Found In Ceylon

Hunger

Shortly after school on Thursday, Jenny walked onto the school campus. Lying under the stairs that go to nowhere, she reported, there was a dog eating a rat. “I saw entrails pouring out of the rat’s stomach,” she said.

Having never heard of a dog eating a rat, I was skeptical. Later, I approached the dog. It was cowering under the bottom steps with as pitiful a look as it could muster. It didn’t look like an animal that had just feasted on rodent.

So I came a little closer. I saw the rat lying underneath the dog’s front paws. I couldn’t see any spilled guts, and the rat was still kicking its legs.

What a survivor, I thought. Then I realized it was a newborn puppy.

I told Jenny to come over, and together, we agreed that it was indeed a puppy. On cue, the mother dog then gave birth to a shiny, wet black ball. She dragged the ball from her hindquarters to closer to her head, bit into it and revealed the puppy within. We watched her simultaneously eat the black sac and lick the squeaking minutes-old newborn.

“That was SO weird,” Jenny said when it was all over. “I guess you’re not too hungry for lunch anymore, are you?”

She was right; I wasn’t. But I got my appetite back ten minutes later when four carfuls of sponsors arrived, carrying several dozen styrofoam lunch boxes.

While the school is able to provide several meals a week to their residential students, sponsors from Matara and the surrounding villages will often provide a lunch meal. Sometimes it’s for the occasion of a child’s birthday or a death anniversary, and other times it’s purely tzedakah (the Hebrew word for charity). Whatever the reason, the sponsors ensure that all residential students stay well-fed.

And is so often the case no matter where I go, the sponsors cannot take their eyes off me. A deaf foreigner signing with deaf Sri Lankan children! But most of the time, they stay out of the mess hall.

Not these sponsors, though. They were about fifteen men from the telephone company, all in ties and slacks. A few of them stood mere feet away from me, observing me and the boys nearby eating their donated food.

Pretty quickly, I got peeved and signed to the kids, “You know who we are to them? Monkeys in a zoo. They’re just watching us munch, astonished that deaf people could eat at all.”

Sameera admitted, “Sometimes I get tired of being grateful every time someone gives us food.”

“Right. We should, of course, thank them immensely, because we need it. But it’d be nice to eat without being observed like lab rats.”

“You know, Sophie was embarrassed too when the sponsors were staring at her eat and sign with us. A foreigner!” Pasindu said. “So you’re not the only one.”

“Yeah, well, nothing we can do but say thank you every time and eat.”

Even after we were done eating, a few sponsors couldn’t take their eyes off me. I made the most of the instant-audience situation by creating an impromptu English lesson, testing whether any of the boys remembered how to spell cricket, rugby, volleyball, and football (I reviewed that with them the day before while watching the Sri Lanka-Pakistan game). The sponsors liked the show and left soon afterwards.

Later the day, after dinner, I recounted my lunch experience to Nerissa.

She responded that it was perfectly normal and the custom here. She said that sometimes the three of them would go to a house for dinner, and the entire host family would stand there, watching them eat.

“It makes them feel good to watch us eat,” Nerissa explained.

Oops. Had I misinterpreted the lunch sponsors’ fascination with our eating behavior as patronizing superiority when, in fact, it was just what they do in Sri Lanka? And did the boys take my mistaken message of silent rebellion to heart?

“It’s so important that they get food,” she continued. “You need to see if some of the children are getting breakfast. Some day students probably show up at school hungry.”

“You really think so?”

“Yep. You can tell when they nod off in class.”

I immediately thought of Lakmal, the tallest and best-looking senior in the school. If he was in 90210 attending West Beverly High, he’d be Dylan McKay; you know the type.

Many times, I’d walk by his 11-A classroom and he’d be taking a nap on his desk. Surely, I thought, he’s just a teenager and probably just stays up too late. What’s more, his home was destroyed in the tsunami and his family lives in a shack, awaiting for two years their new home promised by phalanxes of NGOs.

So if he’s falling asleep in class, he’s got his valid reasons.

“They don’t fall asleep because they haven’t had enough sleep. It’s because they don’t have breakfast,” Nerissa said. She knows, because she spearheads a community program to provide 24,000 schoolchildren in the Matara area with breakfast buns every day.

I felt stupid. How could I have missed these signals? Lakmal wasn’t the only one dozing off; I had taught a few other classes where a student would just spaz out. Often, I let him or her take a quick power nap and catch up a few minutes later. Of course. They were hungry.

“I”ll ask Lakmal tomorrow morning if he’s had breakfast,” I promised. He’s a day student, so he doesn’t get to eat any of the meals the residential students receive.

“He probably will say yes; it’s embarrassing to admit that you haven’t eaten.”

The next morning, I asked Lakmal if he had eaten.

He said no.

Instantly, my heart broke. I felt like I was watching an epic disaster unfold before my eyes.

While he led the children to the volleyball court for calisthenics, I pocketed two bananas from the custodial staff’s mess hall, intending to give it to him just before classes began. As Lakmal came back towards the academic building, I pulled him aside.

I told him that he needs to tell me every time when he doesn’t eat breakfast, and then showed him the two bananas.

He jumped back and yelled, “No! They’re Siamese bananas!”

I looked at the yellow fruit. Sure enough, he was right. The two bananas were conjoined along their length. I pulled them apart. As far as I could tell, they were still edible.

“If I eat them, I’ll have Siamese children!” he said. To illustrate this, he grabbed nearby Ishara and touched his head to his own, mimicking a pair of conjoined twins.

“That’s a total lie,” I shot back. “Eat the damn banana,” I threw one banana to him and gave the other one to Ishara. Lakmal swaggered for a few seconds, but ate the banana and walked into the building.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of unease. Hungry children, right before my eyes. Sure, it’s nothing new–I’m sure even Del Mar schools have hungry children here and there, but still, to see it… And how was it that I didn’t see it before? I’ve been working at the school for more than three weeks now.

After school, Lakmal and I were chatting about his weekend plans. As we talked, I looked at his face. What was once an handsome, model-quality face had slowly morphed into a slightly emaciated face. His cheekbones no longer looked high and pronounced, but instead outlined sunken, possibly starving cheeks.

When you recognize hunger, you start seeing it everywhere.

Most of the children at the school are thin; provided with a steady stream of high-carb food, the Rohana Special School could churn out Olympic marathon runners of both sexes by the dozen. Also, from years of undernourishment, they look much younger than their ages. I’m constantly surprised when children who appear fourteen tell me they’re nineteen.

Then you have the day students and the residential students. Maybe the day students have just one meal a day. When you’re eating mass quantities of food with the residential students, it’s easy to forget the few day students who are going home to empty kitchens. And being a residential student is no guarantee, either; Chintha told me Friday that often she skipped breakfast because she was so sick of eating dhal.

After school on Friday, I peeked at the new canine family under the steps. Boards had been placed around them by one of the matrons, creating a makeshift litter-box. The mother dog looked stupefyingly thin. Nothing but bones and fur. I remember someone telling me that after you’ve given birth, you’ve never felt so hungry before in your life.

I told Pasindu to grab a dish of discarded food (kids who don’t finish off their plates throw the food away into a medium-sized plastic trash can) and carefully pour it into the litter-box. He did that, and the food was consumed within seconds.

Hunger is all around us in Sri Lanka, but its stories aren’t always told–or seen. The people here have a limitless capacity for giving to their fellow countrymen despite their own food-supply issues, and for not accepting extra food from others. The children howl if I decline a vanilla cracker they have offered.

But they also refuse to accept an apple that I’m too full to eat and instead try to sneak it into my backpack for me to eat later. So, in this hungry land, I’m left looking around in vain for a child to accept an apple.

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