Settling In

(The following is a blog I wrote for the Paavima website. You can see the official version, with pictures, here

I arrived in Colombo exhausted. Jason picked me up at the airport and whisked me through the empty night streets of Colombo. I spent most of the next day in a stupor, waiting for immigration to extend my visa and wandering slowly through the streets. The next morning we were up before sunrise, before heat and traffick could choke us, and on the streets, making our way south to Madiha.

Jason is interpreting the landscape for me as we go, telling me about the tsunami, stories about the passenger trains, the government legislation, about people and houses and the path of the great wave. We breakfast at Galle and are installed at the Beach Inn while it is still morning. It's nice to have a place to rest for awhile. And rest is exactly what I need.

For the rest of the week, with the help of Indika and a local community member, Mr. Fonseka, we round up the troupes. This only takes a few hours out of every day, at the most, and the rest of my time, I sleep and walk the beach and go for long swims in the ocean. The waves are breaking metres from my door, the food every night is divine. There is always sand between my toes and a nap in the afternoon in the hammock between the cocount trees.

I propose to start work on Monday, so on Sunday we need to clear a space. Some women in the community volunteer to help me and so we find ourselves at the ruins of the Polhenna school, just across the way from the Paavima Dive Shack.

As you can see from the photos, parts of the classrooms have been completely laid to ruin by the tsunami. There is a new school being built next door and for now, all the rooms of the old school are empty and full of rubbish. It looks as if someone is living in part of the building. I select a long, open hall for the classes. There is a blackboard at either end. The floor is concrete, but missing in patches.

They tell me that it used to be the village green, where children played sports. Now there is a pile of rocks there and big machinerary noisily moving the rocks to cover the beaches and the turtle's egg laying places for some reason only the government really knows about. We have to climb over the heaps of jagged rock to get to the classroom.

One of the empty rooms seems to be a kind of wharehouse for the furniture. The women and I carefully extract rusty old chairs and broken tables from the piles and send them over to a tap where another woman does her best to wash them. I am soon covered in sweat and rust, walking carefully along the floor where panes of glass have broken to avoid accidents in my silly little sandals.

It doesn't take too long. In the end we have about thirty chairs of various sizes and we have salvaged about nine desks. The women set these up in rows as neat and orderly as the uneven floor and the rusted furniture allows. I smile to myself. "I'll soon be changing that," I think. We haven't really said much to each other, my Singhala is nonexistant. But we have smiled a lot and laughed in the sunshine, and carried things together.

It's a good start, as far as I'm concerned, looking around at this strange place where I will be teaching English conversation for the next two months. The first general meeting for all students is on Monday and I am excited and nervous to see who will come and what will result...