to expect. Even now, sitting in the Kolkata airport, exhausted and admittedly a little fogged from last night's good times, I’m halfway-unsure that I’ll be able to make it back to Colombo. The feeling of authentic life, or life without all the usual safeguards, has not yet been lost in this country, as I feel it has in most places I've lived and visited, and it’s a baffling delight to experience it.

Such is life in India. It’s abundantly clear that the dominant values here have nothing to do with what we in the West call “reason”, “logic”, or “sense”, and I've only learned to cope with this difference to a tiny extent. I’ve learned that this country is a cultural behemoth that is struggling fiercely to reconcile its values and history with a path of development that seems to always be just-out-of-reach. And I’ve learned that the fact that people here sometimes do things for absolutely no reason, like honking the horn of their car, and that while excessive noise is annoying, there is a wild freedom in their making it.

I've learned that it’s never quite worth it, under an analysis-of-risk and a desire-to-be-wearing-clean-underwear, to offer your tuk tuk driver an extra ten rupees to get you to your destination double-time. You will also have a cleaner conscience in general if you avoid being the unintentional cause of minor traffic accidents.

I’ve learned that travel and exploration are unquestionably more enjoyable and fruitful when you have company. And I’ve learned that it’s easier to make friends when you recognize both your own frailty and your strengths, and reach out in companionship to others who walk your path, even if only for a moment. I’ve learned that such friendships, as potentially brief as they may be, offer a quick view into that which makes life worth living.

Never before has my own social nature been so clear to me as now, flying solo in a doubly-foreign land. I’ve learned that most people are quite happy to join hands with strangers who are also trying to understand the world in order that they might do some good in it. And I now know that I really, really need to learn, for my own self-respect, a few more languages.

I’ve learned, or rather, emphatically re-learned, that it will never be possible, without the complete unraveling of the native cultures, to overlay the official idea of development onto this land. And I’ve learned that the countless attempts to do so are rather evil, despite their potentially good intentions, in their subversive ethnocentrism. I’ve seen the enormous potential for autochthonous, inside-out development here, and it pains me that this potential is largely neglected in favor of highways, dams, English literacy courses, and new markets for Coca-Cola and GlaxoSmithKline.

I am also delighted to have visited one medical clinic of the Institute for the Indian Mother and Child (IIMC), for there I saw a model of development I can truly cheer for. It gave me hope to see that the ideas of basic health, community empowerment (especially for women), self-sufficiency, and quality human-to-human interactions have not been completely lost in the ratrace flurry of Development (capital “D” intentional). It’s very easy to become disheartened when neither government nor non-governmental organizations seem to be doing the right things, and when the most you can hope for towards poverty alleviation, social justice, and environmental sanity are a few conferences and some full-gloss promotional pamphlets.

I’ve learned that there is such a thing as Ratatat withdrawal, only curable, of course, by a timely mixture of coffee and “Loud Pipes”. (Disregard the funny looks as you jam out. They would understand if they had had that one Indian pop song stuck in their heads for five days.)

I’ve learned that there is an enormous amount of energy in the resistance to the step-by-step, sequential, Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On attitude I and the rest of my culture seem to have evolved and internalized. There is a quiet sort of anarchism here, and it’s slippery as pickles and always will be. The harder the officials push to have everyone in their Rightful Places with Plenty of Work, the harder people will skip work, sleep wherever the hell they want to, buy and sell illegal things, and ignore the “Obey Traffic Laws” signs. I admire this, and hope my country can take a cue or two from India as it rises in power and precedence. “There are no rules to this thing,” said one wise man. Indeed.

I’ve learned that we in the West are caught in a sort of metaphysical crisis, which has been written about and analyzed in countless contexts and through various lenses. Unfortunately, more analyticity and cleverness will not solve the problems of analytically-induced despair and the boredom caused by being too clever all the time. I stop short of saying the East has all the answers, because they’re caught up in plenty of contradictions and crises of their own. But I will say that I’ve learned that it’s easier to take a breath and take it easy when you’re not shoestrung into cooperating with someone else’s view of what you ought to be doing, and the people of South Asia seem to understand that better than Americans. It’s hard to say what The Answers are, but I do believe that there needs to be a real reconciling between these two world-views, rather than the petty liberal “acceptance of others” we’ve been spoon-fed our whole lives. I’ve come to see “acceptance” as merely another excuse for keeping The Other at arm’s length, and I believe humanity must really begin to rectify the collective skeletons in its closets with the kind of lifeways that will be conducive to the continued survival of our species on this planet. It’s going to be difficult, and it will require a new sort of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship we’ve not yet seen. But I’m more hopeful now than in previous weeks that good people the world over will be able to choke up and do what needs to be done. I’ve seen enough wild beauty and committed people this summer to know that a livable, beautiful, crazily diverse future is possible. And that journey is worth taking.

On Bangladesh and Contentment

I’ve recently returned to Sri Lanka from a nine-day trip to Bangladesh where I observed a dizzying array of conferences and workshops. I’ll probably end up reporting on their content as part of my internship duties, so I won’t go over those details too much here. In a nutshell: The conferences were a mixture of positive and negative elements. Some were quite inspiring and productive, others less so. They were also not the predominant reason I traveled to Bangladesh.

I now find myself in a difficult spot: to recount the details of my nine days in Bangladesh would be difficult enough had two days of sickness and fever between now and then not obscured the crispness of my memories. In many ways, the trip was a path-determining experience, one that will undoubtedly shape my approach to life from now on. I have two regrets: first, that I contracted some sickness there, manifesting itself upon my return to Colombo, and second, that I didn’t make the time to travel to the slum village across the river from my inn.

If you are not expecting them, the crowdedness and overall debility of Dhaka may blindside you when you arrive. You will see urban poverty in so many dehumanizing ways, and it will unease you. You will see wrinkle-faced women shoved away from your group by gruff security guards because they were begging from you too aggressively, and you will be relieved to see them go, despite your conscience’s outcries. You will see diseased dogs nipping at equally-diseased centipedes amidst piles of discarded plastic and Styrofoam on the shores of a grey river. You will smell piss and shit at every depression in the sidewalk and you will wonder why the hell no one has taken care of any of these things. Then, you may be ushered to your air-conditioned room on the third floor of your inn (high enough above the level of the streets that you can avoid looking at them), where you can take refuge in cookies, tea, and at least eight minutes of hot shower.

If, however, you know that there are always too-many layers to every story for them to be fully told, you’ll try to take some steps towards unpacking a city like Dhaka. The culturally-shocking scenes will not so quickly distract you from what you would otherwise immediately begin to see: human life, living with dignity however it can, despite hardship and suffering, deliberate neglect and disregard. You will see the corruption of government in its manipulation of LDC status to line the pockets of a tiny elite. You will know that the local mafia somehow has a stranglehold on the lives of almost-every beggar you come across, and that if you give the beggar a taka, it will go straight to a criminal. You will notice that the simplest infrastructural upgrades could easily be handled with at-hand resources and the abundant labor, and you will see that there must be powers working against having usable sidewalks and public sanitation. And later on, outside the city, you will see hectares upon hectares of rice paddies, vegetable farms, and coconut plantations, and you will know that in a land with so much productivity, no one should be going hungry.

Something is wrong here.

To you, my reader, I will admit that I vacillated between the extremes of an exhausted, culture-shocked tourist who too refuge in coffee and hot water, and a critical observer who hopes to see an end of the misery of places like Bangladesh. So much of what I’d been shown and told about Bangladesh has been the story of disaster, poverty, and source-less deprivation. What is not shown in media, particularly in the US, is the story of the peoples’ resilience in the face of disaster and deprivation, as well as the real sources of these disasters and depravities: a climate spun into chaos by uncontrolled (Northern) greenhouse gas emissions as well as the double-punch follow-through of a malfunctioning development mechanism and a corrupt local governing elite. Ordinary Bangladeshis are, from what I could tell, tired of being labeled “Least-Developed”: in their view, as long as that label sticks, their state will not improve. Ordinary Bangladeshis are also, from what I saw, some of the most hospitable people I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. You don’t see on CNN just how brilliant their smiles can be.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that I come from one of the most-contradictory cultures on the planet, the number of contrasts Bangladesh takes in stride is startling. Ultra-rich/ultra-poor. Urban “investment”/rural neglect. One of the highest concentrations of development organizations on the planet/LDC status. Tri-axle dump-trucks FULL of fruit barreling down the roads/inadequate calorie and nutrient intake in the hinterlands. What all of it seems to boil down to is an obscene maldistribution of wealth. But even more than wealth, per se, it is the (deliberate?) denial of necessities to those at the bottom of the hierarchy of capital. It is the domination of the poor and powerless by local and international elites, local and multinational industries and corporations, and an international development project that counterintuively benefits from never-quite-alleviating poverty.

What’s upsetting to a self-critical Western psyche like my own is that my complicity in such a system has heretofore implicated me as an accessory to these crimes. Investigations into Bangladeshi sweatshops for ready-made garments put a spotlight on the West’s guilty, greedy consumption habits a few years ago, and there the story seemed to end. We’ve not yet matured, it would seem, to being able to question the validity of the economic system wherein setting up sweatshops in Bangladesh to produce items for sale in the US makes fiscal sense. How much misery must be stitched into our clothes for us to demand a different way? Must we feel such misery ourselves?

My trip to Bangladesh was too short. I intent to rant about NGOs and their conferences a little while later, but I can excuse myself for a moment by saying that such conferences had my hands thoroughly tied for most of my ten days in that beautiful country. I was present enough to see, however, that there is something thoroughly offensive about building elevated highways above slums instead of building meaningful livelihoods for those who live in them.

I would like to end this short, disjointed post on a more moderate note. Most people I saw in Dhaka, Chittagong, and in-between were healthy-looking. They were also remarkably easygoing.

There was a quiet sort of friendliness that exposed itself as joy in the muddy, roadside game of football, in the explosion of laughter at some internal joke from the crowd of brilliantly-saree’d women returning to their bamboo-stilted village, and in the basic generosity of those few-dozen shopkeepers who saw the rain-drenched foreigners trying to keep themselves dry in a monsoon and offered plastic bags or the shelter of their awnings. Misery and contentment are surely at odds with one another. Now, I see just how important it is for us to seriously examine the systems that produce misery and rob people of happiness all over the world. This is the most important task my generation faces.

The Traveler's Dilemma

Last night I ventured into an Indian restaurant with the intention of learning to eat something new. I stumbled through the menu, looking for a word I could pronounce, having not the slightest clue what any of the items consisted of. Squeezed between the grimy doorframe and the huge right shoulder of a man who must have been a sort of bouncer, being blasted by a startling array of scents and Indian music, and trying to simultaneously plan my next move, I found it difficult to focus on the dog-eared bi-fold menu in my hands. "Dosa" was what I landed on. For Rs. 140 (about $1.25), and given that I couldn't go wrong in speaking those four letters, I took the leap. What I learned: Dosa is a simple masala with a beautiful array of tastes, some subtle and others, well, not-so-subtle (read: this is the first time in my life I’ve had heartburn). I further learned that it’s probably impossible for a first-timer (in an authentic setting like that) to eat the food correctly. [Remember, most South Asian cultures eat with their right hand (and only their right hand), and masalas have so many…crumbly or liquid ingredients.] The last thing I learned is that even if you look like a child and end up destroying your food before it gets to your mouth, most locals will appreciate that you’re trying, laugh at your strangeness, and will, in the end, send you off with a gracious smile.
I would never have thought to write about so humble of an experience if my next pit-stop hadn’t happened: I walked about a block to the least-authentic place in Colombo, in cultural terms, a place called Odel’s. I’ve mentioned it in past posts because it has served as a bastion of normalcy for me on a couple of occasions: shopping mall, Euro-American setting, air conditioning, decent coffee (!). But my time there last night was different. In order to boost their WIFI for a little while, I needed to purchase a coffee at the lofty price of about $2.25 (that money would otherwise buy me two full rice packs here), and standing in line in front of me was a middle-aged man I later learned was from northern Europe. Odel’s is the only place in Sri Lanka I’ve found that charges “tax” (it must be some kind of racket), so prices inevitably end up falling on strange amounts. It’s the only place I’ve ever received half a rupee in change, for example, (which turns out to be this adorable little plastic-sounding Monopoly-money piece), and the European man needed Rs. 5 to avoid having to carry around a bunch of change. I freely offered the nickel, with a smile, and in short order was invited to drink my B- coffee with him and his partner, a female European who seemed to be a few years older than he. I found that they were expatriates to varying degrees, she retired and he still working through phased-retirement for the Red Cross. They live together here in Colombo, and I thought it would be interesting to get a feel for their situations as foreigners who have lived here for four+ years.
But my talk with them was predicated upon some important events of the past weekend, so my mindset bears explanation. It’s been long enough between my posts (sorry, dear readers) that I can’t possibly recount all the details of what’s happened between now and the last, but in short: I traveled to Kandy (it gets an A+ in my book) two weekends ago and Anuradhapura (too flat for my tastes, though still fantastic) this past weekend. The week in-between was a whirlwind of excitement-and-craziness that I will have to write about another time, because what interests me now is a group of four young European women I met in Anuradhapura. I had met three of them two weeks before, in Unawatuna, and serendipitously (and almost creepily, overall) ran into them again on Sunday. In general, they seem like fun, well-meaning people, two of them in particular. The two I related to the most were only-a-little-bit-afraid to stand in the doorway of a CTB train as it barreled along at 65 kmph, laughing with the other standing-people and soaking in the beautiful paddy-fields and plantations as they whizzed past. The other two were all-too-content to be securely seated in second-class. All four, however, set my mind rolling as to the situation I find myself in: like most expatriates the world-over, they’ve stuck to themselves and they’ve carved out a space in their adopted country where they can practice life as they normally would, venturing out into the real world only on weekends, smoking only imported cigarettes, and refusing to ride CTB buses, etc.
As difficult as it’s been for me, I’ve purposely been avoiding those kinds of communities. The Red-Cross couple represents a striking example: when pressed for specifics about adapting to life here, they admitted that they’ve avoided much of Sri Lankan culture in favor of “keeping to themselves in their retirement” and could not tell me too much about living as Sri Lankans do, even in metropolitan Colombo. I was struck that two of the Europeans I spent the better part of a day with in Anuradhapura remained as aloof as they did. They continually reverted to their native tongue, which the other three of us do not speak, and tried, as best as they could, to steer all conversations back to stories of their worldly experiences, especially their travels. However, it was plain to see that no matter how widely they’ve traveled, and no matter how many stamps their passports contain, they’ve never once stopped for a moment to consider living any way other than their own. I sensed an overriding tendency (a strength, no doubt, in some contexts, but otherwise a failure) to cling to what they know and to perpetuate it as much as they can. They represent a microcosm of their homeland in a strange land, and I doubt they will ever step out of it.
All that being said, it’s really, really hard to step out of one’s cultural context, especially when bombarded on all sides by different lifeways. I’ve refrained from mentioning specific European nations because overall, the global West represents a basic homogenous foundation that is relatively navigable for all its residents. Transplant a Westerner to South Asia, however, and it becomes a different story. The small differences that one consciously dismisses as immaterial and unimportant react synergistically to one another: suddenly the fact that no businesses post their operating hours on their front doors drives you crazy, walking on the left side of the sidewalk becomes a constant burden, and you want to shout obscenities at every earnest tuk tuk driver who solicits you for your business. Being alone in this experience has shown me that foreigners everywhere are stuck between a rock and a hard place: they can either retreat into themselves like bulbous drops of oil in a dish of water, or they can cast off what they know and submit to being tumbled around like a forlorn sock in the dryer. I’m tempted to say that it makes very little difference in the long run which route once chooses, but I can’t honestly submit that as my opinion. The four young Europeans, plus the two older ones, have shown me that the only way to live fully anywhere is to submit to a process of mutual adjustment between oneself and one’s environment. This has been easy for me in a place like Boone, North Carolina, United States of America. It has been much more difficult in Nugegoda, Colombo, Sri Lanka. And yet, I am able to stupidly walk into an India restaurant and try something entirely new, something that scares me, something wholly different from the pork tenderloin I was craving. I can do this because I have nothing else to lean on, but in the end I find that the differences really are immaterial. People everywhere eat food, period. Now I know that, at least in some ways, it’s possible to circumvent the xenophobia that characterizes my culture. And now I really know that Americans are capable of so much more goodness on this planet than we’re currently exhibiting. I think we need to stop being so selfish and start eating with our hands. I also think we need to recognize that Dosa masala is really, really good, and worth craving in itself.

For Sale: Culture!

As brave Sri Lankan men sometimes say when greeting solitary, foreign-looking males, "Heyyouguys!"

It's now Thursday, but I keep thinking about the interesting weekend I had. As I mentioned last post, I traveled to Galle and then to Unawatuna, which are in southern Sri Lanka, 120km south of Colombo. By train, it took about 3.5 hours each way. Not bad, except that the train seats were particularly austere in their design, if you were lucky enough to have one, which I didn't for about one hour of each train ride.

I learned a lot traveling for two days. The great majority of my traveling was unquestionably enjoyable, and that's best evidenced by some photographs I took of the weekend (see Facebook or email me for some examples). Unfortunately, some of my experiences left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I think the relevant points are pertinent to my current study of sustainability here in Sri Lanka. What I witnessed this weekend, in many different guises throughout many different situations, was the commodification of Sri Lankan culture for sale to tourists like me, as well as the accompanying sliminess of constantly being bombarded by attempts to swindle me out of my money. All told, I feel that tourism has had a particularly negative effect on the uniqueness of Galle and Unawatuna, and I wish things had worked out differently in the meeting of cultures here. Even locals avoid those places.

The catalyst for almost everything I did this weekend was a man I met on the train coming south from Colombo. I never learned his name, but he was a police officer of some high rank, and he was extremely friendly to me, right from the get-go. We chatted for an hour about all kinds of things; his English was quite good. I was enjoying his company, and he apparently took a liking to me. From my perspective, he went out of his way to suggest good things for me to see and places to visit, and then to arrange a government-owned tuk tuk to take me to these places. He made it sound as if the itinerary he'd set up was all within a stone's throw of Galle, and wouldn't take very long or be expensive.

Unfortunately, I was being taken advantage of. ("Conned" would be too strong a word.) I later learned that the police officer was getting kick-backs for much of the "kindness" he showed me that day, and that my taxi, though government-owned and "metered", was giving me the not-so-kind tourist rate of approximately 250% the normal fare. Two of the stops I had agreed to turned out to be nowhere close to Galle, contrary to the police officer's impressions, and I'm certain the driver took the longest routes possible to get to them. But alas, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first part of my tour was Galle Fort. I mentioned it in my last post. It's about 300m from the train station and is a pretty neat edifice, in all honesty. It stands militantly out-of-place on the edge of the rolling sea, edged by palm trees. Its central clock tower is impressive, and its lighthouse is delightful in a sort of quaint way. Unfortunately, a man tried to rob me near the lighthouse by backing me into a corner and then doing who-knows-what to get my cash. He got much too close and was mean-looking and filthy, and was trying to push me out of sight of some far-away bystanders. His hands were up in an offensive sort of position, and he kept saying something like "Would you be kind and do me a favor, like your country did after the tsunami?" I had to gruffly shove past him to avoid being cornered...regardless of whatever aid he received from the US in 2004. I then made a quick retreat to where my taxi used to be, only to find it missing. "Great!" I thought, "I've been ditched by my taxi and now I'm going to be robbed by Dirty Dan." I was grateful when my taxi driver started shouting from behind me, about 60 meters off. He had apparently moved the tuk tuk to a more convenient parking spot closer to the fort's exit. "When I saw that man come to you," he said in genuinely worried-sounding English, "I was worried he would rob you. It happens a lot here and I'm sure that man is a thief!" I would really have appreciated some advance-notice in this case.

I hopped back into the three-wheeler and was driven throughout the old Galle town, which sits within the fortifications of the fort. I've not yet visited Europe, but I felt like I was in an old European town. I now believe the reports that the town has changed very little since the days of the Dutch. (I came back to the old town before my train left on Sunday to explore some more, because I liked it during this initial fly-by.)

With the little noisy 2-stroke spouting blue fumes behind us, we quickly darted out of the fort and through the city proper. We were headed to Yatagala Temple, the 1200-year-old Temple-Under-the-Rock. Unfortunately, the Buddhists who founded the temple chose to place it under rocks that were not near Galle, but about 15-20km out. (Remember, I'm paying the taxi-man a rate that I should have known was too high, and I'm paying it per kilometer.) I had at least one "Where the hell is this guy taking me?" moment on the drive, but was otherwise too busy feasting my eyes on the passing scenery to sweat it too much. We arrived at the temple and I climbed the 120 stone steps to the top, passing raucous monkeys and saffron-robed, 10-year-old Buddhist students on the way. The temple was gorgeous, though I understood very little of its symbolic elements. There were at least two large statues of Buddha, including the phenomenal yellow one that greets you at the top of the stairs. I puttered around and was planning on having some quiet time, since I wasn't feeling exactly spiritual at the moment. I sat on what I thought was an appropriately out-of-the-way bench, and there was no one around but me and the monkeys, who had even fallen silent in their feast on a jack-fruit. I started to let out an "Ahhh" but couldn't even finish it: the taxi-driver had huffed up the stairs and was now calling for me to come back down. "Excuse me??" I thought, but said "What's the problem?" "We must go now," was his terse and urgent-sounding reply. I thought I'd upset some hidden priest by sitting where I had, so I hopped up rather sheepishly, looking around to see evidence of the indiscretion I'd committed. I hustled back down to the tuk tuk, and it wasn't until he screeched off in another cloud of GHG's that I realized that the only mistake I'd made was in not telling the taxi driver to wait quietly while I took my time to observe the ancient holy place. Time was money for him, and I was being herded along like a cow to maximize his workday profit.

By now I was having difficult concentrating on the scenery, but was instead imagining myself throwing handfuls of rupees into the air as we drove along. It took a conscious effort to bring myself back down to earth before our next stop, which turned out to be a bit stultifying. Galle is one the last places in Sri Lanka where men still fish from stilts. The pictures of it make it look pretty incredible, and it's surely one of those beautiful cultural practices that is worth holding on to. The stilts are firmly stuck into the rocky bottom of the seabed along the shore, and men will climb to them to fish when the tide is right. The total number of stilts is fixed by the little seaside villages, so men pass them along to one of their sons and the art of fishing from stilts is thus passed along from generation to generation. Unfortunately, very little actual fishing is done nowadays. This is because it's much more profitable for them to charge tourists for photographs and only to climb onto the stilts when said tourists have forked over their cash. When I was dropped off at the shore, two fishermen immediately approached me and offered to demonstrate their "craft", for a fee. I told them I'd love to see them fish but wasn't willing to pay them anything, so they promptly sat back down and continued chewing their tobacco. Thus, I now have a number of photographs of empty stilts and this beautiful cultural craft continues to be degraded by the influx of expendable tourist money. I did buy a king coconut from a roadside stand here, though, so I had a quick pick-me-up. They're delicious, by the way.

Next stop was the tea garden! It's been a dream of mine to see a tea plantation, and while this garden was small by plantation standards (only 200 acres), it did not disappoint aesthetically. It was stunningly gorgeous, from the small streams to the sloping hills of tea plants, to the hibiscus flowers hanging over the pathways. Here is where I hoped I could find some breathing time. The tuk tuk driver parked and started napping in the back seat, looking like he'd been here many a time before and had some expectation of how long my tour would be, so I figured I'd be free from his hustle for a while. Unfortunately, I was hustled along by an entirely different breed of hawk, this one in the guise of a tea garden proprietor. A real creep, this one, he proceeded to give me a tour, but would not allow me a moment to stop and observe anything. All my questions were answered curtly, if not dismissed outright, and the whole deal was a race to the gift shop, wherein, he hoped, I'd spend an outrageous amount of my money on tea (almost $50 for 148 servings of their white tea). Even so, he couldn't resist swindling me out of some other money first!Part of the tour included a sit-down tea break, and I could not tell who was making my tea or putting my small bits of cake on the plate. My tour guide was serving me these things directly, and then hurrying me along as fast as he could. A little while down the trail, he told me that it would have been appropriate for me to leave a tip for the kitchen staff, which was complete news to me. In Sri Lanka, tipping is more or less discretionary, and it's not generally expected that you tip in restaurants, though it's surely welcomed. He told me that distributing tip money throughout the kitchen staff was part of his job, so I naturally gave him a generous sum for the tea-and-cake services I'd received. It wasn't until I was leaving the gift-shop with my tour-guide nowhere in sight that I saw the real tip jar with its courteous sign requesting tips for kitchen staff, tea pickers, drying-and-sorting room staff, and gift-shop tea-makers. I find it impossible to imagine that my tip money made it into this jar, or anywhere other than the tour guide's pocket. And I should have been more discerning, because the gift-shop staff surely thought I was a Scrooge. Lesson learned.

The next thing I learned was that taxi drivers have also learned to expect tips from foreigners, even if they've already commenced over-charging you. I (grouchy, at this point) handed over a solid tip, only later remembering that he'd borrowed money from me earlier in the day to put gas in the tuk-tuk. Double-tip-extortion! A swing-and-a-miss! Here's where the story gets better: I asked to be dropped off at the east end of the south-facing inlet that is Unawatuna. I then hopscotched my way from guest-house to guest-house, looking into renting a room for the night. My prices kept getting better and better and I got more and more aggressive in exaggerating the low rates of their competitors, until I eventually landed on a beautiful little one-room guest house called The Yellow. For Rs. 1700 (about $15.50), I had a spacious bedroom with a queen-sized bed, working shower, and ocean-facing balcony for one night. It was right on the beach, and was finally my chance to sit and relax.

I immediately went swimming and almost swam with a sea turtle but almost got knocked out by a wave-borne coconut instead. When finally I made it past the breakers into the more-gently rolling bay-water, I couldn't help but float on my back and reflect on how quirky life really is. Just four months ago, an opportunity like my internship here in Sri Lanka was a distant dream. But here I am, through a strange combination of happenstance, go-getterness, and the gracious support of so many of my friends, family, professors, and administrators. So, I spent about $100 on a weekend trip that should have cost $30...I'm still living an incredible experience and I'm growing into a better person by the day. Being treated like a tourist will never suit my fancy, but that's what I am for the time being, and this whole experience is something I will never, ever forget.

I've already begun to consider the ways in which this experience has and will continue to influence the trajectory of my life.I can't dwell on those thoughts too much because there's still too much uncertainty, but I can and ought to sit comfortably in the new-found understanding that, indeed, I can become an influential force for positive change because I'm fully a part of this strange, beautiful world of ours. And I fully intend to.

This weekend, I brave the trains.

I've spent the last hour preparing for a small weekend trip I've concocted. I'll be travelling to Galle Fort, which has some interesting historical roots. Historians believe it is the Tarshish of Biblical literature, where King Solomon obtained his gems, spices, and peacocks. Until Colombo took prominence, it was Sri Lanka's most-used port. It was first occupied by the Portuguese in the 16th century, and the Fort itself was built in 1589. The Dutch destroyed the Portuguese fort in 1640 and built another, larger one it its place in 1663. It has changed very little since then, judging from what I've read. And there will be a beach or two to get burned on. YES.

This week has proven to be a bit bewildering, and I admit, not my most productive one yet. A number of wrenches were thrown into the works for me, not the least of which was the necessity of extending my tourist visa to accommodate my entire stay here. I was granted 30 days, free of charge, upon arrival, which was easy as pie. Getting the extension, however, proved to be a bit more...taxing.

I'm not trying to complain, so here are the constructive lessons I learned. First, waiting only four hours for ANY sort of paperwork processing at a government office in a developing country is a miracle. I've heard numerous horror stories about the inefficiency of government agencies in this part of the world, and have been told that just three years ago, my wait would have been double what it was. Apparently, Sri Lanka has embarked on an aggressive campaign to streamline its Immigration services, and I was the lucky recipient of their efforts. It wasn't too bad, honestly, waiting as I did. I just have to harumph because I forgot my book in my rush out the door that morning and had nothing to read while sitting.

Second, the US's immigration policies piss off the rest of the world. Apparently we make it abhorrently difficult to enter our country for any foreign national, and getting a visa extension like mine would have been close to impossible for a Sri Lankan. I began to get a feeling for this situation when I was applying for my visa to visit India. They reciprocate every bit of America's nasty immigration policies, and thus make it stupidly difficult to get into their country in any way, shape, or form. My boss tells me that India has become extremely guarded, much the same way the US has, in their paranoia about terrorism over the past decade.

Further, my visa extension was above-and-beyond more expensive than any other charge I could get a feel for at the Immigration office. Whereas an India would pay the equivalent of pennies for the same extension, and an Italian I was sitting with paid just over $30, my extension cost over $110. I was reminded that entry visas into the US are consistently more expensive than other countries', and Sri Lanka has chosen to reciprocate. So, in effect, I've been getting a taste of what the US has been dishing out to everyone else for a few hundred years. I can't blame the Sri Lankans, and wish every American could experience having the tables turned at least once in their lifetimes.

In terms of Sustainability, what have I learned? Well, an interesting Buddhist lesson, as the case may be. The concept of sustainability has a lot of, how shall I say it, grey areas. For example, it's easy to settle into the basic idea of considering the wellbeing of current and future generations without considering, exactly, how far into the future we ought to consider. Pop sustainability has latched onto the "7 generations" idea, but even that is kind of arbitrary. It's easy, therefore, to often think in terms of "forever" and "infinite", but I've long realized that this is probably too far into the future to be useful. My boss today dropped a line that struck me. He said "As a Buddhist, I know that nothing is forever. Nothing. What we instead need to aim for in sustainability is an endurance process within the regenerative capacities [of the planet]." He means, of course, that it's silly to focus on "forever" when we can't possibly achieve such a lasting effect in anything we do. As Wes Jackson says, we can never do better than nature, but we can hope to do better than we are. And perhaps gaining an understanding of the inherent contingency and timeliness of all things, like my Buddhist friends strive to do, will help us make good decisions in both public policy and throughout our daily lives.

The next big decision for me, as it stands, is between SPF 15 and 30. But if all things are contingent, should I care about my skin?? Sheesh. Maybe I should find some shade and drink a fruity drink instead. I guess it is as the Buddhists say: life is full of suffering.

; )

Today...I slept in.

That's right. I successfully performed the 21-year-old equivalent of waking up to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. Which is to say, I decidedly did not wake up to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. It's interesting, though. The sun, in relation to the Sri Lankan clock, rises and sets about two hours earlier. With my bed so close to my window, I find my body aligning itself to this rhythm in the wee hours of the morning. It's kinda nice, actually. 6:30 is my normal wake-up time, and the sun has been fully out for over an hour by that point. Rolling out of bed at 9:00 today was sorely welcomed, though.

This past week has been really cool. I've been able to finally start the kind of work I really came here to do. Some of the least-exciting tasks have been paperwork and bureaucracy-related, as the Centre applies for consultative- or partnership-status with a number of UN Programmes, Departments, and Councils. All told, Uchita and I machete'ed our way through three applications for consultative status this week. I imagine they will all be accepted, which will lend CED much greater freedom (and responsibility) in participating and reporting on UN activities. The Centre is already de facto operating at consultative-status level, but hopefully now it will become official. And now I know how these things work.

The details of one of the projects on which I'm working are still kind-of-classified as the legal details of the arrangement are negotiated. I can say, though, that it involves designing a curriculum for a professional certificate course on Climate Sustainability. These first stages have involved lots of brainstorming, big-picture thinking, heckling, and an occasional obscenity between me and Uchita. As we hashed out the context of a serious academic course, I found that I was having a really good time. Exploring the complex interlinkages between all the sub-contexts of an issue like Climate Sustainability and then trying to map those units into a linear pattern to be taught over a period of time proved to be a welcomed challenge for me. It also made me realize that an Eastern mind like Uchita's is much more accustomed to thinking in circles and webs than a Western one like mine. My analytical skills proved useful in this context, as we had to present a salable sequence of lessons to a potential collaborative partner, but it's clear I have a long way to go in the art and practice of holistic thinking. We all do.

My other main task has been to prepare for a large project. The result of the project will be a comprehensive report on Sustainable Consumption and Production Governance to be issued well in advance of Rio+20, the goal of which is to seriously influence policy in the official negotiations. One of the "themes" of Rio+20 is "Sustainable Development Governance", one part of which ought to be SCP Governance, specifically. My mental stumbling block in trying to situate our SCP Governance report within this theme for Rio+20 has been the sheer hodge-podge that is the existing institutional framework for SD Governance of any kind. Within the UN, there is a mind-numbing web of programmes, councils, and offices who claim some authority in the matter, and determining the power flows between them and their real-world efficacy has absorbed a good deal of time lately. Thankfully, an NGO called Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future has put together a ton of neat reports on the matter (some targeted to the uninitiated, like me) and are working hard to spread information. CED is also in this track, and I've been asked to start contributing to our blogs over the next few weeks. Looks like I'll get some more experience in this strange form of writing! Chip chop chip. (Chip chop chip?)

On a more-interesting note, I had a near-pants-soiling moment this morning while walking to Uchita's. I was groggy from sleeping so much, so imagine my brainfog when I was charged by a slather-mouthed, 7ft-long monitor lizard bent on stealing my soul and feeding my remains to his hellish offspring. Nugegoda's a heavily urban district of the greater Colombo area, so the most-threatening wildlife I've been exposed to have been fruit bats and stray dogs. (Well, actually, dengue-mosquitoes ought to be my biggest fear, but they're so...little.) This lizard though...sheesh. It forced me into a fight-or-flight response, which mostly resulted in a noise I can only represent onomatopoetically with the word "BLLLLEEEEAARRAAAAAGGGGHHHHAAAAAA", in combination with some gymnastico-evasive maneuvers. And thus, dear friends, was I the laughingstock of a half-dozen white-and-blue clad Sri Lankan punk-children. Uchita explained to me that the stream that runs through a concrete channel near his home affords them some habitat a little further downstream, and that being charged by this lizard was not an offensive move on his part. He was merely trying to return to the water in the drainage ditch, and I just so happened to be in his way. Indeed, he plopped into the water just behind me and disappeared underneath the sidewalks that cover the drainage ditches here. This is the Sri Lankan version of alligators-in-the-sewers, I think. But these ones are real. Appallingly, Godzilla-ly real.

I'm now in Colombo 7 after visiting the National Museum of Sri Lanka (pictured). All I can report is that I was more interesting to the three-and-a-half-thousand schoolchildren there than their own cultural artifacts. Which might be an quantitative exaggeration, but surely not a qualitative one. I had a prolonged moment of being followed by at least 20 giggling children who kept asking me my name in their beautifully-clear-but-limited English. One was even bold enough to pull my bun. Have I mentioned that long hair on males is an extreme curiosity to the people here? Apparently men haven't worn long hair in this country in a long, long time, and many children just haven't seen enough tourists to get used to white skin or long hair. The museum got really warm and my entourage got too close and numerous. When I got politely-but-sternly reprimanded by a museum official for taking a picture without the requisite permit, I decided to quit while I was ahead. Now, having ingested some caffeine and dried out my back-sweat (yuck, I know) I'm ready to hike over to the Galle Face Green (Google it). Hooah!