angst-

Let the record reflect that I am sick of angst. And the repeated, first-hand experiences where I realize I am weak, weak, weak.

Spent the weekend at our first ever girl's scholarship ceremony. The evening before, we trundled up to the hall, and had bizarre conversations about local implementing partners. Then came a flurry of calls from outraged moralist principals, who had recently discovered that one of our candidates, a 11 year old girl, had a mother who was a , ahem, blue film star. One wonders of course, how these said principals and affronted parents and teachers knew that, but they wheeled out the Rustic Moralism , the hypocrisy that arises out of close, confined, communal living. Where there is a sharp divide between public and private morality. It was all rather hysterical really. Then the other catastrophe of the day was finding out that one of the girl's parents had committed suicide rather recently.

Today we were interviewing, and I met a rather old, lovely distinguished man, who had vision and understanding of the Sri Lankan educational sector, and he talked about Jaffna and how when he grew up in the East,he had two excellent teachers from Jaffna, and they were revered as gods in the village. And we pondered for a minute, that lost, long-ago Sri Lanka, before all this had started.