2 days left!

It's hard to believe that my year away is drawing to a close. It has been a rollercoaster ride of amazing highs and lows - there has been so many experiences that I've only touched on a fraction of them. I've met some truely inspiring people and feel extremely fortunate to have been able to have done this. It really has opened my eyes and has constantly reminded me of what a great life I have back home. The things we consider every day stresses are pitifully small in comparison with what a lot of people have to contend with ..... I shall try hard to grumble a lot less!

The bus experience

The bus screams along the road intimidating the tiny tuk tuks which buzz around like a swarm of angry wasps. Everyone standing sways in time with the lurches - forwards, backwards - dangling by their arms like giant pea pods ready for picking. Those lucky enough to have seats lean from side to side like riding a giant bob sleigh. The sweat from the man next me slowly trickles down my arm and I try to peel my legs off the plastic seat that I've melted to. Bus driver and conductor work in perfect harmony and the chanting of place names takes on an almost musical/poetic quality. The shouts "Haree haree" (okay - go) and "Binarr" (get down - stop) float continuously through the air. The all singing and dancing shrine- like Buddhist display flashes garishly at the front of the bus, surrounded by garlands of plastic flowers. Luggage racks are roped off to prevent bombs being left. The stop buzzer is an old fashioned bike bell attached to a long piece of string that runs the length of the bus - it works well and causes the driver to stamp on the breaks to produce an emergency stop the likes of which would impress the harshest of driving instructors. Through the windows comes the deafening clatter of the kothu roti choppers who dice the roti with two big blades and use them like they are playing percussion. My eyes hurt from staring intently out of the window, trying desperately hard to lock on to something I recognise so that I don't fly by my stop. My skin turns grey from the constant blast of dust from the street outside. As the conductor approaches me I pretend that I know the exact bus fare and confidently hand over the money, then look away....it works!

Slappers!

I am slowly coming to realise that in this life there will always be some people you don't hit it off with no matter how hard you try. One of them, by the name of Bianca (21), landed in my house. I tried not to be hasty forming my opinions and have observed her over the last month but have come to the definite conclusion that she is a bloody nightmare. It started from the first conversation I had with her over breakfast:
B: "God, sweetie, I can't believe how much you have to cover up over here it's ridiculous" (indicating to her own attire like it was the height of modesty - she was wearing a vest top so low cut the top of her bra was poking out - not just any bra, a gravity defying Wonderbra that pushed her boobs so close under her chin that I'm surprised she open her mouth to talk).
P: "Err yeah it is really quite important."
B: ".... and babe if there are any bombs I'm on the first plane out of here, because there's no way I'm risking my life, I'm an only child you see."
P: "Hmm. Why did you decide to come here?"
B: "Oh the beaches, man. I want to get really tanned."
P: "Right...well there have been three bombs in the past two weeks but so long as you don't get the bus at rush hour, there's not so much of a risk..."
B: "Hell no, I don't do public transport. I hate it back home. There's no way I'll be getting on those death traps darling".
P: (speechless!)

So there you have it and it gets worse every day. She has a devoted boyfriend back home who she has cheated on several times. She lives to get drunk and then says stuff which is so repulsive it's unrepeatable. She saunters down the street half undressed (yeah okay I am sounding like a proper old fart now!) with a fag hanging out of her mouth (it is very disapproved of for women to smoke here) wiggling her bottom from side to side and then acts outraged if any men make comments. I have tried to tell her to cover up but she takes no notice. I can't stand it. The men are challenging enough without encouragement from people like her. I got wanked at again the other day, whilst waiting for my tuk tuk in front of the nursery. The thing I find even worse than this is the incessant kissing noises that men make when you walk past - it's just so degrading. Last night we started doing evening tuition for the lads at the local cricket club. They're all late teens early twenties so it's a bit daunting. Bianca dressed for the occasion in a very very very low cut top and then proceeded to lean over the desk when addressing the boys. So that's a few more Sri Lankan men that now think white women are little slappers......great.

I quit!

A few weeks ago I admitted defeat and gave up on teaching. I had endured six weeks and that was enough. The final straw came when I was teaching from one of their English textbooks. Not only are they at a level that completely exceeds the childrens' abilities but they are also wrong. One exercise involved matching up words with pictures of various vegetables. Instead of carrot, cabbage etc written down there was head, nose, eyes. When I confronted the teacher about this she wouldn't admit that it was a mistake and got the children to match the words to the vegetables which most resembled the body part....unbelievable and pretty confusing for 5 year olds! The older children are no better off as all they do is copy the correct answers off the blackboard with no understanding of them. One fifteen year old lad didn't even know to leave spaces between the words. It was then I realised that I was fighting a losing battle! So I am now helping out at a nursery, getting tormented by thirty stunningly beautiful children with the biggest brown eyes and longest eyelashes I have ever seen! My performance skills are improving as I am made to stand at the front of the class and sing nursery rhymes. Watching the mums and dads leaving their children stirrs up all sorts of old memories. There is always a little one sobbing and I remember the empty feeling I used to get watching my mum walk away twenty-four years ago!!

ICU - Sri Lankan style!

At the weekend I got to experience Sri Lankan hospitals first hand. I was woken at 1am by my phone ringing, it was another volunteer who was distraught. She had developed food poisoning, was feeling like death and was needing accompanying down to the hospital. Ironically she got ill from the 5 star hotel she'd decided to treat herself to for one night of luxury - sod's law. So five minutes later I found myself flying down the pothole riddled road wedged on the back of a motorbike. Now people here seem to effortlessly manage to fit a family of five onto a bike but when it comes to us westerners we struggled with three. In the hurry I'd shoved a skirt on which proceeded to billow up round my ears Marilyn Monroe style, so I was all knickers and white legs - it's certainly an effective way of stopping traffic when you don't have a siren. The hospital was a government one and it was pretty dire. I did my best to reassure my friend as she was wheeled past a washing line of gloves which were drying and awaiting being reused (some on the line, some on the floor). We went to the "intensive care unit" which was complete with cats going through the bins and home-made air con in the form of walls that only went half way to the roof - so it was open air. When we got to her bed (which incidentally had a horse hair mattress - I know this by the foot wide hole in it) the nurse told me patients had to provide our own sheets and pillows so the host dad had to go back to fetch some. Finally we got her into bed and the nurses put a drip up...this was as far as Sri Lankan nursing went. For the rest of the night it was just me and her (the host "dad" had to go as it was females only). "Both ends" were simultaneously emptying every half hour. I tried to get her through to the toilet on a few occasions but this was a nightmare as I had to stop her drip, carry the bottle with one hand, push the wheelchair with the other and perch the vomit bucket on her knees (there was no loo roll, obviously, so my friend had a grim introduction to "the left-handed way"). The nurses didn't once help and never checked that I restarted the drip or set it at the correct rate. There was a sweet little lady in the next door bed who had the night time munchies and kept feeding me bananas and crackers (I tried hard not to think about what might have been on them - thankfully the light was dim!). The lights on the ward were turned off at 2am and put back on at 4.45am, and there was a constant drone coming from a radio - it really wasn't a restful place. By the morning I realised the hospital mosquitoes had had a fantastic feed on my legs over night. At 5.30am I was given two minuscule glass jars for stool and urine specimens (brings a whole new meaning to the expression "taking the piss"). Bearing in mind that my mate was struggling to even sit up I thought this was a little ridiculous but no they wanted them. Somehow, through a joint effort we managed to get them. The nurse I handed them to even had the cheek to remind me to wash my hands which were of course covered in..... ! At visiting time we managed to load her into a car and get her to a private hospital which of course was world's apart from the one we'd been in. I'm pleased to say she's now fine and it's strange what good comes out of negative experiences. For me, I spent the whole night thinking how much I'd missed nursing and despite all the shit and vomit it's definitely the job for me. For my friend, well it's not a night she'd care to repeat - I think her experience came second only to giving birth when it comes to losing your dignity!

Thailand

I arrived back in Colombo yesterday after two weeks holiday on Thailand. Whilst I was away a bomb exploded on a train very near to where I live (my host family "brother" regularly takes the same train into Colombo). It's really very scary and where as before I managed to not really think about it, I now get pretty nervous going on public transport (which unfortunately is every day). It feels like Russian roulette - there's no way of knowing what is going to be targeted next. On the bus home from the airport I saw soldiers on every street corner and even on the bus, all brandishing large guns. Far from finding this reassuring it just panics me more. Then the bus conductor tried to overcharge me four times the actual price (I felt like shouting at him "look, I'm working for free in your god-damn country, risking getting blown up on a daily basis and I have to pay extra for the privilege!!!". What a tosser.). This morning I got thrown off the bus to work as I refused to pay the conductor forty rupees instead of the usual eight. The weather is wet, wet, wet at the moment and there is bad flooding nearby. My host family are currently stranded in the hill country after going away for the weekend and I've been sent home early from work as the kids don't turn up in the rain! The mossies are loving it and are eating me alive. Moan, moan, moan!

Thailand was amazing and spending two weeks just relaxing was heaven. I went with another volunteer, Julie who is a midwife. We flew into Bangkok where I looked around wide-eyed at the enormous roads, flyovers, sky-scrapers and girls strutting about in next to nothing. An overnight bus took us down to Surat Thani where we caught a ferry to Ko Pha ngan. This is an island off the East coast where the huge full moon parties are held. The party was all a bit of a blur although I do remember spending a lot of time doing glow in the dark body painting! Before we knew it, it was dawn and we watched the sun rise from the beach which was still teeming with weary people. Unfortunately a girl I was with had her bag stolen so I spent several hours at the police station trying to help her sort it out. I felt so sorry for her as she had lost everything, even her passport.

Next stop was Ko Tao - a small island an hour North. We stayed in a very remote spot called Hin Wong on the east side. There was no beach but the water was crystal clear and the snorkeling was out of this world. I almost felt as though I was flying being able to propel myself forward with my arms, watching the fish dart around me. They were vivid colours - electric blue, yellow, football teams in black and white stripes and my favourite a large fish that had swum straight from the 80s with shimmering fluorescent yellows, greens and pinks. The coral formed amazing shapes, some looking like large brains and there were small multicoloured "Christmas trees", only a couple of centimetres high which shrank back if you ventured too close. There were also some "Nemo" fish which lived amongst the sea anemones, weaving in and out of their tentacles. One day we hired a canoe and paddled north around the coast. At one point we heard mysterious splashing all around us and joked that we were surrounded by sharks. It wasn't until we got back and mentioned this to the hotel owner that we discovered that sharks are regularly sighted around that particular headland....eek!

We got the overnight ferry back to Surat Thani, and interesting experience where I got to share my bed with fifty other people! Mattresses the width of my bum were laid side by side covering every square inch of the floor. One person looked familiar and turned out to be James, a volunteer I had met in Nepal....it's a small old world! We then headed over land to the west coast to a place called Raillay (in the Krabi province). This has to be one of the most stunning places I've seen in my nine months travelling. A short longboat ride transported us to a world of powdery white sand, warm turquoise water and surreal rock formations. The beach was completely enclosed by towering honey-coloured cliffs which had been sculpted into amazing stalactites. At night these were lit up and I floated on my back gazing up at it all. By day climbers spidermanned there way up impossibly sheer rock faces whilst I did a bit of body toasting! The sunsets were psychedelic, the sea turning to molten gold and pink clouds streaming across the sky .... a little piece of heaven on earth, one day I'll return - I have to!

Sweaty and stinky again!!!

Here I am, once again, in a country where the slightest movement causes sweat to pour off me. It's extremely hot and humid and feels very much like southern India. There are the same busy tuk tuks weaving in and out of the traffic, stinking piles of rubbish, madman bus drivers and elegant ladies constantly hidden under umbrellas because if the sun's not beating down the rain certainly is. Sri Lanka is much more lush than Tamil Nadu. Palm trees are abundant and much of the countryside is covered by thick tropical forests. The sea is warm and coconuts get washed up on the sand. It sounds idyllic and it's easy to forget that this is a country where bombs regularly explode, the two images couldn't be further apart in my mind. My host family showed me graphic photos of a recent bombing which really brought it home. I've never seen anything so horrendous, but the family viewed it with a quite disturbing morbid fascination. They zoomed in on heads lying on the tarmac, torsos with no legs and other unidentifiable body parts.

I live in Panadura, on the coast south of Colombo. It's noisy and dirty but has good amenities. Rubbish is a big problem, as it was in Nepal and India. Huge piles line the road, mangy dogs salvage what they can from the rotting food and every now and then the rubbish is burnt sending acrid smoke everywhere. I was walking home last week when I came across an enormous heap of used syringes. There was blood visible in them and all the needles were exposed. They can only have come from the hospital - it's hard to believe they dump them on the pavement. There was even a balloon amongst them. I'm sure it was only a matter of time before an inquisitive child stabbed themselves. My host family are well off and I even have a washing machine (my clothes don't know what's hit them after 7 months of me trying to thrash the dirt out of them by hand!). Each morning I get the bus to Pinwatta school (I'm getting good and running and leaping - it's called a bus STOP but they don't!) where I spend the morning trying to teach English to children between the ages of 5 and 16. I feel this would be no easy task for a teacher let alone a nurse. The children are from poor families and have very little grasp of English and I, of course, speak no Sinhala. The boys are particularly naughty and see volunteers as easy targets. The cane is still used in Sri Lanka, and whilst I'm not an active supporter of child beating a little threatening works wonders (I know I know I'm a terrible person!). Progress is slow but they now gets their books and pens out of their bags (one small step for the boys, one giant leap for the sweaty white girl!) and will pay attention for about 20 minutes! Health and safety is hilarious as I arrived today to find the boys wielding hockey stick-shaped machetes which were used to cut the grass and inadvertently any small child that ventured too close. From upstairs I can see the sea in the distance and hear the waves. The school was completely destroyed by the tsunami (the building was thankfully empty as it was boxing day) and was rebuilt by a German charity. It is only small and pupils have been slow to return as families fear the same might happen again. I had a very interesting conversation with the English teacher who explained that before the tsunami local people believed them to be fictional things. There was an old story of a bad king who was punished by a giant wave and to stop it happening again he sent his only daughter away to sea. When the tsunami hit no-one realised what was happening - as the seabed was exposed by the giant undertow people even ran out to make claims on the new land. It must have been terrifying. Everyday when I see the sea I try to imagine what it must have been like, but of course I can't.