Dear Friends,
Greetings of love and peace from Sri Lanka.
I write from my room in a hostel on the campus of the conference center of the Sarvodaya Movement. The overhead fan moves the air around and cools the room a little, but blessedly doesn’t drown out the symphony of night noises from all the creatures in this remote and peaceful place some considerable distance from downtown Colombo. Evidently there is a river, complete with crocodiles, on the grounds, but it was dark when we arrived so an exploration will have to wait.
Abraham, Sujatha Wijetilleke and I left Kottarakkara this morning at 6 AM for a reasonably uneventful hour-and-a-quarter ride to the airport in Trivandrum. I should say, for those who haven’t been to India, driving in India is an ongoing exercise in negotiation, as lane markers, where they exist at all, are more to get your bearings than to confine traffic in a particular lane. It all seems to work somehow, though not without a goodly number of casualties as people shave the clearances with an oncoming vehicle a little too razor thin. As a passenger, surrender is really the only viable option.
Our plane departed at about 9:40 and arrived in Colombo about 10:15. The drive from the airport into Colombo to the home of Sarvodaya’s legendary founder, Dr. A.T. Ariaratne, took over two hours in unendingly stop and go traffic. The slow journey gave me an opportunity to reflect on the differences from my last trip here over ten years ago. Sri Lanka has weathered a tsunami since then and its three-decade civil war has officially come to an end. I noticed the absence of the military check points and an effusion of billboards promoting everything from clothes to education to internet access to custom built homes to new cars – all intended one way or another to help you realize your dream. After rebuilding from the tsunami and the war, consumerism and maybe a little more.
We had a delightful lunch with Dr. Ariaratne, still a dynamic, practical dreamer at 80, mainly hearing about Sarvodaya’s campaign to unite the nation around a 30-point reform program focused on consciousness, the economy and power. Abraham and I were both given copies of the program, but I haven’t had an opportunity to read its contents, so all I can say is that the document is the result of a wide scale consultation in the Sarvodaya network in over 10,000 villages and is now the focus of weekly gatherings of 1,000+ people in different areas of the country, trying to build a grassroots consensus for reform in key areas of public life.
After lunch, we drove (about 45 minutes) to the grounds of the Anglican Cathedral, where we had an engaging meeting that included many who had taken the one-week Moral Imagination peacebuilding training that Abraham and Herm Weaver led here last year, as well as members of the Interreligious Peace Foundation, an interfaith group of religious leaders founded in 1993.
Abraham and I had an opportunity to present about URI. In the discussion that followed it became clear that there is a great deal of anxiety about how to forge a meaningful peace from a military action that effectively destroyed the fighting capacity of the enemy, a separatist Tamil group in the northern part of the country, without seriously addressing the core issues that had fueled the violence. Many are concerned that the Tamil-speaking population is being oppressed and marginalized, a recipe more for disaster and potentially renewed violence than for a meaningful peace. People aren’t sure what to do, but they are clear something needs to be done to disentangle religion and politics and build a measure of healing and reconciliation into the nation’s emerging post violent conflict life.
It was also clear that many of the young leaders who participated in the MI training have found ways to use what they’ve learned to be proactive in addressing issues, like the absence of meaningful medical care in poor Tamil communities, that threaten any sort of positive future for all Sri Lankans. These efforts are small in scale, but represent the effort of a younger generation that seems determined to leave behind the divisions that have defined the lives of their elders and find ways to build a new Sri Lanka that works for everyone.
After this session, we had another marathon ride (over two hours) to this conference center (by the way, Sri Lankan traffic is a lot like Indian traffic). Once here, we had a delightful dinner and I’m about ready for bed, so I can be up and ready to hit the road at 6 AM tomorrow to drive three hours to visit a CC in Galle!
Stay tuned…
Faithfully,
Charles
