Duwa Mangala

The months of July and August are the months of religious festivals (mangala) in Sri Lanka. Most people would not notice this because there are so many religious holidays and festivities year round: Muslims and particularly Catholics nearly compete with the never ending succession of Hindu and Buddhist holidays. But yes, by Lankan standards, these are the months for festivals.





In the region around Negombo where the population is over 90% Catholic, every weekend you have a Mangala in the different town Churches. Once again, none of these festivals coincide with any major Catholic festivity, it's as if these weekends were exclusively reserved for their own neighborhood festivals. However, Duwa is one of the major festivals that brings virtually everyone from the neighboring towns together. All the people care about their own Mangalas, but they all know and want to go to Duwa. I'm not sure the reason for this, but it definitely has to do with fishing. St. Mary's Church in Duwa is actually facing the ocean, which is a rarity in a country that tends to ignore it altogether. A huge, 15-feet-tall statue of the Virgin Mary stands with a boat in her hand facing the sea. The Church and the Virgin not only face the water but the location of Duwa as a town is right outside the Negombo harbor, so basically every boat that goes out to sea has to sail past St. Mary's Church. This church has been here since the 1880s, at the height of splendor for the local Catholic Church, when Catholic identity was a symbol of privilege, connections and access to the best education in the country. Little of this prestige is left since independence, but glimpses of this past strive to subsist in days like today. Before the 1880s there were two Churches in Duwa, but since this building was constructed the Duwa Mangala has been unified and celebrated every July in this very spot.





There were a couple of early morning masses, the main one, but not the first, was at 7.30am and lasted for almost 2 hours. It's interesting how religious time in Sri Lanka (particularly Christian religious time) has not been 'normalized' and adapted to productive work schedules and remains unconstrained by labor and other matters. Spiritual work retains that place outside everyday life and ceremonies and pujas can last a totally unregulated time.



But it is also true that in another respect, the Mangala is more inclusive of activities that are outside religion and extends to the commercial and social. In the case of Duwa the fashion scene is clearly happening in a way that probably does not take place at any other event throughout the year. Hopefully I'll be able to get a sense of what it is like during the Christmas and New Year season, but Easter and other major holidays like Sinhalese/Tamil New Year in April, at least in Duwa, have certainly not had the festive, fashionable dimension that the Mangala had.



After mass is over the people take the Statue of the Virgin out of the Church and go on parade around town lead by the Girls Marching Band, Boys Marching Band and Sunday School Teachers, then all the women, and after the Virgin Mary, all the men. After this mini-pilgrimage they go on to the fish market and to the Negombo Harbor, where the statue boards a boat with navy officers and priests and off they go to sea followed by hundreds of fishing trawlers and small boats. Virtually the entire fishing community of Negombo congregates and participates in this.



Today this has become regulated and organized by the police and the Navy. A few years ago this was much more spontaneous and thus, dangerous. So many people would get on the boat with the statue of the Virgin Mary that it became increasingly risky until one time some five years ago a girl fell off the boat and drowned. You can see how dangerous it becomes as you leave the protection of the harbor and start to sail deeper sea waters. Last week's Mangala was said to be one of the pilgrimages with calmer sea, but being in the middle of the monsoon season it's not difficult to picture how it could easily become hairy.



After sailing about a mile into sea and passing in front of St. Mary's Church, everyone returns to the harbor where the priests give a last blessing to all the fishermen. The grand finale then is marked by the ever present firecrackers, as in every Lankan celebration, and the sharing of food and drinks on every boat that then extends to sharing across boats with hundreds of flying pieces of bread and juice containers.



There was still one more activity left: the safe return of the Virgin to the Church and the another final blessing that took maybe another hour. By then the whole Mangala had been going on for maybe five hours but the people seemed happy to go on and on. I guess you can get a sense of it in the photos, but it was quite impressive to see how excited and happy everyone was. There appeared to be an honest enjoyment on the part of the whole community and an obvious pride in carrying on this tradition. Unlike so many other religious festivities, and especially Catholic ones I should say, the feeling was not of a pious community, but rather a genuine desire to participate.

Red Floors

Coming soon...

Coconuts

There approximately 30 coconut trees in the garden around the house where I'm staying. The owner of the land sends every few weeks some people to pluck the coconuts. An article in the New York Times a couple of months ago was describing the dearth of coconut pluckers in the state of Kerala in south India. Economic development and education are making this activity less and less attractive to millions of people who have lived off the products of coconut trees for many generations.

Sorry about the soundtrack. I know it's lame, but I messed up the original




Needless to say, this is a rather risky activity that can seriously injure you if you fall from the top of a probably 30 feet high tree. No one has yet found a way to develop a technology that allows to pluck coconuts mechanically, not only it is hard to design a machine that could pluck coconuts, but you would still need the plucker to decide which coconuts are ripe and which need to stay on the tree. True, such machine would at least save many bones from being broken.

Negombo Plucking Down


But Indian coconut farmers have found a solution, which is not very technological, but manages to keep bringing the coconuts down from the tree. India is recruiting coconut pluckers from Sri Lanka, who have apparently not yet embodied the ambitious self of the indian pluckers who want IT and government jobs. This has turned into some kind of an odd pride in Sri Lanka, where some seem happy that pluckers keep plucking, instead of having some crazy new idea.




Former Prime Minister Sir John Kotalawela is probably better remembered for his comment on the the dearth of coconut pluckers in Sri Lanka, (and other similar ones) in the early fifties than for his poor handling of the language issue, at a time when things in Sri Lanka could have still been quite different. When asked about the nature of the problem, Sir John suggested that no one was climbing the trees because all pluckers had entered Parliament.

Fifty years later, it is obviously not politically correct to make such jokes. Fifty years later, it is apparently more acceptable to praise coconut pluckers for their professionalism, perhaps this will keep them from running for office. Oh, by the way, the only plucker I talked to, hated his job.

KALPITIYA

Saturday morning we left for Kalpitiya. From Negombo it is about 100 km to the north, so we were planning on taking a two-hour relaxed drive. The last part of the road was pretty bad, probably twenty or more kilometers, so the miscalculation plus our lousy ‘leaving on schedule’ got us there after 1 pm.



Kalpitiya has become quite fashionable in the last five years with lots of people trying to invest on beachfront properties, mostly owned by fisherfolk and the government. Big plans for big hotels are everywhere, but so far only the ‘eco-friendly’ wobbly cabins have emerged. The place is supposed to be ideal for dolphin watching and early every morning boats go out to chase dolphins that chase fish. I, alas, missed it all because this only happens at 7 in the morning. I tried to find out what is it that dolphins actually do the rest of the day other than chasing fish, but nobody was able to answer.



When you look Kalpitiya up in a map it appears as this thin peninsula that branches out into the ocean near Puttalam and encloses a huge lagoon almost 65 km. long as its far end approaches the island again. This rather simple idea is quite deceiving, when you’re there, you realize that this long peninsula that stretches up north develops into several other smaller forelands, islands and sand banks where the border between sea and lagoon is blurred with water and land and beaches and coconut trees everywhere you look at. Absolutely stunning.





As tourism grows and some fisherfolk start to shift their gruff ways to the more polite and profitable (and relaxed) business of learning some English and boating the Colombo-ites around to the beach and to watch the dolphins, a huge coal power plant also looms in the horizon. When in Kalpitiya you’re pretty much oblivious to this since you cannot actually see it, but in the twenty or so kilometers that go from the A3 road and into Kalpitiya, not only the plant is visible but also the flourishing of new white buildings that house its employees, most of them Chinese.






The country’s virtually official policy of rejecting western-led development projects with their self-righteous conditionings, has increasingly benefited the questionable improvement of receiving billions of dollars in Chinese-led development, which of course comes free of human rights accountability demands, but it is still to be seen what will be the share Sri Lanka will have to carry. While western paternalism is hard to swallow anymore, in Sri Lanka or anywhere it insists on correcting others, its terms seem vaguely more reliable and stable than becoming involved with the other guys, but Sri Lanka is happy to take the risk. In this sense, Kalpitiya is the perfect metaphorical example of the country’s current dilemma: develop high-end beach resorts with the implications that western demands brings along, or develop Chinese and Russian style, accepting the mob-like wink that gives the chills to many.





Our friend’s lodge is placed in an idyllic location, what seems to be one of the last tips of land in the north end of Kalpitiya. While it is technically on the ocean proper, there is a sand bank maybe half a mile away that connects two islands, so for all practical purposes, what you see from the lodge is a lagoon and a sandy beach that appears and disappears with the seasons in the horizon. We made use of two of the boats to get across this virtual lake to the sandbank where we could bathe in the ocean or on the quiet lagoon side. Some people walked, like an hour to get around, while others drove since the sand connected the whole semi-circle. The two boats used were also an interesting example of how tourism is changing labor patterns in the area. While the first we used was a multi-purpose dinghy that was cleaned-up to carry a few people, the second was owned by a Muslim guy who had recently spent almost $4,000 in this new spotless white motorboat with cushioned seats and a Miami-esque feel to it. Gladly, the owner’s jumping on and off the boat in his Sarong with the water to his neck to push the boat in and out of the beach managed to kill that feeling.

Guardian

The Guardian published an article on Sri Lanka's post-election future that I find quite depressing. The article itself is not depressing, on the contrary, it suggests that Sri Lanka has a unique opportunity for peace and development and that it is time to give it some more carrot and some less stick. I do agree that there is an opportunity for peace and that these don't come around so often, however Sri Lanka is a country that has had its decent share of opportunities for peace and growth in the past and has systematically wasted them through a combination of unwise decisions and jinxed turns.

I also agree that the country needs 'more carrot', but this should be a lesson that the government should learn and not one that we should be expecting the EU and other countries to enact. There is a clear need for tolerance and open hands, but it is the country's leadership who should understand this and not the international community who should have gestures of approval towards the current administration. After all, the world silently approved of the slaughtering of the Tamil population in the last couple of years by turning its back to the country. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to finally put some pressure on a government that wants to smilingly get away with it.  

The article is depressing after all, because it tones down the violence the country is facing from its own leaders and suggests that 'all they need is a little more support from the West.' Granted that some external help wouldn't hurt at all, it seems rather naive at best, cynical I'd choose, to think that a little money would quiet the demands for peace and democracy that are systematically let down. To think that this is a question of 'buying out' disenfranchised oppositions, is to repeat the same strategy and fall in the same mistakes the country has addictively incurred in since Independence.

Democracy can be tricky at times. Especially when it is confused with electoral politics. Whoever thinks that Sri Lanka is a democratic country because it has periodically sustained elections needs to review their definition of what democracy is. Even if the day on which people go to the polls is a 'celebration of civility' and fraud is ruled out as it has been in the last elections, democracy can hardly be considered a green light to whoever gets more votes until the next election year comes around. A democratically elected government is far from being a democratic government, especially when politics are not cut across ideologies and parties but across religious and ethnic lines.

Opportunities for development are necessary, this is evident everywhere in the world, but Sri Lanka needs more than economic progress to move ahead from the last three decades of violence and frustration. Now, it is not that Sri Lanka needs more because of its complexity, because its values are so unique and different from those of the west, it is simply that any country that undergoes the kind of violence that Sri Lanka suffers will not be fixed with money.