bone and chalk

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20). Your plan clearly isn't working. Don't give up, but do try something radically different. Franz Kafka once wrote that there are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.

I'm leaping alright. In single bounds.

Back from a bone-shattering trip to the East. Our team is by now reaching near-complete physical exhaustion as our punishing schedule continues.

A series of difficult meetings with our partner organization concluded with near-vitriol and some personal attacks. Not quite cricket with this British organization. Apparently our need for monitoring, frequent visits and quality control procedures with regard to construction (an anyway haphazard, mine-ridden process) is unsupportable and conflicts with their ethos of being a 'happy' organization (that awards contracts to their friends and that builds homes for all their employees (none of whom were tsunami-affected) using donor money. This is apparently the striking model of the best charity currently operating in Sri Lanka.

The man even had the cheek to say to me: "I am the most intelligent person you'll ever meet", when trying to explain his side of how we are unnecessarily bureaucratic. Most trying, under the circumstances, exacerbated by a 50 year age difference (approx). Reason cannot breach everything, and particularly an unconsciously voiced prejudice against the Tamils and the TRO. We try so hard to be bipartisan, but such sentiments incite the opposite, in me at least.

Anger blows out the lamp of the mind, according to Buddha.

Other than that, was told by someone recently that my favourite phrase was : I am NOT having this discussion! Followed by whatever!

On our way back, we passed through the outskirts of a national park and saw a bunch of wild elephants, grazing in the scrubland, dirt on their backs, tusks growing proud. And then a lone bull-elephant a few miles away, ostracized by the herd. (Apparently each herd has one of these, a thani elephant, a loner/cranky hermit). We also saw snakes crossing the road and the ride, as usual was one filled with violent swerves and near-death experiences as we missed water buffalo blithely crossing the two lane dirt track that serves as a highway here, as well as the random assortment of cows, goats and domestics.

There was a school opening in a Hindu village in Ampara, a resettled tsunami refugee village. The children had prepared a concert for us and one of the items, underneath the tent beneath the heat of the Ampara sun, in this dusty, sandy scrubland village, was a girl, with flowers in her hair and a pavadai, reciting W.H. Davies, and " What is this world, full of care, if we have no time to stand and stare"? And finally there was the carnatic song sung, alai payuthey, in homage or in recognition, of the tsunami.

So then, this is perhaps what makes it worthwhile. A simple thank you, almost carelessly given, but meaning more to the team than any series of grand speeches.