Project days

After 7 hours of drive, as many checkpoints and 1 CD in the player, we arrived in Vidattaltivu, a small fishing village in the North of Sri Lanka.
“We” that is Thushan, his new secretary, a friend of his and me.
Vidattaltivu is, where the recent Turtle Conservation Project (TCP)- project is located. The small village has a lagoon on one side, with mangrove-forrests surrounding it and the ocean with a coral reef on the other side.
It was greatly affected by the war, as the Tamil Tigers had one of their hideouts here. One still can see destroyed and abandoned houses between the barrack-like new settlements with a program sign on them.

The income of the village mainly depends on fishing, but, like in many other places, the number of fish they catch, is declining with every year. Big industrial trawlers from India and China destroy huge areas of sea grass meadows in the area and all the life that is in them. (Illegally of course but what is a small country like Sri Lanka going to say against India and China?!)
The local fishermen themselves contribute to overfishing by unsustainable fishing practices. In order to maximize the catch and minimize the effort, they have turned to dynamite fishing in the coral reef. This led to the destruction of considerable parts of the latter.
In search for other income sources, the villagers also started cutting down the mangrove trees.
In order to stop those harmful activities, one first has to -much like with the turtle poaching- offer people alternative livelihoods.
So, like in the project you might have seen on the BBC documentary (earlier blog entry), the Turtle Conservation Project is funded by the UNDP* to introduce ornamental fish breeding, tailoring and eco tourism in the area**
So driving north, we had 4 bags of Thushans Platy-offspring in the back of the car, to be raised in newly built tanks.
Well, almost built. The guy who had the order to construct the ca. 2 x 1.5m concrete squares hadn’t been too enthusiastic about his job. He only finished the last tank after Thushan told him there would be no more cooperation if the fish won’t swim in the right number of tanks before we leave.
After placing the remaining fish in the existing tanks and checking on the progress of the already ongoing upbringing, we got invited for the obligatory tea.
Later that evening, I had a quite insightful talk with the secretary girl, but that’s another entry.
Today we did quite a lot of sitting around (with or without tea). The other two girls went to help the ladies of the village with the tailoring order TCP had for them (Cotton bags). Thushan and me were supposed to meet the “father” (=priest) of the christian community, to discuss potential beneficiaries for the eco tourism training. But as it is often the case with people who consider themselves high in hierarchy, this guy didn’t feel the need to stick to the appointment and went to the hairdresser instead.
So over the second bottle of cold Sprite, Thushan used the free time to tell me off about my intended trip to an elephant sanctuary.
On my way back from Rekawa last week, I had met a couple who was doing some promotional filming. They told me that they were normally working for an elephant conservation project. As we kept talking (I had already seen some poor creatures tied solitary in the back of a temple, stereotyping away) we discovered that the 2 of them had been working for the TCP too. They knew Thushan -of whom they spoke kindly- for quite a while. The guy gave me his card and they invited me to come and visit the elephant sanctuary.
When back in Panadura, I told Thushan about this funny coincident. He indeed knew them both but made immediately clear, that he isn’t friends with the guy anymore.
As I didn’t care too much about the guy but about seeing an elephant project, I decided to write an Email anyway and ask about the whereabouts of the place and an opportunity to visit. Although I didn’t get an answer yet and therefor haven’t arranged anything so far, this action alone apparently was a quite disrespectful thing to do as a guest.
In the Sri Lankan understanding of hospitality, the guest owes the host loyalty. So if the host tells the guest he/she doesn’t like someone, the guest is supposed to abandon any further unnecessary contact with this person.
Well, you know how I love having to ask for permission ,-)
There you go: Culture clash at its finest ,-)

* United Nations Development Programme
**for more information about the project see here: http://www.sltcp.org/dugong-project-with-tcp/