Found In Ceylon

Transition

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.

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