Found In Ceylon

I remember the exact place where I swore off long-haul train rides for as long as I lived. It was in the middle of my 2002-2003 winter break, which I had planned entirely around the idea of using trains to travel between Rochester, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. What a novel concept in our jet-set age!

I knew my uncle Hank had a particular fondness for trains, often taking cross-country Amtrak trips from Chicago or New York to Los Angeles. How I imagined his romantic journeys across the American West! Bathing in the glow of sunsets over amber plains of grain, the thrill of weaving between purple mountain majesties up on high.

The Northeastern Seaboard, however, does not provide such stunning vistas, and it was somewhere in the middle of Connecticut that I looked at the time. Two hours after we left Boston’s South Station. I was headed for Washington’s Union Station. Two hours’ journey…and we were still in Connecticut? I looked out the window and saw abandoned, rusted warehouses poorly hidden behind naked trees, all beneath an oppressive gray sky.

No more long train trips for me, I decided.

So when the Matara deaf cricket team told me about the annual meeting of the Sri Lanka Deaf Cricket Association (SLDCA) in Moratuwa, about 20 km south of Colombo, I met their plan to take the train with some trepidation. Three and a half hours bordered on the line between short-haul and long-haul.

However, recognizing that I was not taking an Amtrak train through industrial wasteland, I grew excited about the idea. A train to the city!

So we all boarded the train at 5:00 in the morning–six deaf men and myself. There were supposed to be others, but they apparently overslept, and I start wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea to bring vibrating alarm clocks to distribute among them? But most of them have mobile phones with alarm clock functions anyway.

It’s still dark, but the sky slowly turns blue around Mirissa and by the time we arrive in Galle, all is bright. Two other deaf people hopped on at Weligama, and soon our group is chattering in sign, with bystanders staring at us. I know they’re struck dumb by a group of men flapping their hands wildly, but what astonishes them even more is that there’s a white person among them, also flapping his hands with equal fervor.

The staring. It gets to me. It doesn’t matter where I go or who I’m with–I am stared at. Actually, if I’m with a group of deaf people, others really stare. A white person among deaf people? It doesn’t strike them until later that this white person might also be deaf, too, because why should deaf people–or indeed, any disabilities–exist in the World Of White People where all is magically curable?

I have days where I stride along the roads, confident in my otherness even as heads turn to follow my path, but there are equally as many days where their eyes burn into my skin as harshly as the tropical sun.

But surrounding yourselves with dark-skinned Sri Lankans for months gives you funny ideas. So when I take photographs like this

and look at the camera’s display screen, I am taken aback by this apparition of a ghost. Who is that white guy next to Mahesh and Manjula? Then I realize it’s me.

Often, I’ll be signing with the kids and my eyes will catch a glimpse of my hands and I am briefly astonished that they’re white. Not dark like everybody else, and it’s a reminder that I’m different.

After five months in Sri Lanka, I don’t want to be white anymore. I imagine that I would revel in the home comfort of a Dravidian skin tone–I could stop sticking out of photographs and finally blend in with my school children and friends. However, No matter how many afternoons I spend out on the sea, I’m never going to get a tan half as dark as a light-skinned Sinhalese, so fantasies of waking up and gazing into the mirror and into a dark-skinned face remain just that–fantasies.

White privilege is funny. It’s something to be decried back home in the name of racial equality, but in Sri Lanka, it’s an institution. People delight in perpetuating white privilege, making sure I always have a seat or a lunch plate with twice as much food as anybody else.

It’s simultaneously embarrassing and gratifying–embarrassing because I don’t want special treatment because, well, I’m not special, and gratifying because it is rather nice to get special treatment.

But it’s horrifying to see Rohana children pick up my arm, fondle it gently, and say, “beautiful. me brown skin bad. me want white skin same you.” To them, white people are beautiful–their fair skin; their tresses of blonde, brown, or red; their irises shining all the colors of the rainbow. To see them say that evokes images of millions of children huddled in the dark corners of bedrooms, all of them weeping as they mire in the self-loathing of their skin tones.

In America, we buy tanning lotion so we can look just a little less ghastly. In Sri Lanka, they buy fairness creams which purportedly makes them a little more light-skinned although I am dubious if they actually work. Sinhalese and Tamil teledramas feature people so fair I wonder if they aren’t actually dubbed-over Mexican soap operas pirated from Univision’s satellite feed.

I tell them, “no! you beautiful! me want brown skin same you. me white skin bad, bad!” and we grin at each other in recognition of our identical desires.

When a new white person comes onto the scene, I suddenly find myself in the shoes of a Sinhalese child, equally awestruck as them by the white person’s resplendent beauty.

The team of volunteers at the Rohana Special School has grown to two with the addition of Ginette, a New Zealander who worked at a deaf school (Oak Lodge–the same school as Anne East mentioned several blogs ago) in London for two years and is thus well-versed with the concepts of deafness and sign language. She’s bubbly and picking up the local sign with blazing speed, and it’s weird to suddenly share my life, home, work, and three-wheeler drivers with someone else, but I am gratified by the shot-in-the-arm she has provided in the form of new ideas and fresh energy.

But sometimes I can’t help but stare at her. Not because she’s pretty, which she is, but because she’s white. Her blonde hair, her sunburnt flesh, and her green-brown eyes are so exotic that I simply must study her and drink in all of her external otherness, just like any other kid at the school.

And I knock myself for thinking this way. Silly Adam, you’re white, too, just like her. As I said, spending five months in Sri Lanka does strange things to your self-identity. And so when I arrive at the SLDCA meeting a few hours later in Moratuwa, everyone suddenly goes quiet and all eyes turn toward me. But our common deafness is a quality that trumps everything else and ties us all together, and everybody relaxes and we begin sharing our stories.

This common thread, however, does not prevent the new SLDCA president from repeatedly vilifying my temporary hometown–”Matara bad!” turned into the meeting’s mantra as the executive board condemned some of our team member’s constant questioning of their decisions. Some things about meetings never change.

On the return trip, the train is packed to the seams, but I am given a seat right away next to three mothers/grandmothers/aunts and what feels like a dozen children, all in unison crying, napping, and squirming between legs and arms. I am exhilarated by the wide-open windows; the smells of Lanka–oceans, perpetually blooming bushes, burning piles of leaves, outhouses by the sides of the tracks–swim into the railcar By the time we stop at Galle again, everyone in my group has seats. Many of us get a hot cup of Nescafe.

Many get off here at Galle, and others at Weligama. Some of us, myself included, jump off in Walgama when the train briefly stops for no reason in the middle of the tracks, as trains often do, ending a grand journey, and I walk back on the dusty roads–it is the dry season now–back to the school. It is almost dark, so my skin, set off by my black shirt, shines even more brightly against the subdued surroundings, and curious eyes follow me all the way home.

I felt better after last week’s rant about the teachers at the school.

Speaking of which, your comments have been wonderful. My next blog is will be a Talkback so I’ll have the opportunity to respond in detail. Thanks so much–some of them were very helpful!

However, it may be surprising to you that all that was actually delivered with a rather narrow perspective. When detailing problems within a system, it’s always important to step back and look at, well, the whole system.

Allow me to transport you to windswept hills of tea and cinnamon! Mother Lanka, whose proud Sinhala ancestors suckled on its ancient water tanks and created cities to elevate an infant Buddhism to its universal glories! Even as goats bleat while kneeling on railroad tracks, Lanka’s children march forward to an ever brighter future! Oh, industrious–

No. I’m sorry. The word “industrious” has no place in Sri Lanka. If we substitute it with “bureaucratic,” then we’ll be on the right track.

It is helpful to realize that teachers in Sri Lanka are government employees. In fact, a majority of Sri Lanka’s workforce is employed by the government.

Doctors at government hospitals, teachers at government schools, workers laboring on government roads, grunts at the government-run Port of Colombo–all of them are government workers and are all happily awaiting their turn to pick from the ripe pension tree.

Sri Lanka hands out government jobs as easily as coconuts grow on trees. The Port of Colombo–you know, those shipping docks where Titanic-sized boats load or unload their cargo–employs 18,000 workers. By comparison, Singapore’s ports has only 2,000 workers…and moves ten times as much cargo.

It is prestigious to work for the government. You get paid well, and you also get a very nice pension plan. The government promises entire university graduating classes full employment, and when they don’t deliver, these graduates strike by blocking off roads until each one has a government job.

This expectation of government-sanctioned employment goes to the very top. Sri Lanka’s Cabinet holds 105 members (or 107; the 4 February English newspaper contradicted itself on the number). That’s 53 Ministers, 21 Deputy Ministers, and 33 Non-Cabinet Ministers. This is easily the largest Cabinet in the world.

Among these distinguished men and women are the Minister of Water Supply and Drainage, the Minister of Irrigation and Water Management, the Non-Cabinet Minister of Water Supply, and the Non-Cabinet Minister of Irrigation. With so many people looking after Sri Lanka’s water system, we can expect nothing but the best.

Take transportation. Sri Lanka is proud to have a Minister of Petroleum Resources, a Minister of Highways and Road Development, a Minister of Transport, a Non-Cabinet Minister of Highways, a Non-Cabinet Minister of Highways, a Non-Cabinet Minister of Petroleum Resources, a Non-Cabinet Ministers of Road Passenger Transport, a Deputy Minister of Highways, and a Deputy Minister of Railways. Surely with all these enlightened Ministers continually improving Lanka’s transportation system, matter-energy teleportation cannot be far off.

And should the American President’s mission of nation-building in Mesopotamia ever be thrown into doubt, he can rest easy by choosing from any of Sri Lanka’s five Non-Cabinet Ministers of Nation-Building.

And finally, we must not forget to mention the two Ministers of Sports, who both, upon being named, raced for the previous Minister of Sports’ cushy office, with one beating out the other with only moments to spare.

That’s one hand. On the other hand, we have the simple prestige of being a teacher. It gets you hitched. The same applies for woman doctors. 80% of Sri Lanka’s female doctors do not practice medicine. They went through medical school just simply add the Dr. in front of their names, exponentially increasing their chances of getting married. What man would turn down an educated woman, especially one with a government job and pension plan?

The end result is that you have government-employed teachers who were in it just to get married, are earning comfortable salaries, are enjoying high status and prestige in society, and are difficult to fire. Well, at least the literacy rate is in its low 90s, the best in South Asia.

That’s the big picture here, folks. It’s a very different system. But just because it’s different doesn’t mean it doesn’t need reform. At Rohana, quite a few teachers and the principal do not buy into this stuffed bureaucracy and are keen on improving their little, forgotten corner of Sri Lanka’s massive educational system. I am eternally grateful for their presence.

Still, I’m going to start pushing a little harder from now on and track down teachers who are not showing up to their classes but instead wandering around the school yard, acting very much like a lost student instead of a highly respected government employee.

However, I’d be remiss to end this post, titled “The Big Picture,” without providing a few pictures of my own, so here are a few random shots:

A rare sight–girls playing cricket! This impromptu game lasted for just five or ten minutes before we had to go line up for evening prayers. Iresha, the current bowler, is waiting for someone from the field to throw her the ball, while Chamali and Nimasha are batting.

A few Saturdays ago, the boys created their own cricket tournament. From left to right, I present the Sri Lanka, England, and America teams. England came out on top with a 2-0 record, while America went for second with 1-1 and Sri Lanka came dead last, losing both games.

I still hang with the boys far more than the girls, mostly simply because I can enter their dormitory while the girls remind me that theirs is strictly off-limit to my type. However, they get more and more comfortable with me–and some are now even bold enough to poke my sides or jostle my hair. From left to right, Gayasha, Anuradha, Kalaini, Irangika, Anushika, and Pesnila.

Samantha (on far right) asked me if I wanted to go see a deaf wedding. “SURE!” I said. Only it wasn’t a wedding–the wedding was actually the day before while this was the reception. Weddings in Sri Lanka are two-day (lit. “white sari” and “red sari”) events, apparently. Wearing one of the school boys’ shirts (they strongly disapproved of my original outfit), I am standing next to the newlyweds on my left, and the bride’s four girlfriends, all deaf, surround us.

After the reception, I went back to the school, and we all walked to the temple for poya day prayers. From left to right, Ishara, Ruwan, Rajitha, Sanjeewa, Kumara, Jeewatha, Ishara, Sudath, Priyankara, and the awesome deaf matron, Chaminda.

“I never realized they needed to be painted!” a friend responded when I told him what some of the boys and I did last Sunday.

Several of the blackboards in the secondary classrooms were so riddled with permanent white pock-marks that anything chalked onto them were unreadable. One of them was inexplicably painted with glossy black paint, making it almost impossible to write on.

So on Independence Day (last Sunday, 4 February), Thusharra found an open paint shop on the other side of the river and I bought one can of blackboard paint. The boys had fun selecting the blackboards in need of painting (seven in all), taking them down, scrubbing them clean with water, and brushing each one with a fresh coat of paint. So, people, you can, too, paint one wall of your domiciles with blackboard paint and scribble away to your heart’s delight!

I’m not saying it was a big deal painting seven blackboards, but to me, it was. The project provided a new, engaging activity for several boys–something to break the monotony of weekends with their endless cricket games, naps, television (this is the really bad Sinhalese type of television programming), and little else. They learned how to apply a single coat of paint, how to brush with the grain, that you have to clean the surface before painting.

Two of the teachers came up to me the next day and said thank you. I’m glad they noticed, because many times, all I want to do is strangle them.

Berate them for chittering like hens to each other and making the students wait for five or ten minutes before the class can begin. Make a scene about how they don’t show up for their own classes and instead stuff their mouths–with their bare hands, no less!–in the teachers’ lounge. Drag them by their saris (there’s so much material to grab onto) to observe their own kids blithely cheating on exams because they can’t be bothered to sit long enough to monitor them during the examination. Break their fingers one by one because maybe with broken hands they’ll actually sign better than they do now.

I’m being unfair here. There are quite a few very good teachers. Niwathi, the advanced English teacher, is a delight to watch; many times I actually learn from her. And the former principal’s wife, who teaches Grade 5, has made her classroom the most tricked-out room in the school, with laminated papers plastered all over and handshapes in every nook and cranny, giving new meaning to the term “signing environment.”

And yes, they work under demanding circumstances. I mean, my god! Teaching deaf children! After a few months of this, I think it is an absolute miracle that I am able to string together a coherent sentence in English, much less write a college thesis paper or this blog.

But there’s so many little things they could do to make their own jobs easier and the learning experience a little smoother for everybody. Show up on time. Eat only during your off periods. Be aggressive about where your students are–find them if they’re not in your classroom. Don’t let kids get away with murde–er, cheating. Instill in them a fear of getting poor grades. Sign less, write more. Elicit feedback. Put a Sinhala dictionary in every classroom (I suppose I could do that). Encourage original expression instead of rote memorization or responding to predetermined questions. Don’t ditch school early. Give them more homework. And for god’s sake, don’t be so, so quick to leave school as soon as the closing prayers end because it only makes you look like you just can’t wait to leave. And finally, understand that you get 29 public holidays (and sometimes more) in addition to your three months off. Surely you can schedule your lives around that?

And there’s this issue of the cognitively disabled children. I’m just using the fancy term for mentally retarded, which is the term du jour at the school. I think anybody will agree with me that there are few things more wrong than placing a mentally retarded student in a deaf classroom where the teacher is using sign language. I don’t care what their reasons are—mentally retarded children, no matter how high their cognitive functions may be, cannot be placed in a classroom where the teacher is not speaking but instead flapping her hands around. They are still very much hearing people. Hire another teacher who will teach the smarter ones, and keep the three major disabilities (hearing, visual, cognitive) segregated.

Back to the teachers. Again, I say maybe I’m being unfair here. So much of what they do is inaccessible to me because I do not speak or understand Sinhala. Maybe they have a reason for everything they do. I really don’t know, and I probably never will.

Watching Rohana’s teachers also makes me wonder how I got such great teachers throughout my entire education. I am hard pressed to think of a bad one (it would be unkind to point out my P.E. teachers here; I just hated those classes, and consequently anyone who taught it). I mean, a few of my teachers were so cool I had them twice (a shout-out here to Mrs. Carrillo and Mrs. Ebeling).

Are there any bad teachers in America? Where do they go? Sri Lanka?

With respect to my own teaching, I’ve taken a new route where I am absolutely drilling into the children the 5 W’s and 2 H’s (the second H being “how many,” because that’s really very different than “how”). I’ve convinced myself that this is the way to go because it will provide them with the invaluable skill of asking questions. It also provides far less immediate gratification than teaching the names of fruits or sports, because the progress isn’t as evident or rapid.

It is my admittedly uneducated opinion that before the students can hope to reach even five percent of the way to English fluency, they need to start asking questions and understanding that language is for them to express their ideas and feelings, not for them to use to finish their homework. So by making lesson plans centered entirely on the idea of questions, maybe I’ll make that “aha” moment strike before too long.

But it gets discouraging after you say “what” a thousand times and they get it wrong. We’re coming from opposite sides of the English skill spectrum here. And think about it–they’re doubly challenged because they have little English vocabulary to work with compared with peers from English-speaking countries. Deaf children in America are at least bombarded with English words all over, so they’ve managed to develop a sense of what they are sort of supposed to look like (i.e. balloon vs xvbuygzt) and they can pluck one out of their internal vocabulary lists when constructing expressive sentences. No such luck here for the children at the Rohana Special School.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but there are times where I honestly can’t bring myself to teach one more English class. It’s draining to teach such basic English day after day. And I constantly struggle with the notion of teaching English to them in the first place–shouldn’t all this energy be spent on helping them learn their native language, Sinhala, instead of a second language? So, when I’m faced with an, “ugh, I can’t teach English right now” moment, I reach deep into myself to find some energy reserve I didn’t know existed, and teach…

Maths! For some reason, it’s a plural “Math” here (and I’ve also noticed the same usage of the plural form in the U.K. via the materials we’ve received from there). It’s electrifying to teach multiplication or fractions or exponents. Answers are always either absolutely, positively true or outrageous, bald-faced lies.

It’s disappointing that some kids in the terminal grades (10, 11) can’t divide, and I know half the problem is that they don’t get enough maths homework. Five problems is not going to make a child understand how multiplication works–they need to do it one hundred times! Unfortunately, the textbooks here aren’t as chock-full of nauseating homework problems as they are back home. They just let you try a new arithmetic concept out ten times and then move on to the next concept.

On Monday, I taught Grade 7-C the basic concept behind division–taking a number and putting its parts into a certain number of groups and then seeing how many is in each group. It was part of an activity where I was helping them make a grid on a large piece of paper so they could write out their daily bell schedule, so we had 51 centimeters on one side and had to make 10 row, so how tall should each row be? They totally got it–5 centimeters! They can do division!

Maybe I’ll become a Maths teacher in my next incarnation. For now, my main aim remains English, and I’m still doggedly confident that sooner or later, the breakthroughs will come; they’ll start thinking for themselves and realizing that they can write English spontaneously. It’ll happen; I have to believe that it will.