Home

The bed and fridge were delivered, three months rent were paid, and we got our keys and moved in on a Friday. We had each brought one large backpack, one rolling suitcase, a laptop each, plus my viola, to Sri Lanka. Siam helped us drag each item down the steep steps to the annex. Dan gave him a nice tip for his repeated services and then we were alone in our home. We flopped down in the brand-new naked foam mattress, exhausted from the heat, the packing, and the hauling. We lay curled up, side by side for a few minutes feeling the breeze from the open windows blow over us until suddenly there was a loud scuffling noise in the ceiling, send us both flying to our feet. “Pole cat. We have a goddamn pole cat,” Dan exclaimed.
“What the hell is a pole cat?” I demanded, “And how do you kill it?”
“It’s an animal that lives in ceilings here. I had one pee on my laundry once. I was living with Jeff and I had my laundry spread all over the bed. I left to get a drink and when I came back it was obvious that my laundry had been pee’d on,” Dan replied.
“Jeff?” I asked.
“He wasn’t home,” Dan laughed.
“What about the ceiling, couldn’t you tell by that?” I asked.
“It was a wooden ceiling,” Dan replied. It was difficult for me to imagine a ceiling that would not give evidence of urine saturation, but I didn’t press any further into the issue. “The key thing to remember,” I said encouragingly, “is that animals in the ceiling are much, much smaller than they sound. My violin teacher used to have me come over to her house for lessons. There was this real racket in the ceiling one day and we were really freaked out, so we made her boyfriend go up there. It sounded huge, like a wombat or something. It was a damn squirrel.”
“Hopefully it won’t like it once we start living here,” Dan added.
“What about gangster rap?” I asked. “How does that work? We could have a West-Coast marathon and drive the thing away,” I suggested.
“We can try,” Dan said, unconvinced.

The pole cat was my first chapter in the lesson of the Sri Lankan house. In Sri Lanka, the indoors and the outdoors are not as clearly defined as they are in the West. To ventilate the annex we had to keep the doors to the patio and the windows open whenever we are home. There were bars on the windows to keep people out, but that is about it. When we moved in we had two inch roaches, four different regiments of ants, geckos, mosquitoes, and the pole cat living in the house. Just outside we had a raven and an angry chipmunk that peeps and yells all day long. The local herd of monkeys would occasionally drop by to attack the house and enormous mango tree in the yard. Fortunately Dan was well-versed in animal maintenance and destruction. We both liked the geckos, the raven, and the chipmunk. On our first shopping trip we got spray for the roaches, powder for the ants, and coils to burn for the mosquitos. For the monkeys we armed ourselves with pump-action water rifles.

After a weekend of basic unpacking and organization Dan left on Monday morning for work at the think-tank. I handed him his computer bag with a bottle of freshly filtered water and kissed him goodbye as he changed from his indoor shoes to his outdoor shoes. I was now a Sri Lankan house-girlfriend. In the week before we moved in Dan and I had asked around for work for me, utilizing all of Dan’s contacts and friends built up over the past ten years. Back in the states I was a nurse and made a good living, but I was not licensed to practice in Sri Lanka and held only a tourist visa. After two years of nights and mandatory overtime I was burned out and had been looking for a change of pace. When I was thinking about coming to Sri Lanka I envisioned myself working for one of the myriad of Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGO, doing relief work. Right after we arrived in-county 15 aid workers were shot execution-style as the civil war heated up in the north, so I was not pursuing that option. I interviewed at two International Schools. During each interview I was forced to admit that I had no teaching experience, my only qualifications were my native English tongue and my degree in English Literature. In a country where basically everyone already speaks English, this skill set was less compelling. Sri Lankans themselves go abroad to China and Korea to teach English. I even interviewed at one of Kandy’s better hotels. I was offered a job as a receptionist working everyday of the month except five, eight hours a day, for $80 US a month. This is a living wage for Sri Lanka. I was putting the word out there for private English tutoring, but nothing had come through yet.

Dan had made it clear at the outset that I did not need to work. His grant could more than cover our living expenses and all of the little extras. I paid for my various plane tickets and that was it. “I just don’t want you to be bored,” he had told me with concern, “I don’t expect you to earn money, if you want to take the hotel job for a cultural experience take it, but I didn’t expect you to find work, especially not right away.” I still had some money in savings and no debt. Back in the states I owned a brand-new car outright. When I checked my accounts on-line it chilled me that the figure would not grow for a very long time, only dwindle.

After Dan left I started to clean up the breakfast dishes. I thought about how a move in the US would be different. Before I had gone back to school for nursing, I had worked for a temp agency and landed a job in accounting. Forget the fact that I had a degree and significant work experience for one of the most in-demand fields in the States. Even without that I would be registering with temp agencies, writing cover letters, and attacking the want-ads with a red pen. Here, I had to cast my lines in all directions and wait. Even if I did land a job as a teacher it wouldn’t be for more than $150 US a month. I felt helpless and parasitic.

After washing and drying the dishes I started pumping water. All of our drinking and cooking water had to be purified by with a hand-pump water filter. I pumped the tap water from one 5 liter jug to another. For all of our drinking, cooking, and tea we used nearly 10 liters a day. After the water I swept the floor, picked up the apartment, packaged up the trash, and made the bed. Someone really needed to sweep every day since leaves and dirt blew in the windows, and dead ants, roaches, and mosquitoes covered the floor each morning after we sprayed, powdered, and lit coils each night. To keep the fruit flies to a minimum the trash had to be taken out to the big bin on the road each day. You couldn’t even just have a barrel outside on the compound because the monkeys would be drawn to it. When I looked at the clock I realized that 3 hours had gone by and I hadn’t even tackled the mango leaves on the patio. “Dan was right, this place is high maintenance,” I thought as I moved out onto the patio and grabbed the outside broom. The sun was striking the gold canopy of the Temple of the Tooth and shinning off of the top of the lake. I could see Kandy thronging with activity and life down the hill below me as I worked. I stopped to look at the view and I reminded myself that this is what I had wanted. I wanted the challenge of living in the third world for a year. I had invited the assault on my values and habits. I wanted to be stripped of all the external things like my job, my car, my spending power, and my routine. I had wanted to pop the hood and see what was under there.