The work permit issue has pretty much consumed all our lives here in Ampara the past few weeks. In addition to residents visas the government decided that we would have to apply through the Ministry of Defence for a work permit. It’s part of a strategy on their part to closely monitor the activities of INGO’s , we are perceived in the media as being a law unto ourselves with even accusations of support for and collusion with the LTTE. We all applied in plenty of time and waited for our permits to be issued. As the deadline approached a few were issued to people working on the South Coast and in Colombo but none for North and East. Wild rumours started to circulate that expats found without a work permit would be arrested and deported. There was general mass confusion, local forces were stopping us asking for evidence of our organisations registration with the MoD, something which did not actually exist but information is slow to trickle from Colombo to the “outpost” of Ampara. (The fact that around this time the Norwegian peace monitors came out and formally accused the government as being the ones who executed the 17 ACF staff didn’t help the reputations of Westerners in Sri Lanka) .Anyway a lot of the NGO’s left Ampara for Colombo while all this was cleared up. We stayed and on the first morning past the deadline headed off in convoy towards the checkpoints on the road to the coast , half expecting to be stopped and turned back. It all turned out to be a damp squib, we sailed through the checkpoints with ease as usual and had a normal working day. Two weeks later most of the people are back from Colombo and GOAL have been told that our permits will be issued next week. We’ll wait and see.
I’ve spent a lot of the past few weeks dealing with local government authorities and it has been an enormously frustrating experience. The meetings are excruciatingly farcical and at times resemble a Sri Lankan version of a Monty Python sketch. The meeting of the disaster management council of Sainthamaruthu is a case in point. Two weeks ago I received a letter advising me that I had been appointed to the Disaster Management Council of Sainthamaruthu. That was all the letter said , it failed to mention what this entailed or indeed what I had done to merit my appointment so I put it aside and didn’t think any more of it. Then last week I got a letter late one evening advising me that there was a meeting of the DMCoS the following morning and that I was requested to attend without fail. (there was no agenda of course, that would be all too organised) Off I went the next morning and stickler for time keeping that I am arrived at the venue at 9.28 for the 9.30 meeting. The venue was a corrugated shed on the roof of the building and I sat there for 25 minutes by myself. Every so often someone would pass through and give a reassuring smile to the profusely sweating and increasingly agitated foreigner. Finally people started to trickle in, the main government official arrived 40 minutes late and the meeting kicked off finally at 10.20. The first order of business was to poke fun at the foreigner who was silly enough to turn up at the appointed time , didn’t he know he was in Sri Lankan. The local mosque leader even took the trouble to tell a parable about a king requesting his subjects to fill a huge urn with milk and how one guy got the idea to just contribute water as no one would know the difference but when the king collected the urn it was full of water as everyone had the same idea. So if other words people show up late thinking that they will be the only one…. Everyone seemed really pleased with this little tale and all smiled sympathetically at me , the only gobshite who put milk in the urn. Anyway the objective of the meeting was to make plans to deal with any disaster that may befall Sainthamaruthu , from monsoon flooding to another tsunami. It lasted 2.5 hours and covered a wide range of topics only some of which was to do with disaster management. It was all in Tamil , every so often the mosque leader (who was still on thin ice with me over his poxy little parable) would translate snippets for me but I knew there was a lot of talk and bitching about NGO’s that wasn’t for my ears. One topic covered was the rubbish problem, by and large the streets here are filthy. The relevance on this to disaster management was lost on me but anyway the point being made was that engaging in sporadic mass clean up programmes wasn’t achieving anything. They asked my opinion and I said that to solve the problem long term you had to change people’s mindset and instil in them a sense of pride in the cleanliness of the area. Simple enough but they were all hugely impressed and a twenty minute discussion ensued on how an awareness programme was the way forward. Having resolved the Sainthamaruthu rubbish problem we moved onto the next issue. The fact that absolutely no decisions had been made on the nature of the programme or who was going to be responsible didn’t seem to matter. We had a great idea and that was enough for one day. I was on the verge of exploding with frustration by the time it was all finished.
Last night was the 2nd night of the 3 night perahara or festival consisting of massive parades of guys with whips, guys spinning wheels of fire, lots of dancers and the occasional gaudily decorated elephant. The parade was due to start at 9 so myself and my fellow milk urn filling expats were downtown by 8.45. The locals started to appear in force at 9.30 and the first elephant showed his face at 10.10. The parade was pretty impressive although tales of elephants going ballistic were foremost on my mind. One person was killed just outside our house one night a few months back by a wild elephant and there have been plenty of other such incidents even on Ampara’s main street to deter you from going wandering at night.
Only in Sri Lanka would a road rage incident involve some pissed off elephants. This photos show what happened to one of our hiluxes after an encounter with some elephants last Sunday morning. Our transport manager and a driver were on the way 
back from Kandy when they rounded a bend and found 3 elephants blocking their path. One of them seemed particularly narky and as he approached the vehicle it stalled when the driver tried to reverse away. So he got out and legged it, followed closely by the transport manager (who is a similar size to myself and admits that he has never moved so fast in his life). They hid in some bushes and when they came 
out the elephants had gone but so had the hilux. They eventually found it about 40 feet down a gully where the elephant had pushed it over the side. The decision to run turned out to be a good one, if they had stayed in the vehicle they could have been seriously injured or killed. A motorcyclist in the same area was killed the previous day when , assumingly the same, elephant stood on his chest. He also picked up the motorbike and turfed that over the side.
