wealth gap

I love this vista of Kandy - poor slummish houses extending to government buildings, extending to rich mansions on the hill - Sri Lanka in a nutshell...

land of rice...

of many different kinds....

one of them in the Kandy market... the other on our way from Polonnaruwa, by the road side...

Universal Health Care

Sri Lanka has this - which means everyone gets treated (even if you are a foreigner, I saw a couple actually) and you even get basic medicine for free (!!!!!!) but there are looooong lines... But both my parents are teachers and Kandy is small enough that they know quite a few people... so we get to cut lines... Now, before you scream scandal, my teacher parents also got paid crap all their lives, so.... Imagine my surprise as I pulled out my wallet to pay for the pain killers and my brother said "what are you doing?"... it was free... I guess I had forgotten... or had never had to deal with this... Oh, don't now get me wrong, I was a sick kid, but I guess my parents took care of it all...

This was at the Peradeniya teaching hospital, where I went to remove my birth mark on my back... In summer when I wear tank tops and it is visible, my friends would say, "why don't you get it removed"... and I would ignore them... but this time my Mom said this... you know something is really ugly, when your Mom says so...

The other photo is from the boiling/disinfecting room for surgical apparatus... You might think it is primitive, but it really is very clean...

It was my first ever surgery in life... it would leave a scar that after 3 months is still very visible...

Children's Park

My dad used to take us here when we were kids... It was nice to go back to revive some memories... Of course it was now infested with lovers... But actually now that I think of it, this might not be the Children's park; this might be just the Wales Park (for a long time I used to think it was Wase Park... and that really doesn't sound good in Sinhalese - it sounds like the word for prostitute, so is a swear word - I personally don't think prostitution is bad, for the record!!)....

Anyway, for the nth time an entrance official questioned my nationality (they charge more from foreigners; which makes sense... even in North America non-residents have to pay more for tuition, yes?)... I showed her my stained finger from voting...

drummer

even presidential award wining drummers sometimes drop their stick... to which one of my disgruntled-with-SL-politics facebook friend commented, 'so why can't the president himself miss his step?"

Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic of Lord Buddha - Kandy, Sri Lanka

My GodMother

also my favourite aunt (which is not a feat so hard to achieve, I don't quite like my other aunts too much)... the woman who, when I was little took out this amazingly beautiful dress out and asked her own younger daughter "what do you think? shall we give it to her - she will return it to you once she outgrows it"... I didn't think of it much at that time, but as a grown up well aware of the "I-me-and-myself" mantra of the world that we call ours, I look back in amazement at this wonderful act of selflessness...

the woman who, as I made non-traditional changes to my life and began to live on my own, understood that such lifestyles are also so full of wonder... My parents didn't throw a fit at my divorce, my dad even wrote me saying "I am very proud of you for being able to make such a decision out of the norm", and my mom was very nice in her own way too... but up until this time I visited them, I never felt that my mom really ever came to peace with it... Long time before that this my aunt said "you are loving it living by your own... I can hear the freedom in your voice"...

For a woman, who lived all her married life under my uncle with control issues (I don't think he ever beat her, but I wouldn't put up with 1% of the crap that he gives her) she is amazingly open-minded... and progressive... Progressive... a trait I think many Sri Lankans lack... really lack...

rain in Kandy

Kandy is a town big on rain... I think of rain most times I think of Kandy... Here's what the town looked like (and still looks like) from my home when it rains. and the roof would leak, so we would run about putting buckets and an assortment of containers to collect the water... oh and when it rains in Kandy, it thunderstorms... so we would close up all the windows... unlike in Colombo where it rains veritcally down, Kandy rains at a 45 degree angle... And then we would huddle under the sheets... cos a lot of times the rain would be accompanied by power failures...

It still rained at 45 degress... But this time, there was no power failure... and the roof doesn't leak anymore... and we didn't huddle under the sheets...