Lunch with Elaine

“Is Elaine in town?” I asked Dan on our morning walk along the Galle Face Green before breakfast the day after my birthday.
“I sent her a text before we came,” Dan replied, “And she said she might be free today for lunch.”
“Great!” I answered enthusiastically, “Let’s set something up. Let’s try that Japanese place this time.

After a swim in the pool we met Elaine in the lobby of the Galle Face Regency. She wore a white eyelet sleeveless wrap blouse paired with fitted, tan, polished-cotton slacks and tan high-heeled sandals. I hugged her and she tried to do an air-kiss on each cheek maneuver on me which failed utterly on the second cheek as I awkwardly tried to lean back in to complete the greeting, feeling awkward and provincial. “I know a great Japanese place, Nihonbashi, and it’s right across the street,” she informed us with a smile and led us out the doors of the Regency and across Galle Road.

We followed her into an alley between some closed shops and a construction site on the other side of Galle Road. We continued on along the wall of the construction site, the only thing I could see us walking towards was a closed casino marked by a broken neon sign reading “High Stakes” in red letters with a pair of dice under the words. When we passed the abandoned casino I suddenly noticed a white UN SUV complete with satellite phone antennae and snorkel parked between a navy blue BMW sedan and a Volvo station wagon under a tin roof along the wall of the construction site. “We must be getting warm,” I thought to myself on seeing the vehicles, each attended by its own driver. The UN driver slept in the driver’s seat with the window down, the Volvo driver simply stood next to the vehicle, and the BMW driver poured water out of a large water bottle over the hood of the car and used his hand to push the Colombo dust off of the paint job. Behind the “High Stakes” slate steps led down two glass doors emerged out of a thicket of bamboo.

“We never would have found this,” I commented.
“I’ve only driven here with friends before,” Elaine admitted, “I never really noticed this alley before,” she finished as the doorman bowed and opened the glass doors for us. The Spartan restaurant was filled with light pouring in from large picture windows and diffused by the little bamboo forest that surrounded the restaurant. A fountain bubbled under a skylight in the atrium of the restaurant. We were shown to a highly-polished, thick, dark teak table with a shot of golden teak inlaid through the middle. “Wow,” I sat, sitting down in the laminated birch chair and taking stock of the little gem tucked into a seedy corner of Colombo.
“This place is pretty nice,” Elaine agreed as Dan excitedly studied the extensive menu.

We studied the menu in solemn silence, each making our decisions. After ordering I asked Elaine some of the NGO-related questions I had been pondering for awhile. “Dan has been going out to talk to families of soldiers killed in the war for awhile,” I began. “Recently when he goes to the families houses he has noticed a change. The families now expect that the white person is going to bring running water to their house or something like that.”
“That’s a new thing,” Dan echoed me, nodding.
“So,” I continued. “Do you think that all of the NGO work in this country is creating a culture of dependence where individuals assume that the foreigners will teacher their children English for free and dig their wells to the government assuming that the NGOs will come in and care for the masses of people displaced by the war?”
“Absolutely,” she replied bluntly, nodding. I did feel like I could quite ask “Then what are you doing here?” I just looked at her in silence until she continued.
“But the government just doesn’t care,” she continued. “If we don’t help these people, Especially the Tamils, then they’ll die. Most of the NGOs do really good work and help people that nobody else is going to help,” she replied simply. “But the government and everything they do to prevent us from delivering aid is really starting to get to me,” she conceded. “I work with people who have worked in Indonesia and Chad,” she continued. “They tell me that this government drives them crazy.”
“That’s a pretty strong statement,” Dan replied.
“I have to admit,” Elaine continued, “That’s one of the reasons that I took my current assignment, I’m looking into the possibility of making a lateral move within the organization to a management level in another country where language skills won’t be an issue.”
“So after ten years you are starting to plan your exit?” I asked, surprised.
“I’m looking into it,” she confessed.
“That would be a real loss for Sri Lanka,” Dan commented. “You are fluent in both Tamil and Sinhala and you really know how to work with the people here after so much time in the field.” Elaine nodded in agreement.
“Do you ever think of moving back to the States?” I asked.
“No,” she replied definitively, “I know I’d be bored, getting up every day, driving in to work at an office,” she said, rolling her eyes as the first courses of sushi arrived.

We were quiet for a few moments, each savoring the tasty morsels of fish before I launched into my next question. “You know,” I commented, “Before I met Dan and really started to think about Sri Lanka I knew about the LTTE. I thought that they were freedom fighters; I figured they had a good reason for doing what they were doing. But then I got here and heard about them blowing up convoys of unarmed soldiers going home on leave, sea piracy, and assassinating opposing Tamil politicians; and these are just things that happened since I’ve been living here. You’ve also got the history, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, ethnic cleansing of Jaffna, and blowing up the Temple of the Tooth for example,” I paused. “Now, I’m not saying that the Sinhala didn’t do bad, bad, things, especially after independence, but I feel like the LTTE isn’t about that anymore. I don’t know what they are about, what their goal really is. What do you think? You’ve been up there right?” I asked.
“I will admit that I had much more sympathy for the concept of Eelam before I actually went there,” she began. “I went to the LTTE controlled east after the Tsunami…”
“Did they stamp your passport?” Dan interjected.
“No,” Elaine replied. “I’ve heard about that stamp,” she laughed, “but I’ve never seen it. And they just use Sri Lankan Rupees up there for currency,” she added as the waiter cleared away the plates from our first course. “So I went there to distribute aid after the Tsunami,” she continued. “It was a fascist state, with someone watching you all the time. Nobody would talk to me. The LTTE said to me ‘give us the supplies and we will distribute them.’ I said to them ‘No, how can we give aid when we don’t even know what the people need?’ I mean, in other areas we first asked people ‘what did you lose? Are you a fisherman and you lost your nets? Where are you getting your food? How many homes were destroyed?’ Things like that. So finally,” she breathed a dramatic sigh to add emphasis to the struggle, “I was allowed to talk to the people in the villages with a LTTE soldier right next to me.” I could easily visualize Elaine in a professional but stylish outfit standing in front of Prabhakaran himself and saying “No! We must talk to the people ourselves.”
“What did some of the other organizations do?” Dan asked.
“It was crazy,” She admitted. “There were organizations driving through towns at night pushing supplies out of the back of SUVs into the street and whoever got it got it. They had these supplies and they needed to get rid of them. That’s how disorganized things were.”
“When I was on the Tsunami tour in the south I had some similar experiences,” Dan replied. “So much random aid had been distributed that a certain village might have tons of chick peas and bandages and nothing else. Then we would ask who the villagers wanted to distribute the aid, you know, because we needed a local contact person. Sometimes I would say ‘do you want to monks to distribute the aid?’ and almost always the villagers would suggest someone else other than the local monk,” Dan remarked. “Then we went to this one Catholic village,” he continued, “And they enthusiastically asked that the aid be distributed by the father, by the priest.”
“That’s really interesting,” I commented as the main courses arrived, tempura for me, udon for Dan, and more sushi for Elaine.
“I’ve heard it said that the Tsunami catalyzed the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement,” I commented, realizing I had to wait for my tempura to cool before eating. “But it seems to me that Prabhakaran just needed to re-arm.”
“It sure looks that way,” Elaine replied after a bite of crab roll, nodding her head vigorously.

As I started to work on my tempura, Elaine asked Dan about his research. “Well, I’m wrapping up the war project, finally,” he sighed. “This project has just been really draining. It’s been such a big survey of so many aspects of Buddhist belief and the war that I haven’t had the time and energy to devote to any one research subject or site. I’ve gotten a lot of data, but I haven’t developed any really emotionally satisfying relationships like I had when I was a junior Fulbrighter. I feel like the only relationships I have right now are with Sri Lankans that I employ in one way or another,” he paused to stir his noodle soup. “Also, I haven’t been looking at anything or anyone extraordinary or inspirational,” he continued. “I am more just trying to illustrate the situation on the ground. The monks I’ve been working with are nice guys, but I wouldn’t say that most of them are particularly good monks.” Elaine nodded her head in agreement.
“Early in your career you can have some close relationships for short periods of time that are part of your growth as a scholar, but fall away once you start doing serious research,” Elaine explained. “I lived with a family in a waddle and dob hut for nine months when I was a Fulbrighter,” she continued. “I slept on the floor with the kids. I cried, everyone cried when it was time for me to leave. I’ve gone back to that area maybe once or twice and seen them, but everything is different now.”
“You can’t carry that relationship into the future,” I remarked and Elaine nodded approvingly.

“The other thing is my role as an employer of Sri Lankans,” Dan continued as Elaine gave him a sympathetic look.
“This whole project has been experienced through Thilak,” he began. “I never would have been able to accomplish what I accomplished without him, but trying to get the work I need out him is tough at times,”
“Capacity building,” I interjected and Elaine laughed.
“The worst part though is I have learned that Thilak is practically incapable of doing an interview without lying,” Dan confessed. “For example, we’ll be interviewing a monk and Thilak will say ‘we’ve interviewed over 100 other monks,’ and then I have to say ‘no, we’ve interviewed about twenty monks.’ Thilak is often really good at sort of greasing the wheels of the interview, but that is one bad habit he has.”
“Thilak is just going to say whatever he thinks will put the interview subject in the right frame of mind,” Elaine explained. “The veracity of his statement is immaterial to him. If he feels that his job is to facilitate the best possible interview, he probably can’t understand when you are upset at little details like how many other monks have been interviewed,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and tilting her head with a dead-pan expression as if to say “who could care about such trivialities?” before breaking into a smile. “When you go from just sort of living in the culture and learning about the culture to having to utilize the human resources of the culture to get data on a large scale, that’s when everything changes,” she assured him.
“Another thing is having Sara here,” Dan continued. “Even though it’s great having her here and everything, I used to get a certain amount of attention and harassment, but now I have to deal with the amount of attention and harassment she gets and it has really changed the way I walk around on the street, even when I’m on my own. I’m always just waiting for the next thing to happen.”
“That’s why we tend to come here for vacations instead of to the beach or some place more touristy,” I added. “We can go out for a nice meal and just sort of feel normal for a little while here.”
“It’s really tough,” she agreed. “I knew a guy who was here from Canada and he brought his wife. After three months she just really hated it, she had to go home. The trouble was that his university was giving him extra money for her and when she went home they were trying to get him to pay it back.”
“That’s crazy,” I replied as the waiter cleared our plates.
“Well, it’s about time for me to get back to the office,” Elaine commented as the check arrived. “We don’t have much to do since we aren’t allowed to go to the north and collect data because the fighting is so bad, but I need to be there anyway,” she sighed as we all chipped in money for the check.