We are here now, not passing through

A few days in a strange humid muddy corner of Sri Lanka just outside the town Dehiattkandia. The place was built in 1986 as part of the Mahweli irrigation and hydroelectric scheme. And maybe it was built as part of a demographic bulwark against the Tamil east of this country. Signs here are all in Sinhalese with just a bit of English. 

When you go into villages or some parts of the road you get the feeling of jungle. Not just the large shady trees. Not just the killer humidity. There's a wildness, maybe from the mountains that are always in view. This is a frontier that was carved out of the jungle and peopled. Or re-peopled. 

We are on crummy bicycles. Janet's back tire is flabbing out and flattening again. I stop in the shade and wait for her. Six gents step out of a shady workshop and inflate her tire. Round a few bends I am waiting for her again in the shade. A younger man in sarama comes up his driveway and we talk. He tells the neighbor lady next door we are from Washington, D.C. What's the difference? "Gama Boston" is inconceivable to him. It must mean Washington. He asks where we're going. His delight is palpable as I tell him "Dehiattkandia." At least that's a real place! He points straight ahead, "Main road," then he points left, "Dehiattkandia." He points right and says, "Polonowurra."

It occurs to me. We are on our way to Dehiattkandia. We are staying in Dehiattkandia. We are not trying to get somewhere else. We are savoring this place, this landscape, this human setting. We are here now, not aiming for another here and another now. This is strange and privileged. We ran into a couple of Europeans yesterday in their stretch pants on fancy bikes. They were headed south, had probably started their day in Polonowurra, passed Dehiattkandia where we met them, and looked forward to another 50 or 100 km of riding until they got to their "destination." We were a few km out of town on crummy bikes and we were part of the landscape. Not just passing through. The privilege of this is that you are living. 

We went far north of our mark today because the road through Dolakanda bends that way. Our first left, which my screen shot of google maps indicated, turned into a mud road from recent rains. Why follow it when there was pavement available over the flat and gently curving terrain?

When shadows were coming consistently from our right instead of in back of us I knew we had been heading north for long enough to make it a potential challenge for Janet on her nearly flat tire bike to get home. So we turned left which led us west and west-southwest. On our ride we passed a monitor on the road and what Janet described as a "giant peacock." A tractor passed me and in Sinhalese the name "Kumar" painted on the back of its wooden cart. 

Flat lands, gently undulating lands, cloudscapes, valleys, fields, and waterways opened in front of us. "This is what people want to do, isn't it?," I asked Janet. "Some," she answered, probably recalling one or two of her patients over the years of her travel medicine practice who were actually seeing the landscape from a bicycle seat. 

But today the feeling of floating was incredible. The real magic of a place with real birds and real grasses and real waterways. We floated south and then west to the bund road of a small tank, the vistas nearby to another tank heartbreaking, dreamlike. Was the catchment of this tank, so nearby, a remnant of the first forest here, or has all that jungle been chopped and the land regrown? Did it matter? The tank in front of us and to our left were our "aim" today. We had overshot them by a good 5-10 km and landed back right where we belonged. 

Next we floated along an unpaved canal road that merged with the main road and led back into town. 

Being comfortable wherever you are

Part of the Fulbright challenge is getting out of your comfort zone. For me this means finding a way to build new modalities of "comfort" wherever you are. This is doubly the case because of my research here in cultural landscape ecology. It forces me (well, it lures me) into the field, into strange and seemingly isolated (they turn out to be densely peopled) places, places that seem outlandish and a bit uncomfortable at first or even second glance. 

And by "comfortable" I don't mean hot showers or spic 'n span hotel rooms. I mean places that make you feel you've stepped off the bus into a Martian landscape. 

Fast forward to Dehiattkandia, where we decided to spend a few days exploring the engineered landscape of the Mahaveli Project, a giant nation-building exercise of 20th century Sri Lanka. 

In what was once a jungle the government built Dehiattkandia in what turns out to be an ongoing social experiment. The experiment seems to have gone alright in some ways and horribly afoul in others, especially when it comes to ethnic tensions it created or at least exacerbated. 

But this aside I wanted to walk through some of the streets of town and get a feel for the layout and fabric of the place. As a foreigner I'm sure there's so much that passes me by. But just the same. 

Yesterday I wrote about the broad thoroughfares and spacious traffic circles of town, nearly deserted by vehicular traffic. Why do I feel like I'm somewhere in deepest Bulgaria?

The airy, deliberately designed bus stand seems busy but mired in huge puddles after last night's rains, the "boutiques" across from it with their assorted, colorful, useless wares. 

The same-age market buildings, decentralized and flanked by greenery, with sensible awnings that extend across the sidewalk to shelter from sun and rain.

 

The public open spaces, shady and green. A planner's delight, unused by the barefoot public, sarong-wearing and betel-spitting, or zipping by on scooters or congregating in front of "cool spots" or phone repair stores. 

Evidence all around of the massive influence of the Mahaveli Project, down to the street signs denoting precincts with engineered names like "Nagaswewa."

An engineered urban landscape designed to serve the engineered rural landscapes that surround it. A secret look into a relict of the 20th century stuck like a raisin into the scone of the Sri Lankan countryside. 

Why waste time here feeling uncomfortable, as outlandish as I must seem to others, as strange as I look walking and not riding, as inscrutable as I appear, a pale outsider who doesn't know where he's going. 

An invented landscape in a far corner of Sri Lanka

We arrived in Dehiattkandia at around noon, about three hours after we left Batticaloa. We had had the brainstorm of an idea to catch a bus on the main road that stopped right at Kallady village where our guesthouse is located. That way we didn't have to walk all the way to Trinco Road. It had rained hard at night and this morning in between clouds the sun was hot and the air humid. It looked like the heavy rain could continue any moment. Why not stay close to home grab a ride? It worked. 

The bus sped us west toward Manampitiya and our only inconvenience is that we were dropped in the center of town instead of a km east where the southbound junction for Dehiattkandia was. We saw it go past in kind of a blur and by the time a minute or two had passed we were in Manampitiya center, which is not saying much. Manampitiya's not that impressive. 

Our 1 km walk uphill to the junction east of town was mostly rainy and with traffic, not the most pleasant. Tuktuk drivers kept stopping alongside and one offered to take us to Dehiattkandia, a  Rs 55 bus ride, for 2000 rupees. Manampitiya is close to Polonowurra, one of the top tourist destinations in Sri Lanka, and the closer you get to these kind of places the worse the pressure and tension between foreigners and locals. Or to put it more fairly, the closer you are to tourist centers the more likely you are to be targeted as a potential "customer."

We had chosen Dehiattkandia partly because it's far from the tourist zones but also because it's situated among a number of small tanks. I suspected that these small tanks might be associated with the Mahaveli irrigation and hydroelectric scheme, a massive project Sri Lanka initiated in the 1960s during its struggle for self-sufficiency. The Mahaveli project ended with a number of unintended (or perhaps intentional) consequences, chief among them increased disharmony between the Tamil people in this region and the Sinhalese who were encouraged to move to this area and did so in their numbers. This changed the ethnic demography of the region just east of the Mahaveli Ganga (River) to a majority Sinhalese area. This might be looked at one of two ways (or maybe both). The project was an advance in development and nation-building in post colonial Sri Lanka. Another interpretation is that the new Sinhalese communities (like Ampara, Dehiattkandia, Welikanda and many others) were formed as a bulwark against the Tamil-majority East. I think both truths are there. But the latter is more profound. It led in part to the thirty years' civil war. And it may never be resolved. 

I've seen with my own eyes how this has played out. And given the very negative consequences of this second alternative, which is ugly in many ways, I am nevertheless dead curious how this imposed Sinhalese landscape was imagined and carried out. Given my research interest in tank landscapes I'm especially drawn to the question of how irrigation systems were used to exert hegemony. Even more interesting to me is how they were designed and executed--how they became part of an imagined or re-imagined landscape, and that's what today's afternoon walk was about. 

The hourlong ride to Dehiattkandia from the Manampitiya junction put us in a different world. Gentle Sinhala music accompanied the swaying bus filled with well-fed mothers and young children. The undulating green landscape though not built up did not look particularly poor. We had left the frenetic, sometimes bone-poor east behind. 

Dehiattkandia town reminded me of irrigation-hydro towns I've seen elsewhere, for example in Australia or New Zealand. A bustling town center, a few administrative buildings, banks, traffic roundabouts, and most notably a wide divided road in the center of town. Much like other development towns I've seen, the irony of the planned-out traffic circles and divided roads is highlighted by the fact of very little traffic. Today in Dehiattkandia I saw a handful of private vehicles, if that many. And the roads just a few meters outside of the center were rutted, broken, littered, and in a significant state of disrepair. 

Dehittikandiya had a uniquely Sri Lankan feel, especially in and around the bus station, where at least 100 kids were loitering. Some older, some younger, most with nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon at the end of tuition classes. Those kids spilled into the otherwise empty streets, making the main road headed northeast out of town look more like a teenage pedestrian promenade than a highway. 

Another thing we noticed on the bus to Dehiattkandia and as well in the town was the preponderance of same-age people. We had seen this in Ampara too, where overall people seemed a bit younger. But here in Dehiattkandia there was again the feeling of an engineered community, a place people of a certain age had been encouraged to move during certain years, people who had since borne children or maybe grandchildren in a kind of uniform progression of ages as the years wore on. If young couples were encouraged to move to Dehiattkandia in the '60s and '70s the young people we saw today might have been their grandchildren. Certainly there is good business in weddings here. Our guesthouse banquet hall still had decorations from a wedding that had taken place just a few days before. Also, all five of the TV stations were playing Buddhist religious programming when we tuned in during the afternoon. 

Problematic Dehiattkandia. We decided to walk a km north of our guesthouse, which sits another 1 km north of the town center. At approximately the 2 km mark we came to a bund road to our left. Bund roads are typical enough for village tanks in Sri Lanka and here in Dehiattkandia, which was planned for typicality, the bund road is a must. This countryside was designed to look, sound, taste and smell like the "real thing." A Rajarata landscape comes to mind. With 30,000 small tanks in Sri Lanka, most of them ancient, and a great many of them in the North Central Province, the designers of this landscape had plenty of models to work on. 

Shortly after entering the bund road we came to an unusual sluice, separate from the bund and acting more as a controlled spillway, into which water flowed under the road  and then northbound in a neat canal. 

After this, a steep drop of more than one meter in the road and a wide spillway at this level, out of which no water was flowing. The tank itself seemed neither high nor low but covered with water hyacinths, not a good sign of tank health but rather a symptom of eutrophication. Agrochemicals are rife in Sri Lanka and this was a hint of their use here in this corner of the country. 

Most of the ancient tanks I've seen have one or two spillways. It would be interesting to learn more of how this modern tank was conceptualized with two spillway-type sluices, both independent of the bund, rather than the in-the-bund sluices that typically distribute water to the rice fields below. 

In this tank, as in the modern tank I saw near Giritale a few weeks ago, the escaping water was not used to directly irrigate the fields below. Rather, it was carried downstream elsewhere, to irrigate crops in some other spot as deemed necessary, part of a regional, not local scheme of water distribution and irrigation. 

Perhaps the designers of this modern system took their cue from ancient "cascade" systems in which a series of tanks flow slowly one into the other in a subtly demarcated, naturally-mediated, and low-impact flow through nearly level terrain. Maybe they were inspired by the miles-long Yoda Ela, the giant ancient canal through which water drops at the rate if about an inch per mile. But there is no cascade here and these canals are swiftly flowing. Instead a very widely implemented series of concretized, uniformly wide canals connects water with need and in some places, tank with tank. 

Some other cues were taken from ancient tanks here, put into practice and perhaps enforced legally. Specifically the kattakaduwa, a vegetated natural reserve just below the bund, was part of this tank design. Bizarrely, the naturally-occurring kattakaduwa area of ancient tanks filters water for distribution to the rice fields. But the cosmetic kattakaduwa here is part of a tank scenery, not a functional component of the landscape because water is leaving this tank in a different way. 

The bizarreness is increased on the far side of the bund road where another false sluice (just a spillway whose flow can be controlled) empties into another canal. 

We decided to follow the canal along a very scenic path. On one side were rice fields interspersed with groves of bananas. A Rajarata landscape transplanted here to the Mahaveli Valley. To our left a linear village, each homestead equipped with steps down to the water or its own concretized washing stone, ubiquitous symbols of Dry Zone tanks that are institutionalized here and included as part of the communal infrastructure. 

Also imported to these canal zones are the kinds of angles and curves usually found in Rajarata-style tanks (it's Sinhalese Rajarata where tank culture--Sri Lanka's "hydraulic civilization" reached its zenith and highest density of development. There are places there with on tank per square kilometer). In addition to angles and curves, the same kinds of slots and grooves that I observed in Rajarata have been concretized here. So where ancient tank flow might have been controlled by the placement of a plank of wood between slotted stones, here the design is recruited but I think not for control. That would likely be done upstream as deemed fit by central irrigation bureaus and their engineers. 

Amazingly, the junctures at which water flows here are carefully catalogued and labelled. This is a kind of echo of the epigraphy of ancient tanks, in which ancient or mediaeval Sinhalese script would tell the story of a tank's benefactor and other features of the tank's history. 

Overall this is a chilling scene of a landscape imagined elsewhere and brought to bear in a new place. Is it a "Sinhalese" landscape imposed on a non-Sinhalese place? In many respects yes. Yet I wonder who the designers were and who were the engineers, who painstakingly collected design artifacts from ancient tanks and brought them to bear here. How were these tank features understood and designed by modern engineers? Which policies and guidelines directed their work and where are these documented? 

What is fake and what is real? Is something imposed fifty years ago still a scar? Can we see anywhere else a large-scale imposition of one cultural landscape on another? Is this scene unique to Sri Lanka or are its particulars alone the unique part? 

All thoughts to ponder as we grabbed a banana leaf to cover our heads for the oncoming rain and sat out the worst of the downpour in a fish monger's roadside shed--his cutting stump well worn, the smell of fish from the selling table strong, and fish scales littering the earth floor where we took shelter.  

The engineered landscape of Nagaswewa

I walked to a tank south of town in a precinct called Nagaswewa. There were some twists and turns walking through Dehiattkandia, crossing the main road, going across a bridge that traversed a large canal where I saw a crocodile a few feet from people washing their clothes, then intuiting the curves according to google map. 

I used an observation we'd made a few weeks ago. When you get to some very narrow roads that fork or turn and google maps only shows one, follow the road built from concrete pavers. These indicate  some level of government project and you know these roads (sometimes barely wider than a sidewalk) "go" somewhere. 

The tank was visible from about a km uphill, just at the clearing after a rambling cluster of homes. Pristine looking in its valley among fields of paddy and bananas, mountains on either side, you become aware that this place was carved out of jungle. 

In fact, after some research I discovered it was carved in the mid 1980s. Dehiattkandia itself was built in 1986. The people brought here or induced to move here, according to my guesthouse host, were dirt poor. They were given small plots of land that the government soon discovered was not enough and the holdings were doubled. How people have kept the jungle from encroaching speaks to their will and stamina. 

An old man, probably my age, stops alongside me on his bicycle. We exchange a few words and he invited me to hop on back. I tell him "yannava tikak ballanava," ("I'm walking and just looking a little") and he smiles a big grin, points to the fields, says ("padi")--stress on the second syllable, not "paddy" the way we pronounce it, and rides off. 

There's a lot of traffic, scooters and tuktuks and bicycles. Of course no one's on foot but of course I'm a foreigner, foreign and strange, so it's OK for me to walk. Near the tank two men are negotiating how to get 20 or so king coconuts onto a scooter. Later I see them being sold in town. I ask them the name of the tank as they eye me curiously. "Nagaswewa," they intone. "Naga's tank." Another invented name invoking ancient mythology but very much a contemporary tank of the late 20th century. 

No sluice is visible. Only a spillway on distal end. An allee of kumbuk trees tells us how much they grow over 50 years. 

This is the first time I've thought about the idea of landscape engineering vs landscape design. This is an engineered landscape, in some ways like our Western cities. But our cities didn't grow from a government initiative. Even where they are strictly designed, like the grid pattern of streets in Manhattan, the city grew enmeshed in the design but also beyond the design. Here the contrivances seem so obvious. Animal watches in the fields are built sturdily with tile roofs. They are part of the engineered scheme for this landscape, with an infrastructure built to address, if not completely serve, the needs of it's inhabitants. Even the sounds of deep water flow in water management junctures along the road provide the sound of sluices and bisotewuka in ancient tanks. 

A tractor lumbers by, taking up most of the road. I retreat slightly into the tall grass where I get bug bites and pieces of seed on me. The husband drives and his wife rides in back. More scooters. I come to the far end of the bund road to an engineered dpi which turns out to be the spillway and sole outlet of water for this tank. It's deep and my feet are sore so I turn around, back along the hot road but a much shorter-seeming return. 

Across the canal onto one of the main roads leading into and out of town I come to a shortcut to my hotel, "Nature Lanka." I pass the ponsala built in the late 80s and an alms room in front just finished in 2014. When I get to the hotel my toes are bloody from scraped skin but they don't hurt. My host is horrified by the way I look and maybe terrified by the blood, which is really only superficial. I don't think I reassure him enough. 

After a six-curry dinner later that night, much much more than we can eat, I am called to the outside table where the owner is drinking whisky with his younger brother and two friends. We have the requisite adoption ceremony where they hug and tell me how honored they are. That we are the first Americans ever to stay in this place, and a professor to boot. One of the friends has two children at Moratuwa. He is overjoyed. They are mostly tipsy and promise to take us to see elephants tomorrow. We are wedged between two national parks. 

I feel at home and at ease in this new landscape and among these new people, who call me a "simple" man and praise my teeth. Two are false it tell them and they praise my truthfulness. I have the tiniest sip of whisky and turn down the opportunity to eat a second supper with them. It's been a complete day. 

A less than auspicious bicycle ride that could have ended up much worse

Coming to Dehiattkandia in what might have seemed a kind of random move has actually accomplished something great for me. It changed my conception of Sri Lanka by making it smaller. The no-mans-land east of the Mahaveli Ganga is much better defined than it was before. You might think of Dehiattkandia as a backwater but instead it feels like just over the hill lie Badulla, Kandy, and the rest of the country. 

We learned this in part today on a ride south of town. We were aiming for a couple of tanks. Ended up seeing one from a distance, but also got the feel for traffic headed south toward points more populated. What we ended up seeing is pretty much the side journey of our day. So I'll tell you how things unfolded. 

I asked yesterday morning for bicycles for today. The guesthouse we're in advertises them as one of the things you can do here (there isn't much else to keep you busy believe me) but there weren't any bikes to be seen on our first day. He was very obliging and bikes appeared late yesterday afternoon. "This one's for you," he pointed to a garish road bike, "and this one," with a sort of flourish, "is for the Madame." In the dim light of early evening Janet's assigned bike looked the better and it made me happy. Why put her on a terrible bike when she's being such a good sport holed up here in the Alaska-like countryside (tropical though) while we look at fake tanks?

This morning was a different story. We hopped on the bikes after breakfast under a dingy, humid sky and took off southward toward Dehiattkandia town. By the time we reached the main road we'd discovered that Janet's seat was ridiculously low and we turned around for some serious adjustments. Changing the height of the seat I realized that one tire was flat and the other flabby and low, so the boy who was helping us was ordered to take the bike into town by tuktuk. 

As he started the uncooperative motor of the three wheeler going the manager stuffed Janet's bicycle-to-be into the back seat. Front wheel first probably wasn't the best way to fit the bike in. The back third of the bike was sticking out the door and the manager went in to find tools to remove the far panel. That way the bike could stick out a little bit on both sides. 

Though it's never appropriate here to lend a hand as an honored guest, especially an older one, no one said I couldn't get into the tuktuk. So I climbed into the back, snaked my way around the bike wheels and chain, and then pulled on the bike and used my weight as a counterbalance. The bike was still a third of the way out but with a slow drive through the incredibly pitted streets into town there was a chance it wouldn't fall out and hopefully no one would be injured in this little experiment. 

It makes me think. Being and behaving here in Sri Lanka demands different standards of "dignity" than we're used to. Leaning back in a tuktuk using your weight to hold on to a bike for dear life isn't such a biggie. And like every other time you pass a pair of eyes, people only look at you for an instant. 

The manager had given the boy something like Rs 150. It probably was less. And so we rambled on the rutted road up to a repair shop in a muddy alley in the center of town. What an interesting place. The bike repair shop was filled with wheels, at least as far as I could see, and probably lots more behind. It was about big enough to fit the mechanic and a small table, a few steps above the alley on a covered concrete platform. Like every other space in Dehiattkandia it was built according to plan when the town was erected in 1986 as part of the Mahaveli scheme. What a contrast from our bike repair stores at home where thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of bikes and accessories are on display. 

The funny valves of Janet's wheels needed to be removed, spat on, rubbed clean, and when that didn't work, taken into the shop for some kind of treatment. The pump, uneasily balanced over muddy , betel-stained concrete pavers, didn't work efficiently. The boy and the mechanic, both barefoot, had a go at it and a few words were spoken. Then the mechanic took a small piece of rag from an old sarong, just a few cm square, and put it between the valve and the hand pump nozzle. With some work the tires were both inflated and I told the boy I'd ride back home, less than ten minutes up the road. 

Did I mention indignity? As I stood watching the unfolding drama of inflation I had some visitors. The past two days I've been walking around in wet sandals and small bloody points have developed at the top of all my toes. I've written about this but the wifi at my place is too weak to send the past few posts, which include pictures (not of the toes!). Anyway flies started to land on the raw spots, at one point a bunch of flies on each foot. Kind of gross but I couldn't do much about it  because I was holding the bike by the handlebars, using the brakes to keep the bike stable for my comrades' struggles. 

Yes. Handlebars. When I started the ride on my bike I noticed that the brakes were high above the handlebars. I wrestled them southward to where they belonged and much later in the ride discovered they were under the handlebars, unreachable. This led to the discovery that the handlebar itself was loose. Very loose. So when I needed to steer on back roads (the ride south out of town had been smooth and relatively straight on a well-graded road with decent shoulders for bike riding) it was as if I had tremors. Couldn't control the bike, nor could I brake and control. So things felt like a real mess. Did I keep my balance? Yes. Did I maintain composure? Yes again, though with effort. Don't take a shaky bike down a muddy hill with silty water of unknown depth below on the causeway. 

Our ride brought home to us how this area was carved out of jungle. Kind of like what you'd expect in Amazonia I suppose. Intense humidity all around and not much of a breeze. Traffic was a breeze though, and lots of people were happy to say good morning and hello. A nice smiling ride. 

The views were few, the military posts many and large. It brought home again how militarized this part of the island is, how we are in a perceived borderland, and perhaps how tenuous peace is here. It's a Sinhalese place in what was once a Tamil-majority region. We passed only one spot for Hindu offerings at the roadside, a large Ganesh on display but not a fully developed kovil, and the single church we saw, St. Mary's, was near the very end of our ride. 

Below lie the tank we were after, the entry to it muddy and inhabited by cattle, later a large herd of deer. We had ridden around the back side of the tank so going down would have meant encountering the catchment, which would be wet after the recent rainy days. 

We agreed to head for home, a nice downward ride that we had both perceived coming would be uphill. Town was muggy and muddy as we approached and I thought to myself how if you could make yourself comfortable in a place like this, full of unreadable landscape signals, you could succeed at doing this anywhere. The sky darkened as we approached our guest house, where we shared a delicious one liter bottle of soda water. Within a few minutes it was showering and an hour later the rain was pouring down. Our ride could have turned out a lot worse. 

Planting peace, not a straight line

It sounds as trite as "sprouting peace" but bear with me please. The idea is in line with my recent post on using design methods to build peace. Looking around at the world I've landed in, Sri Lanka, a country ostensibly at peace, appears to be a slowly cooking cauldron of hatred. And if the violence is not overt and physical there seem nevertheless to be many other forms. A lot like our society in the United States. But also different. After all in our country there are mass shootings almost every day. If you think it puzzles Americans of good will imagine how people here perceive what's going on in our country. 

Last post I tried to think broadly about how design principles might be adopted to designing peace. Considering your users, iterative process, and under-designing were the three principles I invoked. 

Hidden within "iterative" was the concept of non-linear process. And therein was a little piece of inspiration. 

Here in Batticaloa it's time to plant the new crop. Thai Pongol, the holiday of harvest and sun worship, is over. New plants are being put into the ground. Seeds are sprouting. I was asked yesterday if this is also the time of planting back home in Boston. "Just five months from now, once the ground is unfrozen."

But speaking of sprouting seeds, have you ever noticed how things come up ever so crookedly? Almost never in a straight line. I thought of this in conjunction with a comment by my friend  Pathytharan Kumaralingm, who lives up in Jaffna. Pathy introduced me to the design principles of vasthu, something I was sadly ignorant of before. Some of the things Pathy told me, and I need to study up on this a whole lot more before I go to Jaipur, which was built entirely on principles of vasthu, is that the materials you use in building are of the essence. Other things like orientation of walls and water features are also important. But one of the most lasting comments Pathy made, while his fellow students were busy, furiously over-designing an urban space, was "why don't we just plant a seed and watch what it does? It will grow the way it has to."

Pathy was speaking from more than opinion. And what he contributed to that overheated discussion was nothing trite. He was addressing a design question from a philosophy that's rooted in more than 4000 years of human experience. 

As a botanist I'm convinced that we humans have co-evolved with plants for most of our existence. And I'm not just referring to post-Neolithic events in which humans learned to domesticate and cultivate plants. I'm going way back to our first bipedal ancestors and before. What did we observe in nature? How did we come to an understanding of how things grow? What did we learn? I'm sure the principles of vasthu are rooted here. And though they wear the ancient-modern cloak of Hindu beliefs, I think they are universal in time and space. 

So what can we learn from Pathy's comment? Certainly, observing plants and plant growth is a good place to start. And while young plants grow toward the light (and downward in equal measure toward nutrients and water), they do it in a non-linear fashion, in fits and starts, in bends and spirals. But inevitably they grow. 

What else can we learn? The materiality of plants is basic: cellulose molecules arranged in a few basic patterns with an array of variations. How can we play upon those variations as we design peace?

Plants are process as well. Their metabolism, like ours, is based on input and output, another principle of vasthu. They are, like humans, polar organisms with a "top" and a "bottom." This lies deep in their (and our) DNA. But this does not absolutely define us. A leaf is not necessarily polar. It has other dimensions as well, both on the exterior and inside. Nor is the chloroplast, the machinery of photosynthesis, entirely regular in its conformation. 

Plants are flexible and plastic. They bend, expand, sprout and contract according to the needs they sense. This is part of their non-linearity. They are "programmed" by DNA to grow according to their form but they are also programmed to respond to variations in light, water, temperature, and texture of their environment. 

As plants have evolved so can peace. Something to think about. 

Endless pocket of need

We were surprised today--quite surprised, when the lady at the front desk asked Janet whether we'd be able to give money to the school where her sister works. "They spent more than one lakh (Rs 100,000 ) on school supplies in December and now they need help paying it back." "But Mr. Thavarajah introduced us to Sister Helen last week and we bought all the kids notebooks and backpacks and art supplies." "That's a different place," she said. "The girls' home you went to is an orphanage. This is a school. And every one of them is Christian." (Does it make a difference--especially to us--the only non-Christian white people for miles around? Maybe the only ones on the island?).  

She proceeded to open her smart phone and show Janet photos and videos of the Christmas pageant, the children costumed and dancing and her brother-in-law cavorting like a Sri Lankan Santa Claus. Why did Thavarajah take us to the orphanage, Janet wondered. Didn't he know this was the place she was talking about last week when she mentioned her conversation with the front desk person?

Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. Maybe he knows about this school and maybe he ignores it. Maybe he misunderstood because Janet did, and mentioned "orphanage" because that was her best understanding. Whatever. The need is endless. Several hundred dollars' of school supplies poured into one cause doesn't fill the need of the next. It's a pocket that won't fill. And just as we suspected in the first place, throwing money at it won't fix it. And incidentally it's lovely to make the orphans happy with Santa costumes but what about the money they knew they'd need for the required notebooks? (Janet says she'd like to introduce loose leaf paper. Come on. Don't you remember the stupid trapper-keepers we had to buy for our kids each year? And how useless they were?). 

The endless pocket is a sign of systemic dysfunction. It reminds me of a visit I paid to my dentist a few years ago. An innocent cleaning. His assistant, Kenisha, was poking around in my mouth when she found a pocket where calcium from the tooth was draining into a gum that was disintegrating. There was a half inch hole that would only keep growing. A kind of cascade of rot. No cause was found. The tooth had to be pulled and I had an ugly gaping hole for a year. I think it was about systemic dysfunction in my work life. A horrible dean and a confused chairman, professional poison in a constant flow, no way out that I could see. Maybe I was grinding the teeth. But I was wearing a night guard! I was so upset I asked my doctor If something else might be going on. Was I losing bone mass in other parts of my body? Amazingly an X-ray and bone mass imaging were taken, mistaken with someone else's, and I was misdiagnosed with osteoporosis. A difficult year it was until the mistake was traced and the hole filled. 

Among the indignities was a stupid "expert" at one of our leading hospitals in Boston who spent about three minutes with me and insisted that if only I took massive amounts of vitamin D I'd be cured. I felt like I was in a whirlpool quicksand of quacks and idiocy and bad intentions and good intentions gone bad. It was ugly. 

So here I am in far eastern Sri Lanka. The needs are wrenching. The solutions are inadequate. A perverse system of international handouts and outlandish ideas that are supposed to provide solutions has evolved to fill an endless pocket of need, a society rotting from within as the result of a cruel civil war, terror and repression, ongoing ethnic and religious tension, widespread mental illness, and unimaginable natural disaster. It's a world of quacks and cheats and corruption. Wish I could say it was a pretty place. 

There is no end to the hole of need. It seems sometimes the mutual hates are overwhelming, and I wish it were as easy as microsurgery and installing a beautiful fake porcelain tooth.