Lassanai: A Summer in Sri Lanka

Come travel with me

I find great solace sitting in the rain, which falls from the stars like sinners to their knees, with a person. Talking, breathing, being, accepting heaven’s tears like azaleas ready for bloom. It’s as if the sky cried for us, for the stories we told the humid air.

We were splayed out on a slab of rocks by the river rapids as the rain came, Sam and I, a Brit and an American.

Sri Lanka was proving to be unforgiving with its perpetual bug bites and sweat. We fell asleep to the hum of mosquitos trapped in our bug nets every night and awoke every morning drenched in our own liquid salt. We became homes to colonies of lice or ended up in local hospitals with various illnesses like dengue, a malaria-esque sickness, lacking immunity that the locals had. We were happy, though. Joyous, even. Happy and wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. We were living in a third world country for the summer, working in psychiatric hospitals, special needs homes, teaching English, and doing our business in holes in the ground with minimal access to toilet paper.

When the rain came neither Sam nor I moved. We let the cold drops kiss our flesh and hair as the locals shouted at us from across the jungle in Sinhala, their native tongue, waving their arms and beckoning us to seek shelter.

“I like the rain,” Sam said.

“I do too,” and we smiled warmly at one another.

Everything was green in Kitulgala. The trees reached the sky and the river rapids, stunning. Monkeys jumped and swung above our heads. Huge bugs found their way into our beds and showers. We hiked the dusty paths in between stems and leaves and smiled at the jungle locals who hung their wet laundry on clothes lines and walked over flimsy wood plank bridges which swayed in the wind. Three children chased one another, kicking up brown dust with their bare feet. Their laughter echoed into the trails, a raceless sound.

“Katie,” Sam said, her British accent sweeter than Sri Lankan bananas and jam, “did you remember to wear bug spray?”

“No…,” I said, like a child to their mother.

“Blimey mate, you’ll get eaten alive out here! Don’t be such a bloody plonker!” She said.

“You’re so British it hurts, Sam.”

“Oh, rubbish.”

We worked eight to eleven-hour days during the week taking dodgy public transport and fumbling with our broken Sinhala to give directions to the tuktuk drivers. The weekends were for us: explorations and site seeing and praying to God that you stepped on the correct bus which would drive you several hours to your desired destination.

We each traveled from our comfortable western homes of air condition and hand soap and modern medicine with the intentions of travel. We all wanted to see the world, every lavish and dirty corner of it, take pictures and meet people and buy treasures, creating memories unlike most.

In the cities of Dambula, Padeniya, Sigirya, and Ella, we hiked through cliffs and mountains, tea plantations and ancient temples, collecting dirt on our cheeks and scalps.

Once on a hike down from the Cave Temples in Padeniya, a monkey attacked me and stole the mango slices I was eating, wrapped in notebook paper which I bought off a local for 50 Sri Lankan rupees, about 30 cents in U.S. currency. On the trails in Sigirya heading towards Pidurangala Rock, a group of monkeys chased my British friend Hazel for her bag of crackers until she was forced to throw the bag at a tree to escape them.

Stray cows and bulls grazed in the open fields next to the trails and could elsewhere be seen strolling along the city streets. The locals would be found in the temples or working the plantations. We put our hands prayerfully together and bowed to them saying “Ayubowan” which translates into “May you have a long life”, the standard greeting in the country. They ayubowan-ed us in return. Then while scaling rocks ten times our size and creating human chains to hoist ourselves through the hike I would say, “Someone isn’t making it back to the bottom, y’all.”

One morning we rose before the sun to catch a train at sunrise to the city of Kandy, determined to catch of glimpse of the tooth of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddah) at the Sacred Temple of the Tooth. Seven hours of Sinhala songs, maracas, and bananas as our only fuel awaited us. We watched the scenery change from agricultural fields to farmland to cold mountains to misty waterfalls to lush green valleys and tea plantations which rolled over hills against the blue sky. It was in these mountains as our feet dangled over the tracks that we stopped sweating and for the first and only time that summer, I wished I had a sweater. Mountain fog found its way into the rooms between train cars where I sat shivering, half nervous the tracks would eat my sandals, or I would lose one of my toes from the train coming within inches of the moist and mossy cliffs.

Hazel and I were in a debate about whose vocabulary made more sense, British or American. She made fun of my accent and I made fun of their diction.

“Well, why do Americans call it horseback riding?” She yelled over the blare of the wind and rumble of the train tracks, a smug smile stapled above her chin.

I laughed, “What do you mean?”

“It’s just horse riding. Why do you need to specify that you’re on the horse’s back?”

I threatened to throw her off the train.

In Habarana we went on a four-hour safari to ride alongside the hundreds of elephants and water buffalo that inhabited the land. We stood up in the Jeep as the sky painted itself from blue to pink and purple and orange. One would believe that no other land existed since the preserve stretched for miles. From horizon to horizon there was only the open yellow savanna. Two elephants escorted their baby to a lake in front of us and peacocks poked their heads out from the tall grass as we drove by. A fellow Jeep sped around us with gleaming bald monks in their orange robes waving and cheering at us as they passed.

In Unawatuna, reddened from the sun, we sunk our toes into sand, surfed clumsily in the waves, and released baby turtles into the crashing shore. We stayed in cottages that lacked insulation from the outside forces of nature. In between the floorboards and on the walls, one could easily lean in and see outside from the space in between the wood planks. The lone window lacked a glass and had only a checkered handkerchief to provide privacy from neighboring cottages. The heat, the rain, the bugs especially, found their way into our weekend homes.

Hazel and I were sharing a cottage. Once we tucked our lacey bug net beneath the thin mattress, we gave our “good nights” and turned from one another to sleep. Several sources of buzzing circled above our heads, diving down towards my face and then away towards the ceiling.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

“Yup,” she said, with defeat.

“We’re going to get bit up tonight, aren’t we?” I said.

I’ll miss the bus and tuktuk rides to work. I’ll long for leaning my head against a grimy window, my forehead hitting it like a drum stick every few seconds from the vicious motion of public transport. I’ll miss looking out the dirty glass and seeing women lifting the ends of their saris to protect them from puddles and stray dogs as sweat dripped down the front of my chest. I’ll miss the view of the old men in their sarongs lounging outside their family’s stores, their gray hair and beards tousled about like birds’ nests.

I’ll miss the street dust that collected at my eyebrows and the young, thin-armed men who were strangely stronger than they appeared. I’ll miss the teenage boys who managed to flirt with us without knowing our language and the young men who tried with knowing only a little.

I’ll miss walking the open-air halls of the psychiatric facilities, wandering through the green and orange-painted walls, greeting patients as I passed.

I’ll miss the squealing children who chased me around their jungle school courtyard, tackling me like a pack of baby wolves on fresh meat. I’ll miss the teenage schoolgirls who called me their friend when “friend” was one of the few words they knew in English. I’ll miss their demeanor and exuberant personalities which so closely resembled mine despite us communicating with a language barrier. I’ll miss the way they would shout my name, “Keh-tee!” (Katie), when I entered their classroom and the way they lovingly held my hand after class as young girls do in their culture. I’ll miss dancing wildly and recklessly with the students before and after English lessons, laughing at one another until our abdomens ached. Dancing and laughter: languages we could all understand.

I’ll miss the vibrant smiles the special needs students flashed us when we complimented their artwork or their disco moves during music time. I’ll miss their messy bows and ayubowans after tea.

I’ll miss the cinderblock stores stacked side by side like cereal boxes and the high-pitched honking of the lawless city streets.

If there’s one thing I learned that summer, it’s that travelling to serve others was an essential value to experience in life. A trip that began as a desire for me to explore the world and help people along the way turned into a mountain more. Traveling, I learned, wasn't about eating strange foods or seeing sights, talking to food vendors in the dirt-swept streets or standing at cliff peaks overlooking the valleys. It was about dancing with people born different than we are, whether with special needs or a varying culture, and bringing laughter and joy to their faces. It was about sitting with someone hungry to learn English or someone who is hungry and laughing as we both try to understand one another. It was about holding the wrinkled hand of a woman with Alzheimer’s who cries in a language I cannot understand. It was about creating friendships with people from all over the world who are just as lost and found in this life as I am, and sitting on a violent bus ride or in the pouring rain by the river rapids talking about our joys and our trials. May we travel for the people who need us to dance with them, to teach them, to support them, to grow with them?

It was my last week in the country and the Indian Ocean sea breeze wiped hair from our foreheads beneath the night sky unpolluted by light. I challenged my friend Devinda to a foot race down the beach, illuminated only by the moon and a few restaurants. He previously claimed that because he was Sri Lankan, he would be faster than me, an American and regular runner.

We counted down from three in Sinhala. “Tuna… deka… eka!” and with each step my feet sank into the thick sand and the wind blanketed my body. I was ahead of Devinda by only a few steps. His long, brown legs leapt farther than mine. I could see in my peripheral vision that he was beside me, his arms moving back and forth like bicycle pedals as he lurched forward. He passed me, approached our marked finish line, and I slowed to a jog, high fiving him for his win. We walked back down the beach, panting and holding our hips.

“Ayo, you go back to the U.S. of A. soon,” Devinda said, his Sinhalese accent as thick as the humidity. “How was Sri Lanka?”

“Lassanai. Godak Lassanai,” I said, breathless. Beautiful. So beautiful.

Katie Donohue Tona

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