Picture this...

From what I understand from reading the blogs of other people, there comes a point in every blogger's "career" where passion either wanes or material runs dry and so ensues the obligatory "picture blog." Don't worry, my passion and inspiration for writing haven't shriveled up and died in the Sri Lankan sun; I guess the time is just right to let the pictures do the talking. Enjoy!



Some of the scenery in and around Kandy/tea plantation/one of the many huge buddhas that sit high up on the hills


My surfing trip to the beautiful, sleepy town of Arugam Bay


Some of the neighborhood kids/my Sri Lankan family/ my first coconut


Boys dorm at Home of Hope/Home of Hope Kids


Lion guarding ancient ruins at Pollonaruwa/motorbikes: room for the whole family/somehow I managed to sneak into a Buddhist wedding...

I guess to see the rest of my pics you will just have to come visit me when I come back to Canada in March! Yes...March...I got my visa extended last week, so it is official: no snow for Christmas :(

Unwound

Two weeks since my last post. So much learned. Where to begin.

My life currently occupies this weird space where busyness and relaxation collide. I have done a fair amount of traveling and trekking as of late: a surfing trip to Arugam Bay on the East coast; attending a Buddhist wedding of the brother of a friend of a friend (an all day affair at a beautiful waterfall bordered reception hall); another stint at the children's home; a spur of the moment jaunt halfway across the island to buy a washing machine; short little visits here and there involving lots of commuting which has allowed me the opportunity to view much of the landscape of this beautiful country. Some of my treks have also afforded me the glorious experience of navigating the Sri Lankan bus system - a hilarious mix of chaos and seemingly impossible efficiency. This has created a busy shuffle from place to place, never really getting set in one place before I am up and leaving for another. But when I am in these places, I mostly spend my time not doing too much, which, as I have alluded to in other posts, is rather normal.

By no means am I implying that Sri Lankans don't do anything - they just do things at a different pace. Things get done, but without the stress.

This new pace has forced me to totally revamp....myself...I guess. Everything that made me a "valuable" person in North America - hard-working, efficient, self-motivated, independant - are essentially useless characteristics here. A rather depressing thought when much of your self-worth has been placed in your own skills and accomplishment. So, while I have frantically sought ways to make myself "useful," buzzing here and there under the guise of helping others, I realized I was only making things harder for myself by struggling so hard against that pattern of life that has been set here for ages. So, against my better judgement and nature, I have chilled out...alot.

It has taken concerted effort to chill out. But I honestly don't have a choice. I would wear myself out if I kept swimming against the current. I think this is a good instance in which it is perfectly OK and right to just go with the flow. The flow has caused me to loosen my grip on certain things formerly held with vise fists. Like efficiency. Independance. Multi-tasking. Who knows if these things will regain the importance they once held. Some of you may be reading this thinking, "Oh no, Dave is seriously loosing it over there!" Maybe. I will probably receive a huge jolt and transitioning pain when I come back to North America. But for now I am enjoying being unwound. Unwound to the point where I think I might even be starting to wind back up in the complete opposite direction that I have been coiled all these years. It is intriguing to think that the way you live your life may have a polar opposite twin, and the only reason that your life is lived on one end as opposed to the other is largely dependant on where/when/how/and with whom you have grown up. Every event and life scenario in which we find ourself has the ability to change and tweak the way we view the world, tightening or loosening the coil that we have wound around the central worldview that shapes who we are. I feel frightenly close to that nucleus, wondering if somehow the whole thing will come undone if my preconceptions of the world are unravelled any further. But I am equally curious to see what the "other side" is like; that maybe I can get a taste of how my mind and life and worldview would be alternately formed if I would have grown up my whole life in a culture like this. Not that any culture is better than any other, but that each is distinct, and distinctly able to change and rearrange how one thinks. And so I continue to unwind.

Revisited

I just came back from a wonderful visit to Home of Hope, a children's home in the area. Most of my days were spent playing guitar (I am attempting to teach myself while I am here: I have 6 chords down!), reading, and waiting for the children to get home from school. Then the fun begins. The smallest girls seem oblivious to my obvious deficiency in speaking their language, laughing and giggling at me in Tamil, or Sinhala, I still can't tell the difference. I am slightly worried that, while playing with them in the playground, on the swing sets, they are screaming at me, "Stop pushing me! I am too high! I am scared of heights! I am peeing my pants!" to which I respond with my usual smile-as-big-as-I-can-because-I-don't-have-any-clue-what-you-are-saying and pray that I am not scarring these children for life.

This home's location in rural Sri Lanka afforded me the opportunity to become a little more acquainted with the insect/reptillian/creepy-crawly population of Sri Lanka. I have never really been scared of bugs, however, when I was a wee lad I vividly recall disobeying my parents by watching a TV version of the early 90s thriller, Arachnophobia. One particular scene became forever etched into my psyche and is responsible for my slight distaste for bugs: a legion of spiders had taken over the bathroom of some house, unbeknownst to an unfortunate patron of that bathroom. As he/she (I can't remember) showered, spiders crawled out of pipes in the shower head, toilet, faucets, to prey upon the unsuspecting bather. I thought this was great entertainment. But when I went to shower that night, I was keenly aware of every single hole and hide-away in which some killer arachnid may be waiting in ambush for me. For a week straight, I spun a perpetual 360 as I showered, bearing the sting of soap in my eyes to avoid missing the sign of a sneak spidey-attack. I performed a thorough examination of the toilet before every use, making sure that no poisonous webspinners were clinging to some under-visible underside, waiting to take advantage of my embarassingly vulnerable immobility. Fortunately, this paranoia gradually subsided.

My childhood fears revisited me this week.

Upon entering the bathroom to relieve myself (I seem to write a lot about bodily functions...) I noticed a big 'ole nasty cockroach floating in the bottom of the toilet. Paranoia flooding back, I tried flushing him down, to no avail. So, I proceeded in my initial task, very cautiously and awkwardly, while trying to keep an eye on the overgrown beetle. With the mission accomplished, I triumphantly flushed, making sure that this time, my roach friend slipped down into the watery depths of the sewer. However, as the flushed water flooded down the sides of the toilet, it carried with it another cockroach, who had been clinging to the underside of the toilet rim, knocked from his perch by the rushing water. Inches away from where I had been sitting. Sick. Nasty. I hate cockroaches.

So there you have it - there are some things that scare me... kind of.

Rags

I attended my first Sri Lankan birthday party on Tuesday, the first of two I was invited to this week. It was to celebrate the 4th birthday of my little pukey friend who decided to gift me with some vomit on my leg for my own birthday (see previous post. I guessed she was six in that post, way off). I didn't return the favor, but I did eat some wonderful food at both her party and the second one, held for the one year old son of a Kandy pastor. If you are invited as a guest into a Sri Lankan home, they make sure they bring out the fattened calf, or in this case, ten different curries, to thank you for your presence. And no, is not an option. It doesn't matter if you are full, you keep eating until they are satisfied.

At the second party I met a little girl who was wearing a rather interesting headband. I have learned that Bob Marley is intensely popular in Sri Lanka, so it is not uncommon to Jamaican flags and pictures of marijuana leaves as stickers on three-wheeled taxis and plastered on city walls. However, this was the first time I have seen the cannabis leaf worn as clothing by a toddler. It shouldn’t really surprise me, since Sri Lanka is full of such anachronisms.
There is a certain irony in the way that western products have received an open-armed (and often naive) acceptance by Sri Lankan culture. It is the kind of irony that would explain a 3 year old sporting a pot-leaf as headgear. Or, a woman at the local Bible college proudly parading the campus, Bible in hand, with the “Hustler” logo emblazoned across her t-shirt clad chest.
Ability to read English aside, I don’t think the message or logo which appears on their clothing bears any real importance to the average wearer in Sri Lanka. For example: Trying to strike up conversation with a teenage, English speaking friend of mine, I asked him, pointing at the emblem on his shirt and shorts, if the New York Knicks were his favorite basketball team? He replied, "Who are the Knicks?"

As the tonnes and tonnes of western designed clothes make there way across the ocean to this little island, I am convinced that there is some pit stop a long the way where they layover and take time to neuter the cultural meaning from any phrase, word or slogan that may have held any sort of potency in the country in which it was conceived. After such neutering, a pastor-in-training at a Bible college can promote a porno magazine with a logo on her shirt with a free mind and guilt-less conscience. The original virility of the message honestly means nothing. In so doing, the shirt-as-billboard simply becomes clothing. A rag to cover nakedness. The message which it proclaims bears no real representation of the beliefs of its wearer. I probably wouldn’t be able to score some weed from my small friend with the rastafari headband. She probably couldn’t even tell me what her headband bore a picture of. It bears a message but to her it holds no significance.

It bears a message but holds no meaning.

“...by this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another...”

Every once and awhile I see these shirts (moreso in North America than here) that say ,“LOVE” right across the front . I have thought, man, I would really like to make a proclamation like that, but that is a lot of pressure. What if I wear that shirt one day, and I do something unloving? What if my life can't back up this LOVE that I'm "wearing"?

If I bear the label of love on my life, but don't allow that label to hold any significant power over my life, it is just a rag. It is just a rag that I use to dress up in, to be fashionable, to show that I belong to a certain club. If it bears a message but holds no meaning, that is all it is - a rag, not really useful for anything except for covering nakedness.

happy barfday

I really need to get into a habit of blogging at regular intervals rather than going on blog binge and purge cycles like I have been doing. At any rate, as promised in my previous post, here is a story.
I was not quite sure what to expect for my first international birthday, so I appropriately placed my expectations quite low. My birthday fell on a Sunday, and this particular Sunday I was out of Kandy visiting another church in Kurunegala, an hour and a bit away. I went to see some ancient ruins with a bunch of men from the church on a day trip on Saturday (Sri Lanka's history is fascinating, if you are bored some day you should google Polonnarawu or Anuradhapura, two of the ancient capital cities) which is a much longer story than I am willing to relay right now. We got back late Saturday night and I pretty much went to bed straight away. Somehow my Kurunegala hosts found out it was my birthday, and I woke up for breakfast Sunday morning to find my place set with a gift, quite lovely. My hosts also made sure that they slipped the pastor a note during the service so he was aware it was my birthday. So, I was asked up to the front to receive a rousing, international flavored rendition of "Huppy Birt-day."
When I returned to Kandy Monday morning I found that there were several youth from the church who had also learned of my day of birth and were dissapointed that I was not around for them to receive gifts(apparently, the birthday boy or girl is the giver of gifts in Sri Lanka)! So when they showed up that night for youth church, I was prepared with a canadian style birthday cake to feed the well-wishers.
There were about nine youth who came, including the six year old sister of one of the boys. This precious little girl kept coming in and out of the group all night, whimpering and wanting to be held by her brother and I wondered what her problem could be and why she wasn't hanging out downstairs with her grandma as she usually does. No problem, the meeting went on.
We finished the meeting and all paraded downstairs for some delectable dessert at the expense of the birthday boy. Before we dug in, I was again regaled with another presentation of "Huppy Birt-day." However, this performance had a little extra flavor than the previous version, compliments of the sweet small one who kept interrupting the youth group. She decided to make known to all of us why she had been whimpering and whining the whole evening. As the voices joined together in a harmonious gusto down the home stretch: "...Huppy Birt-daaaaay tooooo.....VOMIT!" I was standing close enough to my little friend that I felt several projectiles of puke spatter on my leg before I actually knew what had happened. The funny thing is that no one even broke concentration, flawlessly carrying on, "...tooo...yooouuuuuuu!"

She felt much better after she upchucked all over the dining room floor. I had a great laugh. We all enjoyed cake. Everybody wins.

Does Jesus play cricket?

Hello friends!
It has been much too long since I last wrote a blog.  Much has happened.  Much has been experienced.  But I think if I attempted to tell you about everything, my posts would start just becoming an itinerary of my days.  An itinerary that would fill several blogs.  So, I am not going to fill you in on ALL the stories that happen here (and this way you have a good reason to come and visit me when I get back, to hear all the stories and see all the pictures of the many things that I have not included here).
One of the questions I am often asked by friends and family from home is, "What have you been doing?"  To those of us with North American bred minds, this is a perfectly legitimate question since we have this insatiable desire to do, to produce, to meet deadlines, conquer, succeed.  But here, doing isn't regarded nearly as highly as just being.  Being with someone, being available, being free to just sit down and talk.  So, looking back on my time thus far (nearly a month) I also ask myself, "What have I done?" Answer: Not much.
Maybe "doing" isn't the point.  I came in here with guns blazing, expecting to "do" great things for the Kingdom.  I expected to have certain tasks, certain responsibilities, certain things that I could check off my list to appease my task centered mind.  But I have found my structured lists afloat in a sea of unstructuredness.  Afloat with no hope of finding anything that resembles "do" floating alongside it to which it might attach itself and gain some sort of validity.  This week found myself longing intensely for some sort of physical labor, so that I could look back and see what I had accomplished.
In my naivety, I came here to "do mnistry" but have instead found myself just living.  Just living as minister.  Is that 'doing ministry?"  Is that ministry? Living without stucture and appointments and meetings (ok, well not completely devoid of these things, but mostly).  What is ministry?  Is it preaching a sermon?  Is it visiting the sick?  Is it spending time with friends?  Is it playing cricket?  Is it reading the Word?  Hmm, I don't know.  My checklist mind keeps trying to compartmentalize all these things so that I can be "efficient" in "doing ministry."  My mind is consistently blown by the way that cultures wire you to think certain ways.
I realize that this in not a particularly profound post.  I realize it is not really put together that well.  I apologize for its seeming lack-lustre, especially since it is the first post in a long while.  I can't comprehend these things.  I wonder if it is even worth trying to comprehend them.  I wonder if maybe my desire to understand everything is causing me to miss out on some things that just need to be experienced.  Not understood.  Not concepts to be conquered, but simply things to live.  Faith like a child.  Trust in the Father.  Not needing to understand, just knowing that He is good and he will take care.

Hopefully my next post won't be so disjointed.

Now I know my ABCs

Today was a typical day for me.  I woke up and did some reading and journaling, then enjoyed a curry breakfast at 9 o clock.  By 10 o clock I was ready to leave the house for the day, as per my host's instructions; we ended up leaving at 11:30 - typical of how time flows here in Sri Lanka.  I have learned to always have a book or magazine handy.  We were off to make the rounds visiting some people from the congregation, praying for them, seeing how we can help meet some of their needs.  These visits are usually conducted exclusively in Sinhala, so I usually just pray, or if there are children in the house I try to make funny faces at them, hoping to solicit a smile or two.  Kids don't seem to care that I can't speak their language.  I am learning a lot of these universal languages as I am here. smiling is one language in which I have been able to have beautiful conversations.
 Anyways, one of these smile conversations led this one pretty little girl to show me her "Learning ABC" book.  She opened it up and showed me the "R" for Rabbit, and "D" for Dog and other classic examples that you would expect to find in a book teaching the alphabet to toddlers.  However, there were a couple examples that were sure sign indicators that this book was not published in a country that speaks English as there first language.  This lovely publishing company from Sri Lanka had some interesting words it wanted to teach children for "A" and "Q":

For those of you, who like me, do not even know what "quinine" is:
quinine |ˈkwīˌnīn|
noun
a bitter crystalline compound present in cinchona bark, used as a tonic and formerly as an antimalarial drug. • An alkaloid; chem. formula: C 20 H 24 N 2 O 2.

Definitely a useful word in anyone's vocabulary.
If only I had a book to teach me these these valuable words when I was a toddler.