Jaffna (Mar.16-22)

I had another one of those, "holy crap" moments on the car ride from the Colombo airport. On the radio was a song which featured N.O.R.E. & Nina Sky, and had the Tego Calderon "Guasa Guasa" beat I'd first heard in the Dominican. It was very surreal. Globalisation at it's finest.

The next morning we flew to Jaffna. Here's my tip of the day for anyone traveling to Jaffna. If you were planning on getting a return flight ticket, don't bother. Get a one-way there and then take one of the luxury buses back. Flying from Jaffna to Colombo is exceedingly time-consuming thanks to the army controlled access to Pallaly airport and three sets of baggage checks.

I'd been to Jaffna briefly before so I'd seen the town. It's like any small but growing town. The reason we came this time was to visit my parents' old houses.



Very picturesque fishing areas, the water was various shades of blue and green; I'd swim there if I wasn't so concerned about the mines.



Here the morning fog is lifting and it was very calm and quiet out. Mainly because our cab had died and slowly coasted to a stop.



My mom's house had been stripped of most of the furniture and valuables over the years since my grandmother left. Here we slept on the floor and bathed by the well, a very simple lifestyle. It was weird being here; it wasn't familiar at all since I'd only been here once before. Yet at the same time it did feel very comfortable. The neighbours were amazing, and because there was no running water, no kitchen, nothing really in that house, they cooked meals for us while we were there. It's certainly an experience seeing the chicken you're about to eat. You'd think that would make me a vegetarian, but really it just made me lament the fact that the chicken was running around so much, making her very stringy. And it certainly was nice to see nature's beautiful cycle: man eating chicken, chickens eating leftover chicken pieces, goats eating plastic bags...



We also went to one of the island's to see my dad's house.



Yup, that's it. It had been appropriated by the army during the war, flattened when they turned the area into a base, and then cleared when they finally left. It was a pathetic sight, but not altogether unsurprising. We met with some of my dad's relatives back in town, and they showed us some stuff their mother had saved. It included my parents' wedding invitation.



It was an extremely profound moment for me. Because throughout a 20+ year war, through the '83 riots, the '91 Pungudutivu & '95 Jaffna displacements, they had carried it with them.
Family.

about Sri Lanka, from Australia