teaching gis

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^*in kalmunai, on the east coast of sri lanka. the lady is a newly trained gis specialist and is holding a mobile phone as one symbol for her bridging traditions and the "modern" world. kalmunai is a town where islam values are held very high - in general it is a really patriarchal society. having managed to aquire above average education and balancing it with her life of a mother is what i admire in her.

^* gis is shorthand notation for geographical information system

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kalmunai students iv

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before you are afraid that this turns into a monothematic blog of kid pics - these are the last ones i'd like to show from kalmunai. sri lanka again experiences a wave of violence, and the east coast i visited 3 weeks ago is now more or less a no-go-area for foreigners.

those kids have grown up in the civil war, and whilst kalmunai itself has not been in the center of real war-like actions, road block everywhere and killings in the villages have always been present since more than 25 years.

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kalmunai students

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early morning hours are my most prolific time of the day. the fishermen, the outrigger boat, all these picture were created from 6 to 8 am. the light is soft at that time but does not have that orange cast of the sunset hours.

and the public is definitely different - only at that time you see the students in a light suitable for portraits. at noon, when they return, the harsh sunlight is everything else but pleasing.

those two kids are living in the battlefield of 2004's tsunami, there school, now rebuilt, is also in the zone of massive destruction. they seem to push aside their remembrance of that mayhem. but the smile in their faces can be misleading: talking with social workers shows the whole bandwith of psychological injuries, and the skin that has grown over these is still very thin.

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bawa singers, kalmunai

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those singers traditionally woke up the people during ramadam, early in the morning to allow a good breakfast as the basis for a whole day of fasting. now this custom is forgotten in most places, but still the singers are invited for some festivities.

the high iso possibilities of my sony a700 are always reason for joy: iso 2500 and only minimal noise (see the full filesize on flickr).

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Tsunami Traces II

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the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka more than 3.5 years ago. it's traces can still be seen in the faces of the people. that man to the right, probably 15 years younger than me, lives and works next to the place he lost his family, barely 50m away from the shoreline. conversation was difficult, so he silently offered me a glass of tea and we stood there closemouthed in a place where i was already short after tsunami, covered in the smell of decaying corpses under collapsed houses.

the west and south of sri lanka got rebuilt pretty fast and well, as this is where the singhalese majority leaves. the east with the muslims and tamils was always neglected and still is. or could you imagine a city of 100.000+ inhabitants not having a single loader and truck? hospitals not sporting a toilet for the men's ward? and still a number of tsunami affected families live in temporary shelters. as do the sometimes 180.000+ internally displaced persons (an excellent euphemism for war refugees) alone in this region. those war refugees get no compensation, in the camps they wait to be allowed returning to the shattered remainders of their villages after one or the other army was there. and racism shows its ugly face everywhere, making tamils fight muslims, tamils kill tamils, singalese fight tamils without end.

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