|
 Having
now got a little bit more acclimatised to the weather and the hot
food I am starting to settle down a bit more in Colombo. The
work is long and hard and the poverty has hit us all much more than
we thought. The horrendous lengths that people will go to for money,
often for drugs, is mind numbing and highly distressing. A beggar
with no arms came to the van I was a passenger in and stood by my
window. He had a bucket for you to put money in. However, after
a week of constant begging and being harassed for money because
seen as a rich tourist, I had to say no.
I was
upset that I had the heart to do such a thing, but I found out the
next day off a friend that the same man had laid on the railway
track to chop his own arms off because he knew it would get him
money for his heroine dealer to inject drugs into him. Another tactic
of begging that is hard to ignore is the women who carry sleeping
babies whilst asking for money - in this heat no baby would be able
to sleep. These parents inject their children with tranquilisers
to make them sleep and then have an average life span of 12-15 years.
Seeing a baby whose tranquilisers have worn off as it wakes is highly
distressing and makes you wonder why and how these people are so
poor.
Enough
of the bad stuff; this country is also one of the most beautiful
places on earth. I went to a city called Kandy with some other volunteers
for a weekend break. The owner of the accommodation for tsunami
workers sorted out a couple of guys to escort us and show us the
sights for a measly 13,000 rupees (£75). I achieved one of
my ambitions in life and rode an elephant. It was awesome. We also
saw a herd bathing in the river right by a restaurant where we stopped
off for lunch. In the morning we had monkeys sat on the balcony
of our hotel; they stole one of the other volunteer's flip flops
and tried to get my shorts, but I'd had the foresight to tie them
to the balcony to dry.
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| Richard
with the elephant that he rode |
In
Pinawala, central Sri Lanka, there are two elephant orphanages.
One is a tourist destination that looks after only a couple of elephants.
It was here that I managed to fulfill the ambition of a lifetime
and rode on the back of one. As the sixty-year-old giant trudged
along I had a beaming grin from ear to ear and we all got too many
photographs. Further down the road is an orphanage that had a two
week old elephant which would not leave its mother's side. Another
had had its leg blown off when it was used in mine clearance.
We ate at a restaurant overlooking a river just as a herd came down
to bathe and cool down from the afternoon sun. Many of them were
running and splashing like children in the water, others were jousting
with their trunks and some lay in the water lifting their trunk
to breathe or spray water over themselves.
We
met another group of volunteers who had been working for one of
the elephant orphanages and one of them told me about how they were
riding elephants when they came across a broken down tractor. The
elephant keeper and tractor owner exchanged words in Sinhala, the
keeper said something to the elephant and it proceeded to push the
tractor and trailer to give a jump start. One of the extraordinary
things you have to get used to in this country.
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