I’m now nearly two weeks into my six month stay here in Sri Lanka. I’ve started work at my NGO and am well into putting together their 2007 annual report. Olof and I have also met up with almost all the other Challenges Worldwide volunteers and have experienced the rollercoaster ride that are Sri Lankan buses (I just close my eyes and pretend that I am at Alton Towers or Thorpe Park).
After a few days of finding everything wonderful here, I have started to wake up to a few irritations. I have come to realise that for all the exciting, exotic and fun things about this place, they also carry with them irritations and annoyances. The phrase that occurs to me is “every cloud has a silver lining”, except in this case, every silver lining has a cloud.
Take the wildlife for example. I continue to be amazed and delighted by the range of wildlife that we coexist with here. The other morning, Olof and I were taking a walk beside our local pond and we noticed a HUGE lizard crawl from the bushes on the other side of the pond into the water. It must have been six feet long and looked to me like a dinosaur. We later learned that this was a monitor lizard, and that they are fairly common here. We have also seen iguanas, monkeys, crabs, amazing and beautiful birds, tropical fish, frogs...
This is brilliant and I am really looking forward to discovering what more Sri Lanka has to offer. But sharing everything with wildlife is not always what you want. This morning I shared my shower with a small family of frogs. I woke up in the night to the sounds of rats crawling on the plastic sheeting that covers our ceiling. The fridge is full of ants, and every time you remove a pile of clothes from the bedroom, a small gecko crawls out. This isn’t too bad really, but sometimes I just long to be somewhere where the only wildlife we lived with was the occasional clothes moth.
Another example is the heat. I love hot weather. I was miserable in Edinburgh unless the sun shone, and couldn’t bear the cold. I also know that it’s freezing and gales in the UK at the moment, so maybe you won’t have any sympathy with this one! Here it is about 30 degrees every day. When I’m not working, this is great. I can enjoy the hot sun and go for the occasional dip in the sea (ok I’ll stop making you jealous). But I had completely underestimated how hard it would be to work in this heat.
When I started at my NGO, it was particularly hot and humid. I am used to walking briskly to work and was looking forward to my morning walk to work. 15 minutes of sloooow walking later and I arrived, dripping with sweat, at my new place of work. Not quite the first impression I had wanted to give. The humidity also means that when you wash your hair, it never completely dries, and drying clothes or swimming gear takes much longer than in dry heat. Again, not the end of the world, but when things are a challenge anyway, this doesn’t help.
A final thing I will mention on this subject is the people. Sri Lankan people are incredibly friendly and inquisitive, and always really interested in EVERYTHING about you. “Where are you from”, “what is your name”, “are you married”, “where are you staying”, are standard questions that we get asked several times a day. The friendliness has huge benefits, not least of which is our lovely kind host family, who are bending over backwards to make our stay here comfortable and happy. But, being British, I sometimes want to blend into the background, to not be noticed, to not be the focus of everyone’s attention. I had not realised how stifling this constant interest can sometimes be, especially if I’m feeling under the weather (I already had a horrible tummy bug), or want to lay low for a while.
So I have realised that, like a lot of things back home, every silver lining has a cloud here. I think that as I get more used to it here I will be able to find a path through these irritations, and will continue to take pleasure in all that’s different here. In the meantime, I am busy at work (which I will discuss in a future blog entry), and looking forward to visiting some of the sights around here at weekends.
More blogging soon – internet access is not the easiest here, so bear with me.
Norny xxx
