SRI LANKA REVISITED
Part 1
It is mid-December 2023. In Sri Lanka, according to the climate description of the island, it is the dry season. Unfortunately, things are different now. It pours with rain or just rains every day for several hours.
In the rain like this, we go out for dinner. We were suggested a restaurant run by a German, because he is a client of our friend’s - a portrait painter - and we should visit him.
During the tuk-tuk ride, the city was enveloped in darkness. A failure in one of the three power plants caused a power outage across the entire (!) island.
State institutions, hospitals, hotels and popular restaurants use their own power generators.
The lights from the restaurant are the only street lighting.
In the dark we reach our restaurant, where there are no signs of activity. But after a while, a few young people (waiters?) jump up from the table at which they are sitting and invite us for dinner.
It's still raining heavily.
Dinner with candles and decorative battery-powered lights, cooked on gas, was a typical Sri Lankan dish - rice and various vegetables in curry sauce (rice and curry).
We are the only guests, so several waiters try to entertain us with conversation. Time passes, there is still no electricity.
Our dinner without power:
One of the guys whose English is the best, at our request, accompanies us at the table. He is about 30 years old and his name is Akitha.
We bombard him with questions about life in Sri Lanka for people of a similar standard to his.
And so begins the "candlelight" story.
At times very funny, at times intimate, and all the time very personal and ultimately sad.
The opportunity to have a longer conversation with foreigners, not just a casual conversation like that of a waiter with a restaurant guest, makes Akitha open up to us and express what there is on his heart and soul. He tries not to dazzle us with the dramas and difficulties of life he tells, but rather lightly presents his reality as the fate that concerns him.
First, he answers our questions about employment conditions in this restaurant. Work here is like in the feudal-capitalist system: no contract, no guarantee of employment, 24 hours a day (!) in a system of eight-hour shifts, paid at the whim of the German owner and the local manager. Twenty-six working days a month for approximately US $150!
Two lousy meals a day and a bed in a shared room.
He says about his relationships with his colleagues that there is general mutual unfriendliness because competition on the labor market is ruthless.
The tourist season is short (at the coast it lasts only four months).
Akitha has a very limited social life because lack of money and family obligations force him to take on additional job.
The unsympathetic and capricious owner of the restaurant mercifully agreed to let Akitha work a permanent shift from 16:00 to 00:00, so every other day he can take care of the house with a swimming pool and garden of a Swiss resident in the country, from 06:00 to 15:00. He earns five US dollars for more than eight hours of work per day. Overload with work and lack of sleep results in a young man’s great fatigue and lack of energy for any additional activity.
Akitha is a believing and practicing Buddhist and without protest he submits to the rigors of this religion (or philosophy of life).
He is the fourth of five children (the only male offspring) in a family of poor tea plantation workers in the Singharaja area - within the Rainforest National Park.
All Akitha's sisters already have their own families and are scattered throughout the region and country. Things are not going well for them. They struggle to cope with the cost of living.
The only male offspring is responsible for taking care (mainly financially) of his parents. The parents, seventy-year-olds, are tired of life (hard work on plantations) and very sick. They have no income of their own. The money Akitha sends them (the entire salary from the restaurant) is not enough to cover the cost of medicines, not to mention the doctors themselves.
The story of a representative of this social group in Sri Lanka (we assume that the life we are hearing about is certainly the experience of many young people) moves us so much that we decide to meet Akitha on his free afternoon and continue our conversation.
After five hours, the light "came back" and around midnight we returned to our place. The rain continued.
In Galle, 16 km away from Hikkaduwa, where there is our accommodation, we meet to visit the Portuguese Fort and further reflect on life. Mainly life in Sri Lanka.
Akitha's father suffers from advanced diabetes and circulatory failure. Living and taking care of the health of parents is the main goal of Akitha's functioning. With all his devotion, he sacrifices his salary and the accumulated four days off a month to spend this time with them. The village in the Singharaja district is about 100 km from Hikkaduwa, where he works. Reaching it, at an altitude of approximately 500 m above sea level. means an almost four-hour journey, changing buses several times going to Deniyaya zdj.., and then 10 km by very local transport and another kilometer off-road to the house, all the time uphill.
In a very simple household there is no bathroom, and the father's dream would be to have a TV and the mother's dream would be to have a refrigerator. Both things are impossible to achieve, not only because of the price, but also because of possible electricity bills, which are very high here.
The conversation about the parents and their dramatic situation, in which the diet consists of the proverbial bowl of rice with poor additions, and Akitha's emphasis on total devotion to his loved ones, was a bit prolonged, which made us doubt and suspect what our meeting was supposed to be about.
We have often heard about foreigners being tricked into giving various forms of help based on stories about illnesses in the family, etc.
Continuing my report, I must now say that nothing of the kind happened as a result of the meeting with Akitha. From today's perspective, I confirm that his intentions were pure and meaningless. He honestly shared with us his difficult life, because as he claimed, he had never met anyone who would listen to him so attentively.
The near future was to confirm much of what we had heard, and Akitha's life soon brought further difficulties and dramas, which resulted in, among others, my current stay in Sri Lanka.
Of course, I had to ask how Akitha imagined his future and how he would like to change the conditions he is in now, mainly concerned not to lose the job he has.
I was informed that the region where his family lives (priceless, protected rainforests) is very attractive to tourists for six months of the year. Some village residents, who invested in the construction of one or more bungalows on their own plots a few years ago, created the so-called "homestay", i.e. accommodation with family.
According to Akitha, they all quickly paid off their bank debts and, by local standards, became wealthy while treating those in poverty with contempt.
The natural question was the price of such an investment. One house - a bungalow can be built in three months for 1,000,000 Sri Lankan rupees, which is equal to 13,000 Polish zlotys, little over 3000 US dollars.
The bank grants a loan to owners of their own plots of land (this is the legal status of Akitha's parents' land), demanding a 150% refund within a relatively short period of time. Murderous capitalism, right?
Tourists pay 40-50 US dollars in this area per night.
In the case of Akitha's, the difficulty lies in the possible lack of income during the construction period, before the investment generates income...
So the dream of building a bungalow (first one) is pushed into the unknown future.
The amount of PLN 13,000 got etched in my memory.
In the following days, Akitha worked according to his routine, and we went on a tour of the island for over a week.
Anyone who has not traveled outside the European Union has not experienced the incredible feeling of gratitude for the development of technology in which, thanks to the Whatsapp application, you can talk to the whole world for free! All you need is an internet connection.
Telephone and internet networks work perfectly throughout the island, so we were in constant contact with everyone at any time.
