Headlines from a Pandemic

Living through the pandemic in Sri Lanka has been an interesting experience.  We feel very fortunate to ride out the pandemic in this tropical island nation. Doubtlessly,  there are worse places to be stuck.  And we are hopeful the worst of the pandemic will pass before our time here is up and we must move on to our next adventure.

The country's initial response to the pandemic was swift and deliberate, a 10-week island wide lockdown. The lockdown ended in May, and the summer was relatively quiet. The kids were on a hybrid program when they returned to school in the fall, one week in class, alternating with one week at home online. The kids were poised to return to class full time when an outbreak of the virus at a garment factory north of Colombo led to a second wave which rolled over the island and persists now.

Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi said that she was willing to offer herself as a living sacrifice to the sea to eradicate COVID-19 from Sri Lanka.

Her self-sacrifice seemed melodramatic, but the country has a mythology steeped in melodrama. Queen Viharamahadevi, the daughter of King Kelanitissa who ruled Kelaniya in Sri Lanka around 200 B.C., was sacrificed to the sea to appease gods angered when the king punished an innocent monk by boiling him alive in a cauldron of oil.  It is said that the gods, angered over this cruel deed, made the ocean rush inland and flood the land. Soothsayers said that if a princess was sacrificed to the sea, the raging waves would stop. The young Viharamahadevi sacrificed herself for the sins of her father and for the safety of her motherland.  She was placed inside a beautifully decorated boat which bore the letters "Daughter of a King" and set adrift on the sea.

It is said that as soon as she was sent off, the sea suddenly turned calm again and the water receded.  Seemingly, the Health Minister saw herself as a modern-day Viharamahadevi. 

When the garment factory cluster subsumed Colombo's largest fish market in Peliyagoda, the market ground to a standstill as the virus raced through the crowded stalls. Both the supply and demand for fish plummeted. There was a genuine fear the virus spread through the consumption of fish.

In order to dispel these fears, a former Sri Lankan fisheries minister bit into a raw fish at a news conference on live TV. 

"Our people who are in the fisheries industry cannot sell their fish. People of this country are not eating fish," said Dilip Wedaarachchi to the camera, gesticulating wildly while holding a medium-sized fish of unknown origin. 

"I brought this fish to show you. I am making an appeal to the people of this country to eat this fish. Don’t be afraid. You will not get infected by the coronavirus," he said, before taking a bite out of the whole fish.

The fisheries ministry released a statement the following day, cautioning people to not bite into whole raw fish.

Most recently, the Ayurveda Ethical Committee of the Rajarata University granted approval of a traditional herbal syrup prepared by Dhammika Bandara as a cure for COVID-19.

The tonic reportedly contains honey and nutmeg. The unregistered Ayurvedic practitioner claimed taking a teaspoon of his potion three times a day for three days will make a person “immune from COVID for the rest of their lives”.

In response, crowds lined the streets in the Udumagama area of Kegalle after Bandara announced 5,000 samples of the serum would be distributed free of charge, creating his own mass-spreading event when the unmasked throng gathered, ignoring social distancing protocols, the Sri Lankan version of Sturgis.

While some of the headlines have been laughable, what isn't laughable is the spread of misinformation and paranoia, though we realize this phenomenon is not unique to Sri Lanka. Hopefully, the new year will bring more positive headlines.  

Both Elise and I see startling parallels between today and this same time 100 years ago.  It is after wildfires ravage a landscape, razing every living thing in sight, new shoots and leaves of green spring from the charred forest floor. 

In an article written by Jessica Glenda for The Guardian, "Epidemiologist looks to the past to predict second post-pandemic 'roaring 20s'" Yale professor and social epidemiologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis brings cold comfort. He sees a pattern.  Plagues and pandemics end. They always end.  Then, once pandemics end, often there is a period in which people seek out extensive social interaction, and which Christakis predicts will be a second “roaring 20s” just as after World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

It would be wise to prepare for the next Roaring 20s. A  The world suffers a similar trauma now.

Sam Goes Fishing

Since our last trip to Weligama, when Sam fashioned a fishing rod from a bamboo reed and fishing hooks from aluminum can tabs, he had done hours of research. He purchased a rod and reel online. When the rod failed to arrive, he bought one from a local department store. When the reel did finally arrive, he practiced tying knots at the dining room table, perfecting his technique. When we returned to the same stretch of Weligama beach as before, he was ready to cast his line into the surf. The result was not surprising.

Dark and Stormy

The first thing I did this morning was run by a cemetery. This wasn’t a modern day cemetery with neatly manicured rows or perfectly plotted paths winding through Elysian Fields. This was the cemetery of bad dreams, musty Stephen King paperbacks. Giant banyan trees stand guard over tombstones smeared with decades of biological grime, moss, soil, and dew, jutting from the soggy land at a hundred different angles. The sentinel trees reaching mangrove root fingers into the ground, seeking nutrients, the things that rot there. Winged angels, hands clasped in prayer, perch atop the once white tombstones, frozen in flight. A dull orange streetlight haze hangs over everything. 

As I run by, a breath of slightly cooler air brushes, appropriately, from the graveyard. Street sweepers in neon orange vests circle the perimeter, brooms in hand, guiding their metal wheelbarrows in circles in the street, the only other life as I streak by. They look at me over their masks, their large white eyes keeping the social distance their bodies cannot for frailty of movement. The street sweepers are all skin and bones and always seem completely exhausted. I feel guilty for having the energy to run when they seem to barely have the energy to keep their skin on or their brittle bones upright, much less sweep thousands of leaves from the gutters and street. 

Five miles later, as I was pulling into the home stretch, I spied Elise bounding from the opposite direction. We high fived as I passed her. No other word spoken. 

It was Friday. The end of a long week. Elise recently told me that as a result of the pandemic, our fight or flight response is constantly engaged as we continually assess our personal health and safety. Do I have my mask? Is this situation safe? Am I six feet away from this person? Or that person? Why is this person standing so close to me in line? Ugh, he just inched closer. Oh god, now he’s coughing!  Why is this taking so long!? And now she’s pulling out coupons!  

With our fight or flight response constantly engaged, our brain fails to register time stamps on everyday events. We are all suffering from a form of amnesia. Compounded by a warped perception of the passage of time. 

The kids continue online school. Though they mostly are succeeding, it’s not without its challenges. Peter had virtual sex ed this week.

During his classes, a series of online meetings, the kids in the class have the ability to chat with one another in a sidebar on the screen. This extracurricular conversation is usually monitored by the teacher. The feature has advantages; for example, it gives students the ability to ask questions in real-time without interrupting the teacher. But when the teacher is presenting her screen to show or describe some part of the lesson, she loses the ability to monitor the chat. The kids know this, and it quickly becomes a free-for-all.

During sex ed, while the teacher presented a diagram of female genitalia, you can probably imagine what a chat box looked like run by a bunch of fifth graders:

“Ewww”

“That is gross”

“Oh gosh”

“Ewww hair”

“Ewww indeed”

“Totally ewww”

“Omg”

“Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”

“Oh my god”

“My mom and dad literally learned this in 8th grade”

“Just

No”

“It’s not ewww. It’s natural”

The last comment was Peter’s. 

“Well it’s ewww for us”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

“And that is why I want to adopt a child”

“Grow up” 

This is where Peter’s frustration showed. He’d complained to Elise and I before about how distracting the chat box was. Even if you minimize the chat box, a near incessant pinging rings in his ears every time one of his classmates comments. Understandably, it makes focusing on what the teacher is saying difficult. 

“Peter you are insane”

“It is still gross Peter”

The chat spiraled out of control when Peter told one of his classmates to shut up in the chat box. Of course, the kid immediately radioed that back to the teacher while the rest of the kids kept copying and reposting his comment to the point it bordered on cyber bullying. 

Peter was, not surprisingly, upset by the whole ordeal. As though learning sex ed wasn’t stressful enough. Like adults, children, too, take advantage of the cover provided by an online environment and say things they wouldn’t normally say to one another in person. We’re learning lots of different lessons this year. 

Peter were later complain he wasn’t taught how to have sex. 

“Well, you have to learn the parts of a car before you can learn to drive,” I replied.

That night, we met a small group of friends at the Station, an outdoor restaurant on the beach for sundowners (a distinctly Sri Lankan way of saying Happy Hour), as a thunderclouds darkened the sky to the east. 

The sun set into the Arabian Sea as black clouds metastasized over the water like a wizards cloak, purple like a bruise and orange, reflecting the dying ray’s of the setting sun. Tendrils of lightning tickled the waves. I forced my brain to remember to take a time stamp. Our time in Sri Lanka is not infinite, and I want to remember it. Despite, or perhaps because, this is where we rode out the pandemic.

Scenes from a Government Curfew

Sam’s beard almost matches his hair. 

Food art made with the end of a leek. We called him “Leeker”. Do you know why?

That’s why.

The artist at work.

Election Day outfit.

Yes, that is a BMX bike in the kitchen.

Reading, walking, and brushing teeth.

What Goes Up

We live in a three story townhouse. The kitchen is on the bottom floor. The TV room is on the third floor. Sometimes — usually on Friday or Saturday nights for pizza or takeout and a movie — we eat dinner in front of the TV as a family. This entails carrying our plates, napkins, silverware, and beverages up three flights of stairs to the TV room, and after dinner, carrying the empty plates, dirty silverware and napkins, down three flights of stairs back to the kitchen. 

There is an atrium that runs through the middle of the house, all the way from the ground floor to the third story. A skylight at the top allows light to reach the entire house. We’ve frequently imagine how easier this would be if we had a dumb waiter.

This past weekend, the rear car door wouldn’t latch. It was the same side of the car we were hit on a few months back, immediately following the last lockdown, but the car door closed just fine after that incident, so I concluded the two weren’t related. Simply, the latch stopped catching.

We’d have to wait until the curfew lifted to take the car to the shop and get it fixed. Until then, one of the kids had to hold the door closed as we drove around town. Something that might have been frowned upon if we were in the States. 

Our friend brought over a bag of different types of rope, string, and bungee cords. There were like 100 bungee cords in this bag, and it wasn’t long before the kids were hooking all the bungee cords together and pulling things around the house, chairs, bicycles, and toys.

Then, someone came up with the brilliant idea to construct the dumb waiter out of a length of one-foot bungee cords linked together and attached to a picnic basket. 

I don’t remember what they first hoisted up in the makeshift dumb waiter, but it seemed to work pretty well, if not move slowly. Clem monitored the basket’s progress from the ground floor as the boys hauled up the basket from the third floor, hand over hand, finally pulling it over the third floor railing when it reached the top. 

They lowered the basket back down to the ground floor slowly.

At this point, I jumped in the shower and shaved. I had shaving cream covering half my face when I heard wailing coming from downstairs. 

I rushed to the second story landing where I nearly collided with Elise.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She guided me back into our room. “Sam’s computer,” she started. “It’s shattered.”

I must have muttered something in disbelief. I ran my fingers through my hair and walked in tight, quick circles. 

Elise and I marched downstairs. Sam day at the dining room table, head in hands, sobbing. In front him was his computer. The shattered screen refracted broken ultraviolet computer light back at him, mockingly. We have no way of knowing if anything else in the computer works for lack of a screen to see through. 

At some point in the preceding 20 minutes, our three children collectively came to the conclusion the bungee cord dumb waiter worked well enough to attempt to hoist Sam’s computer to the third floor. 

They were wrong.

I don’t exactly know what happened or where the mechanical failure occurred, somewhere around the second story, based on the spiderweb-like crack. 

All three of them took turns fighting back tears as they explained what happened, a circle story of good — if not entirely well thought out — intentions. 

Neither Elise nor I raised our voices. Though Sam’s laptop is the only thing connecting him to his education, his teacher, lessons, and peers, at the moment. Fortunately, Clem had an extra laptop from school she was able to move to, freeing up the desktop for Sam. 

We have another screen already on the way, and, of course, it could have been worse. At least they hadn’t put one of their siblings in the basket. 

Chalk it up to another twist of history, this time in our lives, a wrenching, like an Indian burn, or two tectonic plates grinding together. Nothing so acute to make you grasp your side in pain, but there nonetheless, a dull throb. It can always be worse.

The People Have Spoken

Lockdown, Vol 2 - Part Four, The Waiting Place

Clementine has taken to wearing a black cloak around the house most days, a la Harry Potter. She is currently reading the fourth or fifth book in the series. I can’t remember which because she is reading them so fast. 

Peter’s Halloween costume finally arrived in the mail. One day too late. He didn’t waste any time jumping into the spandex and web slinging. 

Time has stopped. The days are longer under quarantine. We woke Wednesday morning as the results started to filter in. Like the rest of the world, we watched the map change colors, red and blue. Like most everything in life these days, we knew to be patient. A vaccine wouldn’t come before Election Day, and election results wouldn’t come before the end of the day either. 

After the last lockdown, I bought a grill. 

A gas grill. I was super excited. I even found a gas store in an old part of the city run by a Muslim family that sold me a small gas tank to go with it. 

Sam and I put the grill together like it was a LEGO or a piece of IKEA furniture. We had planned to grill hamburgers on it that night, but it took a lot longer to put together than either of us anticipated, and we had to make other plans. 

The grill would sit outside on the small patio behind our townhouse. I even bought a grill cover on Amazon to shelter it from the elements. 

It was a good grill.  Over the following weeks, we would grill burgers, steak, shrimp kebabs, chicken fajitas in a grill basket, and bread for paella. 

One day last week, I pulled off the cover, lifted the cover, and a giant rat leapt out of it. 

I came back inside the house and leaned against the counter. 

Elise glanced at me, “What’s wrong? You look pale.”

It would take me several weeks to revisit the grill with the intent of cleaning it and moving it to the third floor balcony, hopefully out of reach of nesting rats. I lifted the lid of the grill with a broom handle, and — sure enough — the rat came scurrying out. I examined what was left behind and quickly concluded the grill was now unusable. I guess this is why there isn’t a lot of grilling in South Asia and tandoori ovens are mostly indoors. 

Because of the curfew, I’ll have to wait to get a new one. 

There isn’t much more that can be written about waiting that Dr. Seuss hasn’t already written...Everyone...Everyone...really is just waiting.

Lockdown, Vol 2 - Part Three, The Night Before

I ran three miles yesterday. Elise and I have resolved to add a mile every morning of lockdown. I ran four miles this morning. I plan to run five tomorrow morning. We run up and down our road, an approximate half mile stretch. I will soon now every step of this road, every building, house, jasmine  and mango tree, street light. 

I start at 5:00 each morning. I get to know the rhythm of that hour on our street. The same people come and go, the bread tuk-tuk arrives at the same time each morning, playing the same song, “It’s a Small World.” Doormen report to work on bicycles and scooters at the same time each morning. I’ve become familiar to the security guards in front of the newspaper office across the street from our house, at the French Embassy a few steps down the street, and the UNHCR office. 

An army of street sweepers keeps Colombo, a city under a green leafy canopy of giant trees, leaf free. They deploy from central points around the city, armed with metal wheelbarrows and brooms. Every morning is filled with the swish-swish-swish-swish of broom bristles on asphalt. You can tell a street sweeper by the rhythm of their swish, a short, quick swish contrasts with long, spaced-out swishes. 

The street sweeper on our road is one of the hardest working humans I’ve ever known in my life. He starts at one end of the our block at 5:00 a.m., goes down one entire side of the street before starting at the other side, finishing well into the afternoon. He is older, with dark, weathered skin. He occasionally wears a cap similar to a newspaper boy’s and occasionally wears a baseball cap backwards. He is ageless, but also very, very old with thick, leathery hands. I get a blister when I sweep the kitchen; I can imagine the giant callouses deforming his hands. It strikes me now I don’t know his name but see him every day.

He is always accompanied by his adult son who stands next to him and watches him sweep. The man boy is autistic or otherwise impaired. I stopped one morning to say hello to him, and he said nothing in return. When prompted by his father to respond, he shook his head vigorously, no, child-like.

I run past a man standing in the bed of small, rickety Toyota pick-up, plucking white jasmine flowers from the high tree branches. Men in plaid dhotis can often be seen picking the flowers. Fortunately, there are enough jasmine trees on our street to supply enough white flowers for them to pick their full every day. I don’t know what they do with the flowers, shaped like tiny galaxies. 

Online school provides it’s own daily challenges, if not rhythm. Yesterday, Clementine was working on her report on glaciers. She was copying passages out of a book she checked out of the library, changing a word here or there by looking up a synonym in an online thesaurus. Elise told her that still plagiarizing. 

Clementine broke down, as she is apt to do usually once a day during online school. She ran from the computer and up to her room and planted herself on her bed to sob. 

I entered the room and sat on the corner of her bed, the bottom bunk, and tried to console her. I don’t know if I ever got her to stop crying. She claimed she couldn’t write even one sentence of her own. I told her she couldn’t write anything upset. She had to have a clear mind to write. I think this just made her cry harder.

I left. A few minutes later, she followed me downstairs, sniffling back tears. At that point I told her it was just better to have a good hard cry and get it over with. Contrary to my expectations, she stopped and flared at me, arms crossed. It was only at that point she sat back down at the computer. I pulled up a chair next to her, grabbing a pad of paper and pen as I did.

“Look at me,” I ordered. “What is a glacier?”

She glanced down at her notes.

“Look at me and tell me.”

Her eyes snapped up from the paper . She reluctantly, haltingly, started to describe what a glacier was. I scribbled her words down furiously. When she was done, I ripped the page from the note pad and slapped it on her desk like a doctor prescribing medication.

“How are they formed?” I asked.

Her eyes drifted down to her notes.

“Look at me,” I repeated. “How are glaciers formed?”

Clementine described in her own words how glaciers are formed, something to do with layers of snow and slush, ice forming, layers compacting and sliding. I wrote it all down as fast as I could. When she was done, I ripped this page out of the note pad, too, and slapped it on the desk on top of the first page.

We did this for three more questions until she had her report written, in her own words, with me transcribing. All she had to do was type it out. 

Today, Elise received in real time an email from Peter’s teacher. He hasn’t finished his math homework assignment. He would need to finish up at the end of the day after class. 

The homework ended up being an interminable number of decimal addition problems. He had to get 100 problems in a row correct. Every time he missed one, he got set back 10-15 points. I was working with him. At 95, he missed a question by transposing two numbers, got the problem wrong, and burst into tears. 

He was set back to 84. I dismissed him, took over his seat, and finished his homework on the calculator.

This week, when I finish me run, I wait for a Elise to either join me or beckon me back inside. I’m just running in front of the house. She knows where to find me. If I finish my allotted distance before I see her, I walk up and down the street, in no rush to return indoors, knowing this is likely my only chance to be inside all day. I listen to the chatter of a flock of parrots fluttering overhead. The moon has been full this week (and the air quality poor) and has been fall-like obscured behind an October veil of wispy clouds. Towards the end of my walk, a pelican glides overhead. It flaps its wings once, twice, and I notice for the first time the bend in a pelican’s wing is, in its own way, so much like an elbow against the violet dawn sky. 

Today has been a lot. Tomorrow will be more. We all love our country so very much and only want the best for it. 

How can we think that is what’s best for it? both sides will think. 

Unlike last year, when we woke to news of the election results, we will be up as the results roll in, making breakfast, brushing teeth, unloading the dishwasher, taking out the garbage, and getting the kids ready for school. 

Dreams

“Thunder only happens when it's rainin'...”

“...Players only love you when they're playin'”

Pure joy.

Lockdown, Vol 2 - Part Two, All Hallow’s Eve Eve

This may seem like our least successful Halloween in 10 years, since we first moved to Ballston. Then, we attempted to make a Thomas the Tank Engine out of a cardboard box. The costume never got made. We were completely overwhelmed at the time, having just moved from Florida to Washington with two very small babies, and living high in the sky in corporate residential housing. 

We’re not quite as overwhelmed now as we were then, but the challenges are still significant. Some weeks ago, Clementine decided she wanted to be a box of Cheerios for Halloween. We saved a large Amazon box that had come in the mail and put it in the garage where it sat for several weeks. 

Peter couldn’t decide what we wanted to be until we bought him a Spider Man costume off the Internet that still hasn’t arrived in the mail, the day after Halloween. Sam wasn’t in the spirit at all and didn’t want to be anything, the promise of trick-or-treating and piles of candy dumped on the living room floor, their bounty, and the subsequent horse trading that inevitably follows, all canceled this year. What was the point? I guess they asked themselves. No trick-or-treating. No costume party. No school. No candy. 

We ordered a styrofoam hemisphere online and white stockings for Clementine’s cereal box costume. They came in the mail a few days before Halloween. The box we had set aside was still in the garage. We pulled it out and moved it to the center of the living room. Elise and I drove to the art store while the rest of the city stockpiled groceries in advance of the curfew and bought yellow acrylic paint. 

The paint and the box stayed in the living room until the day before Halloween. I was having flashbacks of that failed Halloween 10 years ago. The sad, half-constructed Thomas the Tank Engine sitting on the dining room table in our small apartment. Despite a last ditch effort to finish it, I could not. 

The day before Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve eve, Elise sprang into action. 

She finished just in time for Clementine to wear the costume to the pool and pose for a few pictures (she missed the impromptu Halloween parade by a few minutes).

Halloween night, we hosted the two small girls who lived next door for trick-or-treating since we couldn’t do any trick-or-treating ourselves. 

Elise got a hook up on a pumpkin delivery (still on despite the curfew), and we carved flat, green Sri Lankan pumpkins at the dining room table.

We had a lentil sausage soup for dinner and listened to records. All told it ended up being a much nicer Halloween than we thought it could be and somewhat helped us to reset our expectations for that this — or any — holiday can mean.

Lockdown, Vol 2

The disappointment is acute.  

A few days after announcing school was going to resume face-to-face lessons, the decision was reversed; an outbreak of the virus at a garment factory north of Colombo bred 1,600 cases in the span of a week and leaked into the community. School was not only not going to be face-to-face, it was going back to full online; not the hybrid model, one week on, one week off the kids had previously participated in. After school activities, including swimming, were also set to resume. These, too, were postponed or canceled. 

A Halloween party was canceled. My office was then going to host kids for door to door trick-or-treating in our office building. Canceled. Door decorating contest. Canceled. We planned a last minute trip to Weligama, the beach, to go surfing and fishing and relaxing by the crash of ocean waves. Canceled.

I think both Elise and I kind of knew another government curfew was inevitable. So far, this curfew is limited to the Western Province which includes Colombo. We’ve been told it will be lifted on Monday, but the last curfew was instituted on a holiday weekend, too.  That curfew lasted 10 weeks. We’re hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. 

In anticipation, Sam created is own quarantine activity, freezing LEGO men and action figures in ice to be chipped free later with small picks and screwdrivers like a paleontologist liberating a frozen mastodon from  an Arctic glacier. 

Virtual PE

Friday morning, Sam woke in a horrendous mood. He’s becoming more the moody teen. Wonderful when the mood is a good one. He has the capacity to fill the entire house with a noxious cloud of gloom when the mood is boorish, like a sinkhole swallowing the house.  I have always said he has the capacity to be the kindest, most gentle person I know. The converse is also true.  He was looking forward to going to Weligama the most; he’s become quite fascinated with fishing. 

I have a long history with fishing. My dad took us fishing all the time when I was a kid. We’d go out into the Atlantic in his boat, triple outboard motors now. Maybe only twin outboards then. Straight out the Jupiter inlet. There were no seas he was afraid of, angling the bow into the incoming swells at just the right angle, having a prescient knowledge of when to speed the boat up and when to slow it done at just the right moment to insert the hull between the sine wave of the incoming tide and ride the waves out. It was though he spoke to the ocean, and the ocean spoke back, spraying salt into our faces as the tan stretch of sand receded behind us and the vast expansive of deep violet ocean opened up before us. 

I grew up fishing with my dad, but never learning to fish. My dad may have been a micromanager. Or maybe we were truly so inept at fishing he really did have to do everything for us. I caught a lot of fish, but never became very knowledgeable in the language of lures, line, filaments, and weight. I could bait a hook, but never knew the strategy behind fishing, the why of a certain bait in a certain spot at a certain time of day dropped at a certain depth. I could pull a fish (big ones, too) from the briny deep, but always pulled it straight into my dad’s waiting arms where he unhooked the fish, threw it in the cooler, and baited and dropped my line for me. 

I think he enjoyed providing the service, like a charter fisherman. But I never really learned how to fish. And, thus, my interest in fishing waned because I could never go fishing on my own. I didn’t know how. And I never had the proper equipment. Or a boat. 

It seems the fishing bug skips generations, because Sam is obsessed. But I lack the knowledge to help him. He’s been researching fishing in reference books and shopping for fishing gear online. We ordered him a rod and reel and some fishing line, hoping it will all work together. I tried asking my dad for suggestions, but the recommendations provided in terse, sparsely worded emails written like haiku were difficult to decipher. 

On some level, I know it is not about the outcome. Though I do think Sam would be disappointed if he never caught a fish, I am able to take him fishing. My interest is not lacking. I would love nothing more than to sit on the beach or the rocks with him watching him for hours cast his line into the sea. I just won’t be able to offer much in the way of instruction. We’ll have to figure it out on our own. 

But this adventure, sadly, is postponed indefinitely. Another victim of the global pandemic.

Tennis lesson

This curfew started rough, but only a day or two in, we are already finding a rhythm to the day, though we are looking forward to seeing what Monday will bring. Will the curfew lift? If only for a few hours or days? Or will need come late Sunday night — as before — the curfew has been extended? 

The Tooth Fairy’s Favorite Food

Little Adam’s Peak

Part of our sojourn to the mountains was a plan to hike Little Adam’s Peak. What we thought may have been a trek worthy of the Hanna Family was a short jaunt up steep, though well-manicured, stairs off a footpath on the estate of 98 Acres, a neighboring tea plantation and upscale resort on the other side of the valley, opposite Ella Rock, a path short enough and tame enough to be conquered by old, wizened women in long skirts and sandals.

The views were no less inspiring had the hike been more draining and challenging, and we even were teased by the idea of a zip line. Unfortunately, there was a 30 kilo minimum which Peter was a few kilos shy of.

Fall in the Mountains with the Buttercup Trees

We just returned from a week in the mountains of Sri Lanka, forced to return a day early. We had planned to spend six nights at Amba, a tea plantation and homestay, nestled in the rolling, green hills near Ella. 

When we left Colombo, the dark cloud of the virus had mostly dissipated from the island. The kids were scheduled to return to school full time. After-school activities, including swimming, were set to resume. The kids were planning their Halloween costumes.

Bright yellow bushels of flowers painted the green hillsides, the buttercup trees were in bloom, and the flowers seemed to grow bigger and brighter with each passing day. We walked down to the watering hole once or twice every day to swim, skip along the river-smoothed rocks, or angle for small fish in shallow pools with homemade fishing gear made from plastic soda bottles, wine corks and ear plugs for bobbers, metal washers for weight. 

We saw the bright arm of the Milky Way on our first night, walking home under a blanket of stars and lightning bugs shimmering in the palms.  And I remain astounded by the broad breadth of sheer biodiversity on display, all of God’s creatures in wild, ruckus celebration: dragonflies, monkeys, and field mice, mongoose and butterflies, bees and water buffalo and peacocks, fireflies and mint green-feathered parrots. 

Sadly, what began as a relaxing few days was gobbled up by news of a blossoming coronavirus cluster in a garment factory north of Colombo. What started as one reported case grew exponentially by the day. We woke to news of 100 cases, then 200, 400, 600, finally — by day five — plateauing at over 1,000 cases in a factory of 1,600 workers. 

Our thoughts gloomily turned to the threat of another lockdown, though the reality has yet to materialize.  Local media purported there was no community spread, but headlines in the coming days would report of a case at a hospital here, or a government office building there, supporting our suspicion there had been community spread all along; the government failed to test or report it for fear of tarnishing their reputation of having effectively corralled the virus. 

Neither Elise nor I were in a mood to pat ourselves on the back. Sam appeared at the open window to our room at 11:00, “Clementine is throwing up.”

Elise and I dashed upstairs to where the kids were staying to find Clementine on her knees in front of the toilet. She would have a fever for the next two days. She still does today, day three. A stomach bug, a culprit we are familiar with from our days on the Indian subcontinent. We have since narrowed it down to the fresh curd; Clementine was the only one who ate it, but she didn’t just have a taste, she downed an entire bowl of curd, treacle drizzled over the top. 

We couldn’t keep our imaginations from running wild, quarter sprints on an indoor track in our heads. Both Elise and I did mental contact tracing, recreating a map of every possible encounter wherein Clementine (or any of us) could have possibly been exposed. We’ve been very careful. Many think we’ve been over cautious, but Elise immediately blamed herself as though she were a goal keeper who let in the game-winning puck. 

After we talked to the doctor, the initial diagnosis was dengue and we were urged to return to Colombo. 

We returned to a Colombo that seemed like a physically drained place, as though a palpable pall had been pulled over the city. Everyone who didn’t wear a face mask wore one now. Traffic was phlegmatic, uninspired. But we were glad to be home. 

Though I had to work while in the mountains just being away from the office is restorative, playing War with Clementine before she got sick, admiring Sam’s ingenuity and perseverance with his handcrafted line. Removing the complex vectors of our everyday lives reveals the core being of a person, an individual in their rawest, most simple form. In Peter, it is a giant-eyed boy blinking back tears because he couldn’t catch up to the group who had left on a hike without him.  

And seeing this version of the three of them, remembering it is there, then reapplying those forces, is enough to carry one through another long week.

Migration Story

A podcast by Peter Hanna:

Click on this link. 

Empty Skies

When the pandemic struck, many of my coworkers returned to the States. We never seriously contemplated the same, but I recall those first few harried days of curfews and the looming threat of a lockdown as fearful and harried. 

By staying in Sri Lanka, I assumed many of my departed colleagues’ duties on top of my own. For a stretch of six week in the wild heart of the summer, I worked 12-14 hours days, many spent sitting at the dining room table, taking calls, responding to emails, and leading various teams. 

Our trip to Unawatuna was a revisit, of sorts. This was the sleepy surf twin we had visited on our original sojourn to Sri Lanka five years ago when we were living in South India.  This time, we stayed at Kaju Green Eco Lodge and slept in open air cabanas under mosquito nets, the closest to camping we have had in the last year, opening ourselves up to the screech of crickets, chirping of geckos, and chorus of morning birds. Daily, we would fine giant monitor lizards, stalking through the swamp beside the lodge and slithering in and out of the muck. 

We canoed through mangroves and went down to the shore one morning where the kids were able to play in the shallows for hours until lunch. We had lunch at a surfside pizza shack, the same one we took my mom to that many years ago, the one with the whalebone in the courtyard. I don’t know if anyone besides Elise and I remembered being there, but the Lion lager tastes the same and was just as cold. 

At one point, we found a small squirrel under a chair in our room, frightened until Sam coaxed it into his hand and set it free.

The rain started after lunch and wouldn’t stop for a day. Not an intermittent sprinkle but steady, gushing rain, a constant drumming, percussion, on the roofs of the lodges. For hours we read, rested, napped, drank wine. The kids listened to music. I gazed out at the rain, emptying my mind. Toward the end of the day, Elise wondered if there was any water left in the clouds. How long until they were empty?