On The Lighter Side…
Posted in Sri Lanka, 2 years agoDespite the impression that my recent blogs have given, my stay in Sri Lanka isn’t a constantly breathless event. It has its quieter moments (usually on the weekends). However, being in a foreign country (the poorer the better, maybe?) is like being given permanent front-row seats to a private viewing of the boldness and colorfulness of life in its rawer forms.
Break
School has ended for the 2006 term, so I am looking very much forward to the next few weeks off. December break is one week less than everybody expected because Mr. Abeygunawardana announced to the abbreviated student body last Friday morning, the last day of school, that the 2007 term would begin 2 January. Not 8 January as everyone had thought (and planned) for weeks prior.
Highlights of my shorter-than-planned break include scuba dives, luxuriating in the sun reading books, preparing English lessons for next year, working on the school website, writing postcards, and visiting the holy city of Kataragama with the school matrons. But best of all, I will be climbing mountains, visiting ancient Buddhist sites, and seeing the best parts of this magnificent island with my sister, Liz!
Half of Sri Lanka knows about her impending arrival (and what she looks like, her martial status, her age, her job, her education, and that she is my only sibling). The earlier start date of January 2 has its silver lining; it means Liz will get to see the school in action (but think sloth-like action. 3 January is a poya holiday, so most students probably won’t show up until 4 or 8 January,). I can’t wait, but I keep having nightmares of not being able to communicate with her because I supposedly have completely forgotten American Sign Language.
Lactose-Based Products
Sri Lankan yogurt is the best yogurt I’ve ever had. I’ve never been able to tolerate eating American-brand plain yogurt–it always had to be flavored with mixed berry, strawberry, blueberry, or some other berry. But here, I’ve had nothing but plain yogurt and I can’t get enough of it.
Curd, on the other hand, isn’t so great. Sammi eats it every morning for breakfast (except for days where he has fallen under my insidious influence and is compelled to eat Froot Loops). I’m still not exactly sure what curd is, but it comes from a cow, that’s for sure, and is usually eaten with honey.
And ice cream! Sri Lankan ice cream has a distinctive, almost ice-y taste that qualifies it as either the most authentic or most fictitious ice cream in the world. I am partial to vanilla. The boys have picked up on my great love for the local ice cream, and are always eager to keep me well-supplied with small bowls of the white stuff if that day’s sponsored meal includes it.
Cheese, however, is a non-entity in Sri Lanka. As Jenny pointed out when we discussed this very important topic, there are cows everywhere–why is there no locally-produced cheese? The only cheese available is the Austrian-imported Happy Cow Cheese; its label is so distinctive the children have a sign specifically for this product. WIth a small wheel (eight pieces) retailing at 200 rupees, it’s little wonder that schoolboys Supun and Prasad got into a fist-fight over one allegedly stolen piece.
Mr. Bean
In the eyes of the Sinhalese, I apparently bear a striking resemblance to Mr. Bean, the clumsy Briton played by Rowan Atkinson.
It started with the principal a couple of months ago when he remarked to his secretary, “He looks like Mr. Been, doesn’t he?”
“Who?” I asked.
“B-E-E-N,” he spelled.
“Been?”
“The comedian, Mr. Been.”
“Oh, you mean, Mr. Bean?”
“Yes. You look like him.”
So now every other time I chat with him in his office, he brings up this doppelgänger. One time, the office floor had been just mopped and I was treading carefully on the slippery tile. “Mr. Bean!” the principal exclaimed while pointing at me, and the secretary immediately fell into stifled laughter.
I have to assume that Mr. Bean is very popular in Sri Lanka because there is a specific sign for him, and it isn’t just Mr. Abeygunawardana that’s using that sign anymore. Many of the girls at the school now point out this resemblance, and it has spread to some of the boys as well. Specific congruences include my nose, my stride, my hair, and my expressions.
So it’s time for me to watch a Mr. Bean DVD soon so that I can refresh my memory. I just hope it won’t be like looking into a mirror.
Rice and Curry
Sri Lankans eat rice and curry three times a day. Sure, there are exceptions; sometimes a fish bun will do for breakfast, or a family will have a slab of fish for dinner. But from my observations, people are eating from a plate filled with rice and various curries, dhals, and stews for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I can’t really complain. The school cooks (Ruchira’s mother and another cook who also has a son with Down’s, Haditha, attending the school) do a marvelous job of cooking for everybody.
There’s also those sponsors, who come between three and six times a week, and some sponsors bring so much food that students have to stop eating before they’ve finished off their plates.
All these has resulted in a situation where I am more than happy to eat institutional food and will sometimes go out of my way to get at it, meaning I’ll stay extra-late so I can have a school dinner instead of eating hotel food (not as great). Saves me money, too.
Thursday night, I slept over at the school. Friday was the last day of the term and there were so few boys left that I didn’t have the heart to say no to their “will you sleep over tonight with us?” pleas. Luckily, Thursday dinner was sponsored and it was a feast in every definition of the word. My plate must have weighted two pounds and I finished off every last piece of rice.
Per usual, a few of the sponsors stood nearby intently watching me eat–the sight of a white person semi-expertly mixing up rice and curries with his right hand is irresistible to many. One person even took several pictures of me with his camera phone.
It has been a process to learn how to eat with my hands. The food, is of course, exquisitely prepared for this very method of consumption, but it took me a while to get it (Americans don’t run around squeezing filet mignons). Originally, I would just gingerly put food next to each other, slightly mash it all up (avoiding any possibility that the shape of individual pieces might be altered), and slowly throw it into my mouth.
Now, thanks to the boys’ tireless lessons, I vigorously rub every piece of food together until all of it has dissolved into a light brown and green mass (it can look very red if beets are served during that meal). “Work it–hard” is my mantra; the food, is after all, inert and will not object to being squeezed within millimeters of its former self. The harder I press different curries and rice together, the better the resulting concoction is.
Memory: Gayan and Sanjeewa, two schoolboys, were treated to an American-style dinner at a hotel in Mirissa. Sanjeewa did just fine using a fork, but Gayan tired out after a while. I looked on with horror as he mashed together french fries, ketchup, tomato-onion-lettuce salad, and grilled fish pieces into round red-yellow masses and threw each one into his mouth.
The really great part about this particular dinner last Thursday, was that Supun, who was sitting next to me, suddenly served me a ball of everything mixed up. He motioned to me to eat it out of his hand. And I did. I then immediately mixed up a similar ball and served it to him; he ate it out of my hand.
And I repeated this with four other boys - Sanjeewa, Jeewatha, Prasanna, and Priyankara. Each ball tasted uniquely because of the different concentrations of curries and rice that each boy mixed.
It was just this wonderful moment of friendship with us eating out of each others’ hands. It was testimony that oceans of distance could be forgotten and new cultures embraced. For what could be more personal than serving food by hand to other mouths, with nary a utensil to increase the distance between feeder and feedee?
I was reminded of this story David told me once about this mother who still fed his son food by hand even thought he was in his mid-20s and married. In fact, this mother barked at the son’s wife that only she, and certainly not the wife, could feed him.
I dread going back to a country where south Asian food is served in restaurants with accompanying forks and knives–because that’s just not how it is meant to be eaten.
Tidbits
On a rainy morning, I observed from my three-wheeler a man walking along the street with one hand holding an umbrella and the other hand occupied with brushing his teeth. Since then I have learned that people seem to like to walk around brushing their teeth for a very long time; they will walk outside their homes and look around their neighborhood during this morning ritual. It is odd to me because I really can’t brush my teeth for longer than one minute, maybe a minute and half at the most.
The Sinhalese seem to be constantly falling in love with my blue eyes. “They are so beautiful,” they exclaim. They also believe there is nothing more beautiful than a white person wearing a white shirt. Even though Sri Lankans should be used to be seeing white people, it is very difficult for me to remain anonymous. This is especially so when I am walking down the street and endure stares, waves, and yells of hello-and-whatever-else-they-are-saying-but-I-can’t-hear-them from every person that passes me by. I keep wondering if I have a piece of spinach stuck between my teeth or have left my fly open, but it’s really just me that they’re fascinated with.
Fairness cream is in popular demand throughout Sri Lanka. This cream supposedly makes you skin more fair, although I have yet to see it work as described. This infatuation with whiteness is probably why many characters on Sri Lankan teledramas do not bear the dark Sinhalese skin that I see everywhere around me (and that is a fact I lament).
And to touch on the topic of food again, fish buns are wonderful no matter the time of day, and I have to say with smug pride that I consistently surprise my companions with my ability to withstand very spicy curries on a daily basis. Take that, you lousy capiscum!
I think it is remarkable how quickly I have gotten used to taking very cold showers in a room that is both a shower stall and an entire bathroom (After a shower, I have to wipe off the toilet seat and the mirror above the sink; they’re all really that close to each other).
It is distressing (and hard to believe when living in the peaceful area that is Matara) that Sri Lanka is embroiled in a civil war. It angers me that it is the same old stupid story again–an ethnic conflict between two groups. We have all seen this story played out so many times on so many stages around the world, and we all know it does very little good for anybody except defense contractors and weapon manufacturers. Why have we not learned yet?! It is not a hard lesson to master but it is likely one of the hardest of all if you are part of the ethnic group entangled in the conflict.
Please include peace for Sri Lanka and all other ethnic hotspots–Sudan, Israel, Northern Ireland, Oaxaca, East Timor, Tibet, Kashmir, Iraq, Lebanon–in your year-end meditations.
Ayubowan!
The Class of 2006
Posted in Sri Lanka, 2 years, 1 month agoI strolled onto the campus Friday morning filled with pride. All the preparations were done; the monk would come at 3:00 pm and we would have a ceremony that the graduates would remember forever and that would be so awesome the school would simply have to do it every December from now on.
Then Samantha came up to me and asked, “What’s going on at three o’clock today? Mr. Abeygunawardana just told us about some function and that a monk was coming here?”
“Graduation, of course. You mean he didn’t tell you before?”
“No. He didn’t tell anybody. He just told all of us about it this morning.”
I was dumbstruck. I had been assured by Mr. Abeygunwaradana that the teachers had known about graduation all along; after all, many of them had seen the certificates and gowns. What did they think it was for, my own staging of King Lear behind the girls’ dormitory?
A few more sympathetic teachers approached me later and said they probably could not make it due to the principal’s short notice but they would try. The feeling I got from the rest was that none of them would be able to attend. What is a graduation ceremony without teachers? I thought.
Then I recollected myself and reminded myself it was for the students, not for the teachers. Also, less teachers meant less chairs that we would have to move from upstairs into the main room.
Throughout the school day, I kept reminding the Grade 7, 8, 9, and 10 boys and girls that as soon as they finished their Sinhala and Buddhism exams, they had to help move the chairs downstairs and set up the room for graduation. Then, and only then, could they take the rest of the day off.
But when they finished their exams, they did neither. They all assembled around the Grade 11 students who were graduating, and started saying good-bye. Two students had borrowed their parents’ cell phones and were taking pictures of everybody else with it. I joined in the moment, taking many pictures of them. As usual, the students reminded me that I must not forget to print them out by tomorrow morning at the latest, and I told them I would do it within a few weeks.
However, it was getting a little late, past 12:30, so I told a few boys who were sitting around, bored, to start moving the chairs downstairs.
“What for?” Jeewatha and Sameera both asked.
“Graduation!” I said.
“What about graduation?”
“Three o’clock today! I’ve been telling you every day this week! Graduation! Grade 11! They! Go! Bye-Bye! Event! Gown! Sad! Finish! School! Monk! Come! Three o’clock!”
They continued sitting there, not quite understanding the tall order I was asking of them.
Finally, I took a chair and carried it downstairs. This action worked, because everybody immediately noticed the white American teacher performing actual physical labor–a big no-no–and sprang into action.
Jeewatha took a broom and started sweeping the floor, and almost all the kids took two chairs each and carried it downstairs. I began grabbing the black plastic teachers’ chairs from the primary classrooms, and Gayan ran up to me, saying, “No! Don’t work, we’ll do it. Sit down over there.”
I still wasn’t too trusting of them to finish the job, so I kept moving the chairs. Udaya, a Grade 11 boy who had installed himself as site boss, berated the younger boys, “Look! Adam is carrying a chair! A TEACHER! You lazy bums! Finish your jobs! Move those chairs!”
Within thirty minutes, the main room was done, and everyone went to play at the pavilion. The mothers (no fathers came to the graduation ceremony) started arriving at around 1:30.
Sanjeewani came up to me a few minutes after her mother arrived and said, “We have to leave at 2:30. I can’t go to the ceremony. Talk to my mother, please!”
I approached her mother and asked her to please stay until at least 4:00.
“No. We have to catch the bus at 3:00. Mr. Abeygunawardana told us the ceremony was 2:00.” I knew this was not true because I was in the room with the parents two weeks earlier when the principal clearly said 3:00.
“Please stay. Your daughter will be wearing a beautiful gown, and she will get a gift and a certificate, and she will give a speech. She has been here for years, what’s another hour?” She was unmoved. “A monk comes here at 3:00 to give blessings; won’t you stay so he can bless your daughter? Please?”
She refused, and Sanjeewani started sulking in the corner.
“Please?” I asked one more time.
“Okay. But we must leave at 3:30,” she said.
“Thank you very much,” I said, and went up to Sanjeewani to tell her that she could make it after all.
“But it probably won’t be finished at 3:30,” she said.
“Don’t worry; you’ll make your speech first before the other graduates, and then you can leave.”
She appeared mollified by this. With the family dispute resolved, my thoughts turned to another matter. The principal was not here at the school and it was almost 2:30. Where the hell was he? Would he miss his own school’s graduation ceremony? Was it that unimportant to him?
As if to reinforce this point, Kumara, a Grade 6 boy, came up to me and said, “What’s the chairs that we moved downstairs for?”
“Graduation. Remember, I told you many times?” I responded.
“Oh, yeah. But why? We already gave our gifts to them this morning,” he said.
“I told you to wait until 3:00 to give them the gifts at the ceremony!”
“Oh. But why?”
The uninformed teachers. The absent principal. The uncaring mother. The preoccupied students. At this moment, I decided that I had been going about all this wrong. No one cared about graduation. Despite it being celebrated at other schools and universities, graduation was obviously a completely foreign concept to the Rohana community, like trying to teach the Eucharist to Buddhists monks. Why couldn’t I have left well enough alone and respected their cultural norms?
Then Mr. Abeygunawardana came riding on his bicycle, saying that he had a meeting that went on longer than expected, and asked if all was ready for 3:00? A few minutes later, two other teachers came walking through the school gates, ready to watch the ceremony.
Then Iresha, a Grade 9 girl, said, “Isn’t it almost time for the ceremony? What should we do now?”
Maybe there was still hope. It was now 2:45, so I told the eight Grade 11 students to come to the library to put on their gowns. And as soon as I saw them giggling when they looked at each other wearing the funny costumes, I was reminded why I had done this in the first place: to recognize and celebrate the graduates.
From left to right: Ishara, Lakmal, Sanjeewani, Chintha, Roshani, Chintha, Pasindu, and Udaya. They loved their outfits and some of the other kids started looking into the library, wondering where we had all disappeared to.
I told the eight graduates to come outside for photographs. The boys came out first, showing off their maroon gowns.
However, the girls were mortified to be seen wearing these gowns. “It’s like we’re at university!” Chintha squealed. With the exception of Ishara, they came out huddling together, trying to hide from everybody else who were watching from the central courtyard.
Many photographs were taken, including one of all the students who happened to be present and not sleeping (a few boys stumbled out of the dormitory after the photo shoot, wondering what they had missed).
The mothers were all seated in the pavilion, watching the commotion at the playground, so after I had taken the photos, I told each graduate to come grab their mother for a family picture. The one exception was Ishara, whose mother unfortunately couldn’t make it because she was sick and her home is twice as far away as everybody else’s.
Sanjeewani, when it was her turn, came up to her mother, said, “Okay, we’re done fighting, right? Let’s take the picture,” and her mother smiled and walked with her to stand in front of my camera. Peace in our time!
Finally, it was time, and I told everybody, including Mr. Abeygunawardana, to come sit down in the main room. Then the monk came, and suddenly the boys went wild.
“The monk is here! The monk is here! Go get flowers! Candles! Incense! Where’s the white sheet for his chair!” they all screamed.
I realized I had not taken the time to think about how to properly welcome the monk. Everyone stood up in the room for ten tense minutes while we waited for the flowers to be collected, the incense lit, and the tray with a cream soda bottle and glass prepared, and all offered to the monk before the ceremony could begin. I kept imagining next Tuesday’s meeting with Mr. Abeygunawardana, being scolded for neglecting such time-honored and sacred rituals.
After this offering had been made (the monk revealed no emotion during all this), I welcomed everybody to the ceremony, especially thanking the parents who had traveled far just for this moment. Then the monk spoke for about ten minutes, with the former principal’s wife/teacher interpreting to the graduates and me copy-interpreting back to everybody else. It was more of a prayer than a speech because everyone had their hands clasped together, and the monk repeatedly asked for blessings to be given to the students to do well on their O/L exams and to support them in their quest for a good life.
Then Mr. Abeygunawardana spoke to the audience. First, he spoke in Sinhala, then he repeated it all in sign language. If you have met Mr. Abeygunawardana, you will know that he likes to talk. And talk.
It was already past 3:30, and I kept looking to Sanjeewani. She had a pained expression on her face, probably imagining her mother yelling at her later for making them late for the bus. I kept whispering to her, “I’m so sorry, so sorry!”
By the way, the principal’s speech was really nice, and he validated all my hard work by saying it was so important to recognize these eight graduates who were wearing beautiful maroon gowns and how they had grown up at the school and would be very missed. It was very good for me to hear that from him.
Then it was time for the eight valedictorians’ speeches. Sanjeewani went first.
When she was done, she bowed down to her mother, who had tears in her eyes. I was thrilled that she could be convinced to stay to watch this ceremony and be proud of her daughter.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really get to see any of the graduates’ speeches because I was too busy taking pictures and giving the diplomas and gifts to either the principal, the monk, or a teacher (we kept changing the procedure as we went along) to officially give to the graduate. Still, I’m sure they were great although a few clearly came down with stage fright and forgot what they were planning to say.
However, Sanjeewani, after a couple others had given their speeches, approached the principal to bow to him and say good-bye. Instead of touching Sanjeewani’s head, he turned to her mother, saying, “No. Please stay a little while longer.” And of course, you can’t argue with the principal, so her mother stayed put in her chair, and Sanjeewani walked back to her seat with a huge grin on her face.
Chamali and Lakmal:
And Ishara receiving her diploma and gift from Samantha (the shorter one), another teacher, and Principal Abeygunawardana:
After all eight had made their speeches, the former principal’s wife/teacher then gave a short speech, and I also gave one talking about how deaf people could do whatever they wanted or something like that; I really don’t remember. And then it was all over and I could scarcely believe it. A few graduates had wet eyes as they hugged other students good-bye and bowed down to teachers and matrons.
I told them to put their gowns back in the library (so future classes could wear them for their graduations), and they picked up from the principal’s office a new savings account book with an initial deposit of 500 rupees (USD $5.00) each.
And all too quickly, pairs of mother and child, with luggage in tow (many could fit their worldly possessions in a small duffel bag), walked out through the school gates. I want to type here poignantly “out of the gates for the last time” but they all actually come back 11 December to take a van to Colombo to take the O/L exams so I will see them again and give them prints of their graduation photos.
But it doesn’t make this good-bye any easier for me. Because I’ve gotten to know all of them as real human beings with minds and hearts, it’s scary to know that possibly only a few of them may triumph and many of them may not. In my eyes, they deserve every last chance they get and more.
This is my first graduation as a teacher; how do people who have worked in this field for decades deal with the constant uncertainty surrounding their students’ futures? Do they get used to it, much like funeral directors supposedly get used to death?
Pasindu was the last residential student to leave, and the most father-like figure to all the other boys, so we all followed him to the bus stop down the street for one last goodbye to the graduating class. Before he boarded the bus, he told me to please tell all the other volunteers at the school, Nerissa, David, and Sammi that he will never, ever forget them. That’s him in the middle, between the needlework teacher and Prasad:
In a community of about than 100 students, Chamali, Chintha, Ishara, Lakmal, Pasindu, Roshani, Sanjeewani, and Udaya have been the pack leaders. They walked away from the school feeling acknowledged, honored, and proud–but most of all, with the knowledge that, in a country indifferent to their struggles, they are valued, loved, and will be missed. That’s all I wanted to accomplish.
Congratulations to the Class of 2006!
Run-Up to Graduation
Posted in Sri Lanka, 2 years, 1 month ago“This is new for us,” Mr. Abeygunawardana said slowly, signaling that the school community needed time to understand what graduation is about. We were in another one of our meetings discussing preparations for the graduation ceremony to be held on Friday the first of December.
Rohana’s history with graduation is haphazard; prior to 2005, there was no ceremony to recognize departing students. There was a small ceremony last year where volunteers Jill and Peter equipped graduates with cell phones, but my students didn’t cough up additional details. One thing was for sure: they apparently did not receive diplomas.
When you consider that many graduates have spent all their childhood living at the school, letting them walk out of the school gates without any recognition or a certificate is criminal. In fairness, however, the concept of high school graduation is a little muddled in Sri Lanka.
After Grade 11, the students take the Ordinary Level (O/L) examinations, a grueling nationwide testing program that lasts for one and a half weeks and queries test-takers on all school subjects from Buddhism to agricultural studies and Tamil. So it’s only until after the students take the tests that they are officially “graduated.” And even with that, some can opt to come back to school to study the O/L tests so they can retake them the next year and get higher scores. And if they do, they can also come back to the same school to study for the Advanced Level (A/L) examinations, which is their ticket to university.
So high school graduation in Sri Lanka, because of its not-so-finality, isn’t exactly one of those milestones. But still, Rohana Special School is, in my eyes, a special case, and was deserving of a graduation ceremony because of how the students have lived, studied, played, and grown up together in a residential community with an unique communication environment for so many years.
So it was when I expressed these thoughts to Mr. Abeygunawardana that he appointed me as the school’s Official Graduation Day Planner. To make extra sure that I wasn’t imposing some foreign cultural event on the hapless Sinhalese, I asked Mr. Abeygunawardana last month if universities and other secondary schools had graduation ceremonies, and he responded affirmatively–”but only some of them, not all.”
So I began the preparations right there. Every graduation ceremony must have two things: gowns and certificates. Here’s how I accomplished each:
Gowns
Rohana’s colors are maroon and gold (hey, just like Torrey Pines! Go Falcons!). I dug up some photos of my RIT graduation, loaded them onto my camera, and showed them to the principal.
“See, that is what a graduation gown looks like,” I said.
“But this is not an university. They cannot wear university gowns.”
“But are any of them realistically going to university? This is a special school; let’s make this special,” I retorted.
Later, I saw the fallacy in my argument: a lot of people will not get Ph.Ds–does that mean they should get the chance to wear Ph.D regalia regardless? Still, let’s ignore logic here, okay?
He pondered this for a moment and said, “O.K.” Then he pointed, in the photo, at fellow graduate Amanda and our faculty adviser, Eileen Biser. “Is this your sister and mother?”
After I told him no and showed him for the umpteenth time the other photos of my family, I went to the fabric store and bought 20 yards of semi-shiny maroon fabric. The next day, Chaminda, the new deaf male matron, and I visited four local tailors who all declined to make our gowns (I was showing them the same photo of Amanda, Mrs. Biser, and myself at our graduation).
Then Chaminda had the brilliant idea of asking a teacher, the wife of the former Rohana principal, who lived nearby. She pointed us to a tailor shop behind the deaf association building. We walked there and Chaminda took over right there, detailing the entire outfit while I sat watching everybody speak Sinhala. It would all be done on Wednesday the 29th, the tailor said.
The next day, I went to talk to Mr. Abeygunawardana about something else, and he brought up the graduation gowns. He asked to see the photograph again, and I showed it to him.
After he pondered the photograph for a while, he said, “We cannot make this graduation gown.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they look like lawyers.” (Sri Lanka’s legal system, similar to the British one, has lawyers dress up like American judges.)
“So?”
“In Sri Lanka, it is against the law to dress up like a lawyer.”
“Oh,” I said, imagining my perfect graduation ceremony burst into flames. Fortunately, Chaminda saw our conversation, and came to my rescue. He suggested adding Mandarian collars and school badges to the gowns, and pointed out they were maroon, not black.
“If you make those changes, then I think it will be okay. But I–not you or the students, but I–may have problems with the authorities,” the principal said.
So Chaminda and I went back to the tailor shop, handed him the school badges, and told him to make the necessary changes. We picked it up on Wednesday evening and they looked wonderful. I showed it off to Mr. Abeygunawardana Thursday morning, but he sat at his desk quietly, contemplating this strange outfit.
“Put it on,” he finally commanded.
I obliged; he then called a few teachers to come into the office. After a few minutes of giggling and tittering to the principal in Sinhala, all at my expense, they left. He told me that the teachers liked it, but thought it was still a little too similar to a lawyer’s gown. He had a few ideas, however, and would let me know in a few hours.
I was napping in the dormitory when one of the matrons woke me up and flashed a small bottle of gold glitter glue in my face.
“For Christmas cards?” I asked. We had gone through a few bottles of that same glitter to make hundreds of Christmas cards two weeks earlier.
“No, for the gowns!” he said. “I’ll write down the name of the school on the gown like Mr. Abeygunawardana asked, and then it’ll look perfect.”
Gold-glittered Sinhalese letters glued on graduation gowns? I thought. But I didn’t care anymore; I just wanted it all to be finished already.
“It’ll be done tomorrow morning,” he said.
On Friday morning, he handed me a bag of eight gowns, all inscribed with the school name in gold glitter. Surprisingly, it looked pretty good. I brought one sample to the principal’s office for him to see. I asked him to please tell me quickly if it was okay; maybe there was still enough time for me to give it back to the nearby tailor for last-minute alterations.
He quietly observed the gown for a while. Then he said again, “Put it on.” So I put it on. He then again called for teachers to come in and look at me. Again, they giggled at me.
“I think we should take a picture of Adam,” one of the teachers said. I motioned to my camera on the principal’s desk and the teacher took it. I picked up one of the diplomas to display for the camera. “Be sure to include President Mahinda Rajapaske’s portrait in the picture,” the principal said.
The teachers walked out of the office, still giggling, while I showed Mr. Abeygunawardana the image on my camera.
“Yes, this works,” he said. “Thank you.”
Certificates
About two weeks before the graduation ceremony, I asked Mr. Abeygunawardana if he had diplomas for the students (this was the same meeting where we discussed the gowns). He said no, and I told him I would make them for the school. In addition, they would be bilingual in both Sinhala and English, with Sinhala on top, of course. He seemed delighted at that idea.
I started working on them the next Saturday back at the hotel. I looked for a Sinhalese font online and found Malthi. After installing it on my laptop. It took me about ten minutes to type three words in Sinhala: Rohana Special School (I was working from an photo I took of the big sign in front of the school).
I then typed in a formal Old English font some fancy language about how the student, upon having satisfactorily completed the studies prescribed by the school administrators, was now hereby awarded this diploma on the first of December. Then I typed up some Sinhalese placeholder gibberish so others could see where the Sinhalese text, once somebody translated it from the English, would go on the diploma.
Amila and Chaminda visited me later that Saturday and I showed them the certificate. They both pointed at the laptop and said, “No! Wrong!”
I thought they were pointing at that gibberish text, so I explained that it was just there until somebody could give me the correct Sinhala translation. Chaminda shook his head and said, “No, no, you spelled the school name wrong.”
I looked at it, wondering what I did wrong. I had, after all, carefully re-typed it from a photograph of the school sign. Maybe the school sign was also misspelt?
“No, the sign is correct.” He pointed at one Sinhala letter. “This incorrect letter, for example, is very similar to the correct one, but there is just a little line that’s supposed to be there, but isn’t there.” I showed him the Malthi character map and he pointed at the correct letter. I replaced the wrong letter with the correct one, and we did this a few more times.
I suppose the closest analogy in English would be the difference between the letter i with a dot and without the dot.
“To be honest, this looks almost exactly the same as it did before,” I said to Chaminda.
“Yes, Sinhala can be very subtle, but this was wrong before and now this is correct.”
I asked him to write down the Sinhala translation for the English text I had written, but he said he thought it was better if the principal could see it first.
A few days later, I brought my laptop to Mr. Abeygunawardana’s office and showed him the diploma, asking him if the English text sounded okay.
He pointed at one English letter and asked if it was a b, h, or v. “I can’t read this. Are you sure this is English?”
“Yes, it’s English.”
“But it does not look like English,” he retorted.
Belatedly, I realized that to the untrained eye, Old English script might as well as be Klingon. I quickly changed the text to Arial.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Now I can read this.” Then he started shaking his head. “No, no, I already have some language for you.”
He then pulled out a very official-looking Sinhala diploma with a red seal on it from his files.
A little aghast, I asked why we weren’t using that one.
“Because this is from 2001,” and to stress this, he pointed at where it said “2001.”
“Oh, okay, but you want me to use the same language on this diploma for the new diploma?”
“Yes.”
I motioned to him to give it to me.
“I cannot give this diploma to you because this says 2001. I will have the secretary retype it for you in Word so that it says 2006.”
I said that wasn’t really necessary because I could just change the 1 to a 6, but he insisted, so I gave my USB thumb drive to the secretary. At least I can just copy and paste the Sinhala text without retyping it, I thought.
Before I left the office, he said to me, “In English, this must be called a certificate, not a diploma, because the students have not taken their O/L examinations yet.” I agreed, not in the mood to argue the nuances of academic English.
A few hours later, I picked up the USB thumb drive, inserted it in my laptop, and opened up the new document. It was garbled–apparently I didn’t have the right Sinhala font. After getting the Sandaya font off the secretary’s computer, I saw that I would have to, once again, re-type it in the Malthi font I was using for the diploma–er, certificate.
I did just that, then asked Samantha the deaf teacher to come in and help me translate it into English.
She looked at the Sinhala text first, and just like Chaminda last Saturday, pointed out dozens of mistakes I had made where I mistook one letter for another very similar-looking letter. “Sinhala can be tough, isn’t it?” she asked.
Then she started translating each word into sign language for me to type back into English. The word-for-word translation made no sense to me, so Samantha said, “Wait. Let me sign it all at once, then you type it down, okay?”
We did that, and to confirm the translation, I signed the English text back to her. “Yes, yes, it’s perfect,” she cried.
Chaminda, who knows English very well, came in a few minutes later to look at it and agreed.
The next day, I took the laptop with me to class where I had each one of the eight graduating students tell me his or her name in English and Sinhala. This was tricky because many students did not know how to write their second name (sort of like a middle name) in English, or how to write their family name initials (H.G., M.L.; these are often written in English) in Sinhala. But they were very fascinated with my laptop and how I was typing their names in both languages, so quickly and without too much trouble, I had eight certificates ready to be printed.
Then Pasindu asked, “This laptop? Do you have all the pictures you’ve taken of us on it?”
I said yes–all 1,528 photos and movies.
“Show us!” they all exclaimed, and I ran a slide show for about a dozen students to watch until the laptop battery ran out.
At the Beach Inns where I live, Indika is sort of the manager (his family owns the hotel), my scuba instructor, and my companion when I sit at one of the tables in the evening. He had just hung two large, colorful signs advertising his scuba diving services, so I asked him if he could take me to the print shop where he had those signs made. Perhaps I could print out the certificates on nice paper at the same shop.
He said that print shop didn’t do smaller jobs like that, but he would take me to a different printer. On Tuesday evening, I hopped onto his motorbike and we set off for the printer.
I wasn’t expecting a Kinko’s, but at least a shop with a couple color laser printers and copiers. Instead, I saw a very small, dusty brick-wall shop with two large antique-looking printing presses and a dirty computer in the corner. Where modern buttons and displays should be, I saw levers and pulleys.
“No, this is too much; I just need a little color printer,” I told Indika. “Like an actual computer printer, not a big press.” The man at the print shop, after looking at my certificates on my USB thumb drive, confirmed what I said. He explained that they used templates to run off copies–in other words, a real printing press–and because I had eight certificates, they would have to make eight templates for one copy each, and that was just silly. But he was really nice about it and gave me ten sheets of heavy, stylish paper perfect for printing certificates.
We motored to Nilmini Matara, a private post office that had a new Canon color inkjet, but the owner said we couldn’t use our paper in it. We rode to the Nine Hearts digital photo printing lab thinking we could print out the certificates on matte paper, but the woman there said they were out of matte. So we tried the Fujifilm photo lab, and this time, the man behind the counter said they had matte paper, but couldn’t print from a PDF file for some reason.
So Indika told me, “Well, let’s try my color printer. The black isn’t working too well, but it’s worth a shot.” Back at the hotel, we did just that, but true to his words, the black would fade out halfway through each copy we printed.
The next morning, I asked Amila, who works at the Fine Bit Computers shop, if they had any color printers. He said absolutely, so after school, I went over there. Duminda, the manager, told me that they did have one, but it was old and out of color ink. He called a few shops nearby, but none of them had working color printers.
Does nobody in this entire town have a working color inkjet? I thought. I just want to print out eight certificates!
Then he said, “Why don’t you try the deaf association building? They have a new printer which we just gave them. A very good one, too.”
I thought it was poetic how the tailors who made the gowns happened to be right behind the building; that particular village block was turning out to be very useful for me.
I took a three-wheeler to the deaf association, but the doors were padlocked and there was was a sign in Sinhala. The driver told me it read that the building would be open today at 4:00 pm.
It was already 5:00 pm, but then I spotted somebody taking a shower using a well and a bucket behind the building. It was one of the association members, and luckily he had the keys.
Opening the doors, I ran inside and started up the computer. It didn’t have Acrobat Reader and the internet connection was so slow it’d take two hours to download it. Luckily, I found a pirated copy of Photoshop on the PC, so I used that to print out the eight PDFs on the very nice, very new, and very slow printer. After nearly a hour, I had eight gorgeous full-color graduation certificates ready for the principal’s signature.
On Thursday morning, I showed them to the principal’s secretary and she immediately pointed out a letter where the vowel line was supposed to be straight, not squiggly. “This is the difference between ‘ou’ and ‘oo,’” she admonished.
All my hard work ruined because of a squiggly line! I was ready to burst into tears when she said, “But the principal won’t notice, so go for it.”
I gave them to Mr. Abeygunawardana. He said they looked very nice, and that it was very important to laminate them as soon as possible. The angels in my head praised hallelujah as he put pen to paper. I got them laminated that afternoon and later in the evening, everybody at the Beach Inns remarked at how nice they looked.
Finally, it was time for graduation.
Ruchira
Posted in Sri Lanka, 2 years, 1 month agoI 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?
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