October 14, 2008
My first working week in Sri Lanka went off without a hitch. I spent Tuesday at the Department of Animal Production and Health (DAPH) meeting with local stakeholders, namely the Director of the department and Chandra, the newly-hired research assistant on the project.
Chandra has worked for over ten years as a field veterinary surgeon in Sri Lanka and therefore will be
Buddhist temple an invaluable resource when it comes to refining the design of the surveillance system. Wednesday I was again at the DAPH while I spent Thursday and Friday meeting with folks at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Peradeniya. I decided to take Saturday afternoon off and visit the Sri Dalada Maligawa or Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic here in Kandy. It is a UN World Heritage Site and a famous Buddhist temple where they keep, you guessed it, the Buddha’s tooth (the only surviving relic of Buddha). The temple is unquestionably stunning although I can’t say I had one of my more pleasant experiences as a tourist.
Unfortunately Sri Lanka has a reputation for being a place where hassling tourists is the norm and I say, with much regret, that my initial experience was in line with this sentiment. While intending to spend the day alone, I found myself frequently in the company of people trying to give me tours of the temple, bring me to special shops, and borrow money. It really is quite hard not to become angry in the face of such interactions as it means that you really feel like you can’t trust anyone’s sincerity. And yet I think it is important to keep in mind what the majority of Sri Lankans have been led to believe about westerners and their daily realities, and how different these perceptions are from daily life in Sri Lanka.
Just to give an example, one gentleman was pointing out the military towers to me and said that the soldiers work eight hours shifts here in Sri Lanka. He then asked me what sort of shifts soldiers work in Canada. I tried to explain to him that there weren’t soldiers everywhere you went in Canada, that they weren’t really needed. I could see from his gaze that he believed what I was saying just couldn’t be true. Security is particularly tight around ‘the tooth temple’ as it was bombed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1998.