Eva

“You’ll like Eva,” Dan promised as I sat at the dressing table in the honeymoon suite at the Galle Face Hotel putting on my make-up. I regretted that I had such a short toilette as I sat gazing at my finished face in the old silver-backed mirror. Lunch had been the usual delicious, leisurely affair at the Gallery Café, starting with a cold Gazpacho soup, moving into crusted tofu, then to ginger ice cream and Sencha green tea. Now we were going across the street to an Italian place to met one of Dan’s oldest friends in Sri Lanka, Eva. Dan explained that she had her PhD in Sociology, but rather than teach she chose to live Sociology and publish in international journals from Sri Lanka.

We arrived at the restaurant before Eva. She entered the restaurant walking quickly and purposefully wearing a fitted white shirt with a delicate, all-over floral red embroidery, frog font-closures down the front of the shirt, and a mandarin collar paired with tan slacks and low tan heels. She shook my hand firmly on introduction before taking her seat. I watched Eva as she and Dan caught up. With her perfectly coiffured medium length blond hair worn down, tastefully made-up face, and slender build you could have told me that she was a Madison Ave advertising executive and I would have believed you.

“So, what projects are you working on now?” Dan asked.

“Well, I have a grant to fund Sri Lankans to do their own Sociological research,” she began. “We put together a group of 25 for a month-long training period at the end of which they would submit project proposals for funding. Most of the participants were tenured professors at major universities in Colombo. Of the 25 that started the program only 10 finished, and I only have about 4 workable proposals that I am actually going to fund,” she explained. “Now I mostly have a bunch of money and nothing to do with it,” she added.

“What happened?” I asked as the waiter brought our menus.

“We would get them into these classes to try and teach deductive reasoning,” she began. “We would ask the group for a possible research topic, just a premise to start with. One of the participants would say ‘The tea plantation workers are the poorest in Sri Lanka,’ I would say ‘OK, how to you know?’ and he would reply ‘because that’s where I’m from.’ Then another participant would say ‘what about the people in Jaffna? They’re pretty poor.’ Then the first participant would very simply say ‘No, the tea plantation workers are the poorest in Sri Lanka.’ Then I would say ‘have you ever been to Jaffna? How do you know that people aren’t poorer up there?’ Then the first participant would become angry that we were insulting his intelligence and personal experience and quit the group,”

“Wow,” Dan and I breathed in unison.

“I know,” Eva continued. “Things didn’t get better. One day we finally had a premise. The premise was that there is less child abuse in families with strong family ties. I said, ‘OK, now we need to define the term “family ties” so that we can measure it against rates of child abuse. So what are family ties?” The participants said ‘we have strong family ties here in Sri Lanka, not like you in America where you have weak family ties and only visit your parents on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.’ I tried to get them to define the term ‘family ties’ all afternoon in a way that had nothing to do with comparing themselves with the West, but they were unable to do it. I finally lost control of the group and we had to just end for the day.”

“And these are professors at universities?” Dan asked.

“Yes,” Eva confirmed as the waiter came over to take our orders. “I’ve heard that the pizza is good here,” she instructed us. We each ordered a variety of personal pizza.

“It’s so interesting how they couldn’t define themselves except as in opposition and superiority to the West,” I commented.

“And these are the people teaching at the best universities in the country,” Dan reminded us, shaking his head.

“That’s just sad,” I replied. “So, what did you end up with?” I asked.

“I have a woman working on children whose mother’s go overseas to work as maids,” Eva answered. “She has a group of children in a certain village whose mothers are in the Middle East and children the same age whose mothers are home. She is giving all of the kids a repeated set of psychological testing over the course of a year as well as factoring in grades and other subjective data like classroom performance. That’s the best thing we have, her study size is small and I’m sure that some families will drop out of the study, but it was the best we could do,” she replied, shrugging.

“Are you still working up in Mannar?” Dan asked.

“Yes, I go up there for a two weeks and then come back to Colombo for a break and report to the head office,” Eva replied.

“And what’s the nature of your work up there?” I asked.

“I do housing development as well as food security,” she began. “I don’t do nutritional security,” she emphasized. “You have to weigh babies and all that shit for that,” she added, wrinkling her nose and waving her hand dismissively.

“So what’s the difference?” I asked.

“In nutritional security you need objective evidence that the population is getting adequate nutrition,” she explained. “In food security you just help them to have food. Whether or not they are nourished by the food is not your issue,” she paused, watching Dan and I nod our heads seriously. “Basically I give people seeds,” she added.

“When I was on the tsunami tour we would go to a certain village to assess their needs,” Dan began, “and people from all of the surrounding villages would come to the village to try and get stuff. If we were arranging to put in a sewer they would come and say don’t we deserve a sewer? Do you have problems like that?” he asked.

“Yes, and I just tell them that I am working in this village, this district, and they are outside of the area,” she replied firmly. “That’s a big part of what I do up there. Mostly I set limits like that and oversee the local staff and go over all of their account books,” she finished.

“What do you do for housing development?” I asked.

“We used to give people money for the parts of the house and they got more when each part was finished,” she answered. “They would get money for the floor and when the floor was done we gave them money for the walls. This led to a lot of unfinished houses. They would get the money for the floor and put in a floor. Then they would get money for the walls and use it for something else. They couldn’t get more money for the roof until they did the walls, so it wouldn’t be finished. Now we deal directly with the contractors and we don’t pay anyone until the job is done.”

“Who are the people getting these houses?” Dan asked.

“This is a re-settlement project,” Eva answered. “These are Tamils who fled the north and lived as refugees in India for ten or so years and now they are re-settling back here,” she told us.

“Do you ever worry that they will have to flee again?” I asked.

“No,” Eva answered decisively. “This is not a conflict affected area.”

“Conflict affected area?” I echoed mockingly, “Is that what you NGO people call a war-zone?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, laughing at her own jargon. “Of course there is the ‘non-violent peace force’ busily engaged in ‘peace-building’ up there also,” she replied devilishly.

“It sounds like the ‘peace-building’ is going about as well as the house building where people who end up with a floor and spend the money for the walls,” Dan interjected, laughing.

“Speaking of the conflict,” I said. “What do you think can bring peace to this area?” asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered as if it were of no consequence. “I just help people build houses. People who were living in a mud-brick have a house now and that’s all I care about. I don’t get involved in the big picture.” She explained as the pizzas arrived. My veggie primavera was covered in cheese, too much cheese with a few little tomatoes poking out of the avalanche of cheese. I knew that I wasn’t going to eat much as I enviously watched Dan dig into his extra mutton special.

“I love all of the jargon,” I commented rather than eat my pizza. “I love terms like ‘cash for work’ and ‘microfinance.’”

“I have another good one for you,” Eva replied eagerly. “capacity development. You’re probably doing capacity development and not even knowing it. I am trying to do capacity development with the Sri Lankan scholars, trying to develop their capacity for deductive reasoning.”

“So when Dan and I made a worksheet for Dan’s research assistant to use to gather data at the Mihintale Army camp we were capacity developing and didn’t even know it?” I asked.

“Yup,” she replied happily as she enthusiastically cut into her pizza.

“What’s microfinance?” Dan asked in between bites of food.

“Isn’t that like the Grameen bank?” I asked.

“Yes,” Eva confirmed. “The Grameen Bank is in Bangladesh. They give very small loans for a family to buy a sewing machine to start to make handicrafts for example.”

“I read about one woman who used a Grameen Bank load to buy a cell phone,” I added, scraping the cheese off a small piece of pizza and cutting it into small pieces. “She is the only person in her village with a phone and she makes a small profit off of everyone that uses it.”

“I have a colleague who does something here like the Grameen Bank,” Eva replied. “It’s pretty common twist, what he does is bundle a group of five women together. He gives the loan to the first woman and the other four can’t get their loan until the first woman pays her loan back,” Eva explained.

“What a brilliant use of village politics!” Dan exclaimed. “It’s really getting the competition and envy of the village situation to work for you instead of against you.”

“Yes, it really is,” Eva verified. “That’s called ‘community development,’ if you are looking for another term,” she joked.

“Community development,” I repeated. “That’s not as good as conflict affected area,” I said with mock disappointment.

“So, have you talked to other NGO types here?” Eva asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “We talked to a woman, we forgot her name so we just call her Typhoid Mary because she was in Colombo at our hotel waiting evaluation for Typhoid,” Eva nodded her head and chuckled. “This woman worked up in Trinco doing cash for work to rebuild the roads after the fighting had torn them up.”

“What organization did she work for?” Eva asked.

“I’m really not sure,” Dan replied apologetically.

“She was the first career NGO person I’d met,” I continued. “That’s when I realized it’s a big business for foreigners and locals alike. Before her I had just met some women in Kandy who were doing projects for a few months as a break from their normal jobs. In those cases the local NGOs were bringing in a foreigner specifically to do their dirty work for them like write a new business plan or go figure why no new toilets had been built up in the tea country after one year of funding from the parents organization.”

“It is a big business,” Eva nodded her head approvingly. “People ask me why I don’t get a regional manager job. Then I would never have to leave Colombo and I could afford a really nice apartment here. For me going into the field and seeing progress is what keeps me going. I don’t want to sit in an office all day,” she emphasized.

“That’s exactly the sort of job that Typhoid Mary is working her way up to,” Dan added, setting down his fork after having devoured half of his pizza. I gave up on my pizza and set my fork down as well.

“I think I’ve gotten my nutritional security for the evening,” I commented. “And since we’re at the Galle Face I’m pretty sure that my food is secure tomorrow morning,” I quipped.

“Yes, we’ve got to go and get to bed,” Dan added. “We’ve got to get up at 4:30 AM to watch the Superbowl. That’s the whole point of our coming to Colombo.”

“Oh, that’s so funny!” Eva replied. “Who’s playing?”

“Colts-Bears,” Dan replied.

“Well, have fun with the Superbowl at 4:30 AM then,” she replied. “It was really nice to see you both. Call me when you are in town again for the World Series or whatever” she added with a mix of levity and sincerity. Eva then called her driver and walked briskly back out into the warm Colombo night.

“So, what’d you think of Eva?” Dan asked as we started back to the Galle Face.

“She’s remarkable,” I replied, shaking my head in awe.