16 days

On the other side of the world....

Its Thursday, 24th of September of this crazily eventful year 2009. The sun set over an hour ago although its not even half past 7pm. All kinds of frogs and noisy insects are apparently trying to out-noise each other… ever since the monsoon started a few days ago its gotten even worse! But that’s not all – it seems like some kind of zoo close by opened its door and let its inhabitants walk out!
This afternoon we ran into some kind of crab with measured close to a foot in diameter, flying fox have been frequent visitors and a 4 foot lizard walked across the lawn 3 days ago during breakfast… not to mention all those birds that we had never seen or heard of before and squirrels that sound like fighting birds and curse you deaf should you dare to close in on them.

That just for the wildlife here;)

Sometimes I wonder how we ever got here! Isn’t flying the strangest thing ever? You sit in a nice new airplane where you don’t even realize that you’re flying and 3 movies and a few snacks later you find yourself spending a night in some kind of gigantic new airport in the middle of the desert. Without realizing what happened you get on the next plane and 2 movies and a snack later, you’re in a 40°C steam-bath, sweat like a freakin pig and rush through insane traffic and feel very… white! ;)

Well… here we are, 2 weeks have passed ever since we stepped foot on this pretty island in the Indian ocean. And I have to say: it could be a whole lot worse! ;)

The welcome in our home away from home was nice, especially since our “home” soon turned out to be a full-serviced design-mansion with great food, a gigantic “garden” full of palm-trees, a nice pool, a lagoon, direct access to the beach and… with almost no other guests!!:)

The first weekend started out great! After relaxing for a whole day, going for a swim in the ocean and checking out a “spice garden”, we were picked up by our driver Kizeri to spend our first Sri Lankan night out with his boys. A few beers at his house, with 4 other guys (so 7 in total in a small Toyota) to a Buddhist death watch (slight culture shock combined with massive language barriers… quite odd!) then a quick stop for some pints and all sorts of dead fried animals on a platter in some kind of mafia-style restaurant owned by a Sri Lankan with Italian passport… and onward to check out a temple parade! Masked elephants, fire-shows and drums, drums and more drums…

But the “lazy beginning” had to come to some kind of end eventually! So here we went… the probably worst students around, trying their luck teaching a language that is not theirs to kids that don’t even share the same alphabet! But hell… we went too far and left too much for not giving it the best of what we got…;)
So two weeks later, this is what we do:
At approximately 8:40 we start the first class (8:30 plus 10 minutes of Buddhist morning prayer) of “school leavers”. Kids that just got out of 12th grade public school and want to improve their English skills. We teach 3 of these groups with each containing approximately 35 kids with partially huge level-differences once it comes to English! Some can not read the English alphabet properly and have tremendous problems should they be required to freely express themselves – and the writing skills in general are mostly poor.
But… but… ever since our English coordinator Wimal started to give us Singhala lessons – we are not too surprised anymore! This is a whole different story! There is not a single similarity to any language that might give clues to grammar or vocabulary. And this is NOT India! Ever since the English left the country in 1948 there was a huge movement back to the country’s native languages “Sinhala” and “Tamil”, so the English language slowly disappeared from the rural areas of what was once called Ceylon.
Slogans and Advertisements are still frequently labelled in English, but this does not mean that most people would necessarily care about speaking the language!
So this is what we are here for! Safe or re-establish a language in this small community of Ahungalla... a language that not even we are perfectly familiar with… :D

The last lesson we give every day is to smaller kids… 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th graders… some are A classes (motivated, good to work with) the rest are B classes (with several difficulties, a tough one to teach at times). Here we still have the support of Sinhala-speaking teachers, for grammar problems, or the infamous language barrier….

But nevertheless, slowly but surely we get through to them! Especially with the older kids it’s starting to be a lot of fun!

The whole school staff is also quite nice! It’s a shame that we don’t speak a bit of their language, since not all of them speak English fluently and we would really like to participate in their daily business. A Spanish-speaking country would have been a lot easier! :)

It’s Sunday now, it took a while to finish this post… Sunbathing, filling up with awesome food, falling asleep over some book on the hammock and the recreational afternoon beer… that’s all just sooo exhausting and time-consuming! ;)

Speaking of weekends: The first “real” weekend we spend here at the Bogenvillya and in Hikkaduwa, a surfer spot currently abandoned due to off season. We wanted to go out, see new faces and have a good time – and luckily we ran into a bunch of Irish, so we eventually did have a great time! This weekend ( 25th and 26th) was rather cursed though… Maybe 10 tourists in the whole of Hikkaduwa, stomach problems thanks to a pizza that seemed more fried than baked, being dropped off by a bus in the middle of nowhere and having to walk 40mins on some pitch black road… just to find the entire hotel on lock-down – so Markus had to break in by climbing up some kind of pole to the second-floor balcony…. And besides the inconvenience of being sun-burned and tired, there are still a lot of lessons to be prepared, daily reports to be written… and it’s 9pm already… on this beautiful 16th evening in Celyon paradise.

We hope that wherever you might be - all of you are having a great time as well and are taking care of themselves! Many greetings and all the best from Sri Lanka!

Markus and Joachim