Found In Ceylon

I had written up this long blog about graduation. Rohana’s graduation is next Friday, December 1, and I am approaching this event with mixed feelings. I am also approaching this event as its planner; this has entailed running among fabric shops and tailors getting graduation gowns custom-made, making sure the principal remembers to tell the parents to show up, and learning how to type in Sinhala for the graduation certificates.

But Ruchira died late Wednesday night, and my thoughts switched from high school graduation graduation to a nine-year-old boy’s funeral. In many ways, graduations and funerals are similar; they both commemorate a departure from a pre-existing environment and the entry into an unknown reality.

Ruchira is — or is it already time to use the past tense “was?” — the school cook’s son. He had Down’s Syndrome, but his identifying characteristic was an enormous belly which he displayed proudly as he strutted around the school, shirtless and wearing blue jersey shorts. His name sign outlines the curvaceous shape of his belly.

As Jenny said, he was impossible not to love, and Ruchira stole the hearts of almost every volunteer to step onto Rohana’s grounds.

Actually, he was most visible as the volunteer left for the day; he would, without fail, climb into the three-wheeler and hide there. Stubbornly repelling any attempts by other students to kick him out of the vehicle, he’d grab onto the rails, enjoying for the 50-foot ride to the school gate where one of the other kids would finally pull him out through the window.

I found out that he had died as soon as I arrived Thursday morning. Samantha, the deaf teacher, was the first one to tell me–something heart-related–and then urged me to go see the mother sitting near the infirmary. To no one’s surprise, she was weeping unconsolably and I held her hand while three photographs of Ruchira laid in a chair next to her.

So it was with this event that I attended my first Sinhalese Buddhist funeral. As I told Amanda, I was hoping when I arrived in Sri Lanka that I’d get to witness these cultural events: weddings, holidays, funerals. As tears came to my eyes holding the grieving cook’s hand, I realized that I had forgot that, in the case of funerals, somebody has to die first.

There were no classes Thursday as most of the upper-level students sat by the windows, weeping quietly and recounting the chaos of last night (Ruchira and the cook lived in the girls’ dormitory). Amila draped a white flag over a string tied above the front gates so that all passerbys could know the school was now a place of mourning.

We sat like this for hours contemplating the death of a nine-year-old boy; would the cook, who arrived four years ago with Ruchira thinking it was a match made in heaven–the school’s developmentaly disabled unit would educate the son while the mother could cook for all the children–continue to live and work at the school?

At around noon, many of the older children went downstairs to clean the main room. They swept away cobwebs from fans, mopped the white tiled floor, removed the happy framed photographs from the wall, and set up a few dozen chairs all around the edge of the room. The site of many happy occassions such as birthdays and teachers’ appreciation ceremonies would now be a viewing room. The older boys and girls told me they would stay up the entire night as sentinels for the displayed body; Jenny and I agreed to join them in their all-nighter.

The body arrived at 6:00 that evening. The boys quickly set up various decorative objects: a canopy, two large elephant tusks, some flower vases, a couple of faux-marble globes, and the railing upon which the casket would rest. The brown varnish on the coffin was not yet dry, and as the boys carried it into the room, the varnish smeared onto their shoulders as if they had been marked by grief.

Immediately, they opened the coffin. Wide open–the casket opens up on all four sides to fully reveal the body within. As is so common with funerals, the corpse didn’t look like the animated person it had been several hours ago. Most significantly, Ruchira’s enormous, signature belly was gone.

The students walked in and around the setup with hands closed together in prayer. Many of the older girls and a couple of the boys, all who, in the residential family environment they lived, had considered him like a son, dissolved into tears. The mother came in, supported by her older daughters and sons-in-laws, and cried as she kept touching her son’s head.

Then Sanjeewa told me to take photographs. “What?” I asked.

“Take photographs,” he repeated matter-of-factly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Then you can give her the prints.”

I didn’t move until Amila told me to do the same thing, so I reluctantly walked back to the dormitory to grab my camera. When I returned, Sanjeewa pointed at Ruchira and said, “maybe this angle?”

Unbelieving my actions, I snapped a few photographs. Supun then motioned to the mother and her family to come stand by the body for the family portrait. I took two pictures–one with flash and one without–and then Amila said, “now for one of his upper body.”

I obliged. Sanjeewa said, “and tomorrow, when we walk around the body in our white uniforms, be sure to take a few then, too.”

“Are you sure it’s really okay to take pictures?” I asked, not for the last time.

“Yes.”

People came and went throughout the night. For a couple of hours, a dozen deaf people from the deaf association came in–many of them Rohana alumni–and we chatted while the older girls kept us well-supplied with milk tea and biscuits.

By midnight, everyone was gone except about seven boys, Jenny, and myself. We sat on the floor, ten feet away from Ruchira’s body, playing cards and carom. A few of them began passing out on the chairs, unable to stay awake any longer. Jenny, Priyankara, and Amila all succumbed around 3:00, and by 4:00, only Prasanna, Ruwan, and I hadn’t taken any winks.

Those two boys continued to play carom, while Pasindu and Sanjeewa woke up and sat next to me, telling jokes and generally acting out. “This is the most fun wake I’ve been to,” I thought. But whenever the mother returned (she came and went about five or six times throughout the night), we all would walk over to where she sat, holding her hands and gently rubbing her back. She kept asking Jenny and me if we had had a cup of tea yet.

And every once in a while, whenever our laughter died down, our eyes would waver over to the casket and we’d be reminded once again that somebody dear to us had died. It is strange how, given enough time, you can so easily forget about a corpse lying in the same room.

The school came back to life after 5:00 Friday morning, and at 6:30, Jenny and I walked back to our hotel to eat breakfast, shower, and sleep.

After waking up an oversleeping Jenny, we both returned at 1:30 in the afternoon. The monks arrived a hour later–one of them happens to be the school’s founder. Next time I have his name next to me, I will type it here.

The five monks sat down in chairs along one wall, while everybody else, wearing as much white as possible, sat on the floor on the opposite side. Principal Abeygunawardana, in his classic oratory manner, said much more than a few words, and one of the teachers, after my urging, quickly got up to interpret. In the middle of his interpreting, he said, “Adam, go take photos.”

I thought maybe I had nodded off for a moment and experienced a waking dream, but he said it again, so I scurried over to the other corner to take pictures of the monks and the family.

After many words, some prayers, and a ceremonial pouring of water from a teapot into a cup of tea (the symbolism of which I am not sure), everybody stood up to walk around the body, youngest first. Again urged by a few boys and the interpreting teacher, I took more photographs.

Then Pasindu (one of the graduating students) and the mother simultaneously became hysterical, and both had to be restrained from pawing all over the body. In that moment I saw the fusion of Rohana’s residential community; there aren’t students and staff living in the buildings, but ammas and thathas, akkas, ayyas, and malis, all grieving the loss of one of their own.

(In a different way, this will be repeated in the same room next Friday at graduation, as eight more people leave this family.)

The casket was closed and the boys carried it out to the van outside the gates, with younger boys quickly draping long sheets of patterned silk on the dirt road in front of the casket. Girls threw dried rice on it, and the whole school road was filled with people from start to end as we all piled onto the buses and vans.

Mr. Abeygunawardana sat next to me (actually, first it was Samantha, but upon seeing her principal approach, she quickly got out of her seat). I took this moment to show him text messages from Nerissa and David, Matthew and Maurice, Anne, and Sophie, all offering their sympathy.

“From all over the world,” I remarked.

He said it was the cycle of life; some people live for a long time and others live for a very short time. Almost like a tally, at funerals you take stock of the people who are around and those who are not around anymore. I couldn’t stop crying at that moment, as I thought about all who have gone before: Nana and Papa John, Grandpa Sam, Aunt Eadie; and all who will depart–remaining grandparents, aunts and uncles, parents, friends.

But for the school cook to lose her only son–at such a young age–messes it all up and makes it all the more shocking and grievous.

We arrived at the cemetery. Jenny and I walked side by side, aware of our noticeable presence as the only foreigners at this ceremony, and remarked on the large number of Christian crosses and tombstones we saw in what we thought was a Buddhist country–and therefore–a Buddhist cemetery. The boys carried the casket to some open-air, roofed pavilion where, much to my surprise, Ruchira was revealed once again.

A dozen boys then walked around the open casket three times, hands clapsed together in prayer again, and the mother touched her son for one last time. Yes, I have a photograph of this incredibly personal moment, taken once again at the urging of the interpreting teacher.

Then the casket was closed for a final time and carried to the crematorium just down the path, where it was quickly shoved into the oven and the fire doors closed without ceremony. We all moved out to the grass nearby, looking upward at the smokestack for any signs of Ruchira’s remains.

On cue, it started to rain (the monsoon season, which was supposed to end two weeks ago according to Indika, is still tormenting us). The teachers told us to go for the bus, so we walked down the path, eyes darting backwards at the smokestack where, after ten minutes, smoke was finally wisping out.

And we headed back to the school–no, home–silently. Almsgiving with the monks is next Wednesday (seven days after the death), and then in three months, and then every year after that, like yahrzeit.

There is now a conspicious absence in the three-wheeler every time I leave the school; there is no Ruchira climbing around the seats, fending off other boys for his rightful seat by the passenger’s side.

Sinhalese people, when faced with an unanswerable question or an undeniable fact of life, rock their heads from side to side and utter, “what to do.”

What to do?

School today went a bit more smoothly than yesterday, if you ignore the fact that school ended suddenly, as if just on a whim, at 12:30 instead of 1:30.

I am leaving Pointe Sud; tonight, I will sleep in a new place for the first time since arriving in Matara nearly two months ago. Nerissa, David, and their son are leaving for abroad and that means vacation time for the staff. The house itself, which has seen about twenty visitors in the same time span, will certainly get a break from people.

When I tell somebody that I’m going to stay at their house for just three days, I usually follow through, but in this case, three days turned into seven weeks. But I haven’t felt like some parasitic interloper mooching off kind-hearted foreigners. Instead, I am a part of a team (that just happens to include housing and culinary perks) that is dedicated towards improving the community around us.

I have learned what two very committed people can accomplish–a lot–and I am grateful that Nerissa and David have invited me into their home (and let me stay!) to witness tikkun olam in the making.

However, the Pointe Sud Three aren’t the only people leaving. In fact, in the next week or so, every white person I know is fleeing town.

Matthew and Maurice, two very fun and free-spirited men from Malta, have been living in Matara for about a year now and have also picked up fluency in Sinhala Sign Language via their almost-daily interactions with the Rohana students. They also created a vegetable garden on the school grounds so the children could learn about agriculture! They have worked at orphanages; helped fix crappy fishing boats donated by NGOs who didn’t know better; and taught English classes.

They are leaving for southeast Asia, but they promise to be back in a few months.

Dave and Monika, who arrived here not long after I did, are a young married couple from London who quit their jobs, sold most of their stuff and took a year off to travel the world. Isn’t that rad? After trekking through Africa, Australia, and Asia, we were lucky they picked Matara as their place to sit down and relax for an extended period. They have pulled off an incredible feat of making more than three hundred Christmas cards using Sri Lankan materials to be sold abroad so that proceeds go to Rohana. In addition, they have helped clean up different areas of the school, and Monika is working with me in creating a sign language dictionary (it goes without saying that they have also picked up sign language).

They leave later this week for India and then back to London afterwards.

Finally, there’s Jenny, a Canadian, who, after teaching English at a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand for two years, decided to take a two-month vacation in Matara. Despite being on break, she quickly found herself teaching English to Rohana’s custodial staff (and also tried to teach the teachers too, but they wouldn’t show up) as well as to children and adults at a village school. I am particularly lucky to have her around because she has an American accent, so she’s just about the only English-speaking person here who isn’t hard to lipread, and even easier now that she knows lots of signs, too.

We get to hang out at the same guesthouse until she leaves next week to travel around the island, then head home to Canada, and then back to Thailand.

I fear I haven’t really detailed enough these people’s contributions to this community, so you’ll just have to take my word for it–they have done a lot here. As Nerissa said a while ago, “Here, people want to help.”

So, everyone is leaving! I find it rather funny, actually, cracking lines like, “what, is it me?”

I’m sure a few people here know that I’ve been living in pretty luxurious lodgings (comparable not just to Matara but to any Western country too). But it isn’t a problem to be leaving Pointe Sud because I’m really looking forward to this new phase of my stay here in Sri Lanka.

Instead of an air-conditioned sedan ride to school every morning, I’ll be in a bumpy three-wheeler. Instead of grand, family-style dinners with complimentary whiskey drinks, I’ll have pre-ordered plates and my personal bottle of arrack. Instead of large sofas and generously-cushioned rattan chairs, I’ll be sitting in one-dollar plastic lawn chairs. Instead of a bathtub with a draw curtain, I’ll have a bathroom whose entire space, toilet and sink included, also doubles as a shower stall. Instead of real milk with my afternoon tea, I’ll have powdered milk mixed in boiling water.

I can’t wait. It brings me a step closer to the real Sri Lanka, which is what I came here for.

I anticipate many quiet evenings spent on the beach terrace with my book-of-the-day, Moleskine journal, and whoever is also staying at the Beach Inn, keeping me company. In many ways, that’s just how it was at Pointe Sud, too.

I am so curious to see who is the next person to come here; Nerissa says there is always another volunteer coming by. I do hope she’s right; but if she’s not, I won’t be too disappointed either.

As a student, vacation could not come quickly enough. As a teacher, I want to say, “Wait a minute! I need a few more days here!”

Disclaimer: This is going to be another “telling” blog. I originally planned on writing only “showing” blogs (this is something I learned from Mrs. Zides’ AP English 12 class when we were writing our college essays. She’d admonish us to “show, don’t tell!” which basically means write a story using immersive and descriptive language instead of just telling it…or something like that). But the downside of “showing” writing is that you have to take much more time to compose it–at least, for me–and, I don’t know, it provokes a lot of self-criticism when I can’t find the right adverb or that phrase doesn’t sound eloquent enough. So, for now, we’re on “telling” mode together, people.

School ends December 8th. You know that old joke, “What’s a teacher’s three favorite words? June, July, August.” Except here it’s April, August, and December.

In Sri Lanka, vacations are scheduled differently. Instead of bunching the summer months together into a super-vacation, school is out for three one-month periods (Apr, Aug, Dec). I can see that this system has its plus–you spread vacation over more of the year which probably works better for families who may need their strong, energetic children around to repair the house, pull up weeds, or whatever.

Still, from an education perspective, it’s like chopping up brains into bits. Students learn all they can in three months, then they get one month off to forget it all. It must be discouraging for the teachers, but I musn’t jump to conclusions and assume this is actually the case. Besides, the teachers probaby love it.

But back to my present situation. School ends in a bit less than four weeks, but everything’s already going to hell. The Grade 10 and 11 classes are taking their year-end exams all this week. This apparently has the effect of making most of the teachers for Grade 6-11 (who rotate among themselves teaching their subject(s) to different grades) take this week off. Because, well, if two grades are out of commission, why bother teaching the other four, too? Yeah, it’s a real no-brainer.

The next two weeks aren’t too encouraging, either. Grade 6-7 have their exams next week, and 8-9 the week after that.

So I find myself with up to four–sometimes, six–teacherless classes at any point, and the bell schedule is practically defenestrated, so nothing makes sense anymore. It’s so fascinating to see how lax Sri Lanka’s school attendance policies are. Back home, all hell breaks loose if a school is unexpectedly closed for half a day; some districts would require the school to make up for it by tacking on an additional day of school at the end of the academic year.

I lament this loss of order (if what existed before Monday could be considered order) because I was really getting into the groove. Anne’s teaching techniques are truly lighting the kids’ imaginations on fire; and almost all the classes are now writing sentences. I have to remind some of them, however, to not just string words together and hope that I say that it’s proper English. I tell them to think of what they want to express first, then write it down.

A good example: Iresha wrote down, “cat is milk.” I asked her to sign the sentence to me. She signed it exact English: “CAT IS MILK.” I told her, “No, forget the English sentence. What are you trying to say?” She hesitantly signed, “CAT MILK.” I asked her if I came up to her tomorrow morning and signed, “CAT MILK!,” would that make sense? “No,” she said. “So write a new sentence and first, think of what you want to say before you write it down.”

It is a challenge teaching English sentence construction in Sinhala Sign Language; I’ve had to invent new signs for “nouns” and “verbs,” and really, how the heck do you explain what “is” is? I say it’s a verb that you put in when you don’t really have another verb to use. That seems to work for them.

To further enliven this trilingual environment in which I’m teaching, I’ve let the students teach me how to write Sinhala. I am really lucky here because the consonants in the Sinhalese fingerspelt alphabet are almost identical to the ASL alphabet. I can write more than twenty-five Sinhala words, and I can also write (with fair accuracy) any student’s name in Sinhala, too. It is really, really fun. The great thing about learning Sinhala words via fingerspelling is that, because it’s completely phonetic, I know how to say it right away.

This leads to a greater fluency in Sinhala Sign Language because now I can use the proper lip shapes to go with the signs. It can actually be more difficult to understand sign language if the signer’s lips are shut; despite linguists’ railings against ASL being thought as a signed mode of English, the lip-shape of English words used in conjunction with signs does make a large difference in making ASL more intelligible.

The same is true for Sinhala Sign Language; I feel that I am better understood, for example, when I mouth “pol” instead of “coconut” when I sign “coconut.” I find my Sinhala education to be quite agreeable, and I love that it’s a more balanced exchange of knowledge between myself and my students. It is unbelievable that I am able to fingerspell in Sinhala to my students despite learning the language only two weeks ago, but that many of the hostel/custodial staff who have worked at the deaf school for years still do not know how to fingerspell in their own language.

Once again, I can’t rush to judgement on that issue; have they been given the opportunity to learn? I’ll ask the children tomorrow if they’ve tried to teach their matrons the Sinhala fingerspelt alphabet.

In any case, the next few weeks look rocky in terms of teaching my planned curriculum. Actually, that’s a lie; I don’t even plan the night before what I’m going to teach. But, believe me, I do have some sense of direction of where I’m heading, however vague that may be. How much longer can I keep teaching new stuff before it becomes pointless fighting against the dreaded vacationentritis; in other words, when should I stop teaching and go into year-end review mode?

Perhaps I also need to just let go and enjoy the slower pace of schooling in Sri Lanka instead of trying to cling to bureaucratic, Western educational standards. After all, even the provincial government delivered today’s exam papers thirty minutes late to our school. Whoever heard of delivering state-level exams on the same day as the exam itself?

Jenny, another volunteer here in Matara, has wonderfully written up her perspective of Rohana Special School. I think it’s especially enlightening as it’s from a hearing person’s point of view.

In our first training session, Anne imparted to me her personal mantra: “every teacher of the deaf is a teacher of language.” In just a few days, my teaching style would undergo a metamorphosis guided by Anne, who draws from her 35 years of experience in teaching deaf children in England.

Five weeks ago, I declared that I had learned all there was to know about English education for the deaf in Sri Lanka. In many ways, that statement still stands true.

However, as time passed, what grew more salient to me was not the condition of Sri Lankan education itself, but how to actually teach conversational English language skills.

After weeks of teaching, I was getting myself into a rut. Half my classes had learned new vocabulary words: animals, foods, numbers, sports, and feelings (most of which they had learned previously from Sophie but forgotten!). I purchased beautiful, full-color posters of different word categories like body parts, animals, and numbers to reinforce their expanding vocabularies.

The other half–my Grade 10 and 11 classes–were working on pronoun declensions (I, you, we, they), covering both the subject and direct-object cases (they vs. them). I was encouraging them to write simple subject-verb-object sentences using names, personal nouns, and pronouns, with fair success.

Still, I was feeling somewhat discouraged. Sure, my pupils could name a lot of things around them, but when were they going to pick up the ability to write a short letter, e-mail, or text message? More importantly, how could I teach them this–the spontaneous use of English?

Sri Lanka, in a different age marked by spice routes and caliphates, was known as Serendib. This Arabic word is the root of our modern English word, “serendipity.” While its name has changed, Sri Lanka is still rife with serendipitous stories of happy, fluke accidents, and I’m happy that one of these tales involves me and teaching.

Anne couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. I was ready for new teaching techniques, and there is just four weeks left in the school year. But let’s stop talking about me for a bit.

There will come a time when I leave Sri Lanka, so it’s far more important to train the employed teachers at Rohana, because they will stay much longer and exert far more crucial influence on the children’s education than I ever will. That was Anne’s mission; I’m just a bonus pupil in this great scheme. Still, she trained me one-on-one after school.

“Right now, you’re just teaching labels. Table, sun, happy, mother, chair, book. But labels isn’t language,” she said at that first training session.

Suddenly, all my vague frustrations with my teaching progress had crystallized into one clear statement: I was just teaching labels. Yes, yes, I thought. It’s time to teach language.

She added that there was nothing wrong with teaching labels, and that you would have to do that anyway to build up a good vocabulary.

“Also, less fingerspelling, more writing,” she said.

Duh, I thought. I had gotten into this routine where I’d sign a word–say, “mango”–and the class would fingerspell it. Sure, I varied this, but it was basically fingerspelling every single day. I hadn’t realized that, really, the children were writing down “mango” only three or four times over several classes (including on the test).

Anne explained that, when you go to the market to buy toothpaste, you don’t fingerspell “toothpaste” to the merchant. You write it down. Also, by writing down words, you learn what the shape of the word is, and how it’s supposed to look. Writing things down is critical for deaf pupils because they can’t depend on the word’s sound to extract its spelling and shape.

I thought it was amazing that this had to be explained to me, a deaf person. I went through years of deaf education; shouldn’t I already know all of this by heart? The answer, apparently, was, “hell, no!”

In our second training session, Anne introduced to me the written conversation method. It revolves around the idea of creating a “living language,” where the words and concepts taught belong to the pupils, not the teacher. By using pupil-driven instruction, the subject matter is far more relevant to them and they are able to see how they can make English work the way they want it to.

An example of this method, which originated a few decades ago in the Netherlands, is where the teacher brings an interesting photograph (in this example, a recent flood in Kalutara) to the class and have the pupils look at it. Then they chime in with their observations, and the teacher turns these signed observations into written English. One pupil signs, “flood,” and the teacher writes down, “I see flood.” Another pupil says, “boat help,” which turns into “Boat helps people.”

This continues until the whole board is filled with several sentences that have been created by the pupils themselves. Then you work with this material in many ways, like extracting key words for vocabulary-building, writing similar sentences, removing words for fill-in-the-blank exercises, and more.

One advantage of this technique is that you get to use words that are not constrained to one topic group (fruits, sports, etc.). Also, you can introduce both nouns and verbs (which I hadn’t taught as much because they are not neatly categorized into topic groups).

It’s so ingenious that I’m surprised it had to be “invented” at all. I tried this written conversation method on Wednesday with two classes.

By Friday, they were writing completely new sentences with words that were generated from Wednesday’s written conversation lesson. I was then able to introduce them to the concept of nouns and verbs, explain that English sentences generally followed the subject-verb-object structure, and had them rearrange words in erroneous sentences (i.e., “Prasanna book read.”) All in fifty minutes.

The children completely got it! I couldn’t believe it. I was so ecstatic to see them writing real English sentences and figure out (with about 75% accuracy) which words were nouns and which were verbs.

What I’ve detailed here is just a few examples of the many methods Anne trained me–and four other teachers at Rohana–to use. To explain all of them would be to write a very long blog.

So for now, it’s sufficient to say here, like I said to her at dinner, “my teaching really has changed 180 degrees because of you, Anne.”

I am truly excited about teaching again because now I have some tools with which to encourage language development. Now I’ve only got a few weeks left before the pupils go home and forget it all.

There are many, many ways to make a difference in Sri Lanka. Anne made a difference; it’s the best type of difference because it keeps on working via other people for a long, long time.

Before I end this post, I also want to mention that Anne and I discussed one interesting issue regarding questions (like who, why, what) in Sinhala Sign Language. Because I’m particularly interested in other deaf people’s perspectives, I’ve posted an entertaining, informative blog about this subject at DeafDC.com–take a look at Who’s On First!