Poya Days and Pera Heras

The lifestyle in Sri Lanka is pretty laidback most of the time. Even the driving, which seems chaotic at first, seems to just happen without many rules and little stress or fuss. Despite continuous overtaking, regardless of corners, hills or overtaking vehicles approaching, there seems to be a lot fewer accidents than one feels there should be. This could be because the maximum speed seems to be 40mph, but the driving, as with life, seems to flow easily.

There are many holidays in Sri Lanka too, not just the official ones, but it seems plausible for people to take a couple of days off around the official holidays to go visit family or religious places or even just for personal business.

And there are many public holidays. Poya days are the most common sites for these. A poya day is the day of the full moon and signifies the advent of significant religious occasions. Whilst here, I have been lucky enough to take part in two of the more important poya days in the Sri Lankan calendar: Wesak Poya, and Posson Poya.

Wesak Poya celebrates the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha. These events are all believed to have occurred on the May full moon. The festival is a mixture of Christmas and Easter rolled together and is very important for Sri Lankan Buddhists. This is a festival of light, lanterns are made from bamboo and hung around the outside of the house along with fairy lights and candles. The towns and cities are also decorated and there can be mini festivals with bands and stalls. 

Devout Buddhists visit the temple every day in the week leading up to Wesak Poya and offerings of drinks, food, flowers, and alms for the monks are laid in front of the statues of Buddha. There are processions with the Buddhist flag that take these offerings to the temple and the flags are to be found adorning roadsides and shops all over the county. 

The same is true of Posson Poya, although this festival is not as big. It is a celebration of the introduction of Buddhism into Sri Lanka. There are no lanterns for this one, but there are still celebrations… and dansals…

A dansal is a stall found along the roadside that offers free food and drink to passers by. This can range from a simple as a cup of tea or ice cream to a full blown curry meal. Often there are boys with flags waving down cars, buses and pedestrians. Loud music blasts from giant sound systems and the stalls are decorated with flowers and colour. Dansals and alms-giving is all part of building up the good karma. Good deeds increase good karma which is weighed against the bad karma from bad deeds to determine the fate of the next rebirth. A dansal must vastly increase the good karma through random acts of generosity!

The Poya day celebrations can also include a Pera Hera or two. These are carnivals that parade through the villages and showcase a slice of Sri Lankan culture. They usually seem to begin with flower-bicycles parading up and down the road, followed by whip-crackers that announce the arrival of the procession. What follows is a succession of dancers, drummers, bands, and devils that pass in waves of colour and sound. I’m not sure on the story of each section but if I do find out I will be sure to report back! This week I have been able to see two Pera Heras, here are some of the best photos…

Apologies

Well, there is absolutely no excuse for it, I have not uploaded a single blog entry since I landed in ‘the pearl of the ocean’ that is Sri Lanka. This is due, mainly, to lack of organisation and laziness, but it does mean that those entries I do make now will be backed by a considerable amount of experience. I have two and a half weeks left of fieldwork before I embark on the holiday section of my trip. It will certainly be odd to switch from the role of ‘participant-observer’ in Sri Lankan village life to that of ‘tourist’ in the pockets of Sri Lanka that have been inspired, financed, and supported by western influence.

As always, I have not been working as hard as I could have and there are many things I have observed that I have not formally noted down. I figure that restarting this blog will hopefully help me to bring these things to the forefront of my mind and be able to explain them with a western audience in mind. The first entry will be an introduction of where I am and what I am doing, the following entries I hope will be more themed… we shall see…

I am currently living in a small village called Moraketiara in between the villages of Matara and Tangalle. The village is close to two other villages; Marwella North and Marwella South. These villages were heavily affected by the tsunami and there has been considerable change in the composition and functioning of the villages since the disaster of 26^th December 2004. The majority of the population are part of the fishing community and each village lies close to the beach. The aim of my trip was to look at the social impact of international intervention on the village of Moraketiara. This has changed a little to focus more on what makes an intervention successful and what causes a project to be less effective. This has involved observing the school that was built by the Rotary Club as part of the ‘Schools ReAwaken’ scheme, and talking to members of the village about the aid received and the projects that are still going in the village. The biggest problem for me has been the language barrier, there are few people in the village whose English extends beyond ‘Hello, how are you?’ and ‘Where are you going?’. I have therefore had to wait for a translator to be available before I can conduct any interview. This has meant that many episodes of Scrubs has been watched, and a good number of books read that were not, admittedly, anthropologically based…

I live with a young family in the village of Moraketiara. Jayalath is an English teacher in a monastery 3 hours drive from the village. He hopes to get a job closer to home in the future, but for now he endures a six hour round trip to get to and from work, leaving at 8am and not returning until 12 hours later. His wife, Pramitha spends her day looking after their 7 month old son Miyuru and keeping the house immaculately clean. Their house is a typical one for the area. It is currently on one story, although the house is very much unfinished and is ready to receive a second floor when they can afford it. It is very common to see houses of one-and-a-bit floors with stairs up the side and struts waiting for the bricks and cement to create the next part of the building. The walls are all seemingly solid concrete and the floors are mostly painted with a red hard wearing paint. There is a ‘western’ bathroom to accommodate the University students that come once a year as part of Durham’s ‘Project Sri Lanka’ with an electric shower (hot water, bliss!). Pramitha and Jayalath use a more traditional shower and toilet set up in rooms external to the main building. The Kitchen is spread between a lean-to constructed with wooden planks and corrugated iron and a room inside with the fridge and sink.

There is a set of gas rings on which everything is cooked in the lean-to, this is where some serious good curry is prepared!

Two dogs and a cat to complete the family.

As I mentioned before the house is close to the beach. The beach is where many of the smaller boats are kept for fishing. The boats are all brightly coloured and line the sand when they are not at sea. At the end of the beach past the rocks is an area where the freshwater river meets the sea. It is like walking into a part of Peter Pan’s Neverland, without a soul around and absolutely beautiful.

So this is where I have spent my last month or so. There are been some great times, and some dull times, but even in the low parts I am still spending my weeks in a little piece of paradise.

Colombo

My first proper day in Sri Lanka and I already have much to talk about.

I arrived in Sri Lanka at 6pm last night after a long and tiring 18ish hour flight. Having left Heathrow at 8.45pm I had a 8 and a half hour flight to Delhi, a four hour wait, then a four and a half hour flight to Colombo.
It is not really tourist season for Sri Lanka, and both flights were more than half empty. This meant I had the great luxury of a whole row to myself to lounge and sleep as I wished. Despite being forced to walk through the Business class area of the airport to get to our comparatively closely clustered seats, I felt we had a good deal.
We had a wide choice of movies and music to entertain ourselves and with eight hours I felt I was in for a good movie session. Gullivers Travels soon changed that plan and I was snoring away to my hearts content before very long.

The Guest House I am staying in is a Chintzy Kitsch dream. Pink, lace, and pink lace are the orders of the day complemented by two lovely sisters and a small white fluffy dog who immediate sniffed my crotch as I entered. I have a good room with an ensuite and all are very keen to serve me as much breakfast as I can eat in the mornings.

I ventured out into Colombo early this morning to extend my visa until mid-July. This invovled a convoluted queueing system that would make the British feel proud. After hours of waiting and queuing and a nod from a gentlement, swift payment and a stamp of the passport and I was free to spend the afternoon as I wished.

Odels is close to the Immigration Office and filled with high fashion items at a comparatively high end price. I flatly refused to buy flip flops for four pounds on the grounds I can find them cheaper elsewhere. This I soon found to be a foolish decision.

Lessons learnt today:
Cars may not beep constantly when white people aren't around.
Heavy leather shoes make blisters in hot places.
I don't like wood apple juice.

First past the post...

This blog is intended to help chronicle the trials and tribulations of 2 months of fieldwork in Sri Lanka. The trip will provide me with copious amounts of interesting and insightful fieldnotes from which I will create an inspiring and unique dissertation of great scholarly worth. That is the plan, similar to those made by mice and men I feel.

So far I have the flights booked and my homestay sorted. I have yet to make contact with the great and the good which shall happen soon for meetings and interviews. I also need to sort out travel insurance and turn myself into a voluntary pin cushion in the interests of health preservation.

And so the adventures begin...