spring2life take2

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.

whilst i am from a technical point of view not fully content with the picture above – the aspired sharpness is missing, probable due to improper focusing – the scenery is still captivating even in the review. doing it again however i would take care to include all the foreleg of the brown ox.

i myself prefer this picture even over the shot to the right, which is more classic in the usage of the reflection…

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.

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).

for me as living in the european alps, beeing at the seaside and watching the fishermen means alway a bounty of photographic opportunities. golden early morning light made those fishes an interesting pattern of metallic glistening hydrodynamically highly efficients bodies

the outrigger boats are a fascinosum by themselves. while the shape is a classical dugout canoe, the hull nowadays is made from fiberglass. however those planks to increase freeboard are not integral part of the modern hull but are still separately mounted on top of the traditional log-boat shape.

the recitations of the muezzin woke me up after a short night, but i was grateful for this invitation to start the new day early. my hotel was next to the beach – the tsunami at that time had not done much damage as the structure was new and sturdy concrete – so after 10 minutes i was out in the golden light. walking around, not yet decided on what to concentrate, i suddenly saw a scenery that reminded my very much of hemingways “the old man and the sea”.

the presence of me photographing probably made the crowd surrounding the swordfish even bigger, and before negotiating the price they wanted group photos to be taken.

for roughly 170 US$ the trader made the deal, and soon after one of the fishermen came up and chopped away the non-marketable parts, leaving only the torso to be iced and kept for transport.

the crows were already waiting for the remainders of this beautiful animal, one of the fastest in the sea. ironically, while prices especially of the red-tipped-fin subspecies are high up for assumed aphrodisiac effects, in europe the meat would not be allowed to the market: swordfish collect great amounts of cadmium and quicksilver, and the older and bigger the specimen, the higher the concentration of the toxics

before the winter monsoon rains start, the usual catch for the outrigger boats is small. bigger boats with outboard motors then are the only ones that bring home what they catch by long lines.

even then the catch is small. only 5 small thunas for one early morning of fishing is barely sufficient, given that you have to pay the high fuel price also.

the images were converted in bibble – on the laptop this is a good choice because of the more effective cpu usage than with lightzone – and slightly desaturated to work out the silver color of the fish.

finding a time to go for a photowalk to the beach at sunrise was difficult during the last mission – jet lag, early appointments, changes of the venue and so on. in the end, i had to take the last morning – and ended up without visible sunrise due to the clouds.

not wanting to return without any picture, i overcame my shyness and asked the fishermen by gesture if they would allow me to take their pictures. and indeed this was not a problem, but the display of the camera broke the ice and we all had fun time.

so what did i learn from this morning: procrastination is not necessarily evil, but will demand more flexibility. to overcome shyness is not that difficult but also a question of self-esteem. having decided to bring an album with the portraits for my next visit makes the whole thing a much less one-sided affair.

62 years, sick, shaking with probably fever, unhcr provided temporary shelter even almost 4 years after the tsunami, because there is no money to rebuild the house. living on approx. 60 US$ a month which is not much with fuel prices comparable to europe. health care is provided for free, but that also means that not much can be provided for a poor man.

(through our project he got pipe water access. it is not much, for sure, but many don’t have even this.)

being a tamil, he will not walk through the muslim parts of the city after dark (nor do the muslims go to tamil areas). he feels lucky if there is no further confrontation between those ethnic/religious groups as it has happened too many times in the past.

my own needs, fears and wishes look so surreal when confronted with this situation. fortunately my own abilities to make pictures fade away are not below average.
the age of 62 certainly feels different in the g8.

out of our project work: our ngo partner emas, which has 25 years of experience in running well drilling schools in bolivia, has created an awareness programme for students in batticaloa about ways to improve drinking water quality by simple means, among them solar desinfection. trainers went to more than 40 schools with 2000+ students.

another euphemism: idp. in the case of this man (and up to 200.000 others only in the eastern region of sri lanka) the government had decided that in order to have a free firing range against the tamil insurgents, everybody had to leave their villages.

so they were living in corrugated tin sheet buildings while everything they had was at the mercy of the army, the insurgents and the wild elephants. there is not much left now, as you can imagine. but idp sounds correct, nice.

this conflict is with 25 years and over 70.000 killed one of the longest and bloodiest in asia. silently, almost forgotten, as there are not states fighting against each other but “only” army and insurgents.

the violations of human rights are incountable, usage of child soldiers for example, to name only the worst. and both sides are equally abominable: the government for racist actions, under-cover-killings, the other side for forced recruition or using even kids as shields, again only to name examples.

with the looming defeat of the military arm of the insurgents, it now gets even worse. while the government deliberately arrests tamils in colombo (see these news on bbc), the rebels take up to 200.000 people hostage against the progress of the army. 200.000 kids, men, women of whom even the united nations have no information of where they are and in what status…

aah, did i ever say that sri lanka could be a paradise?

the non-availability of clean drinking water clearly is one indicator of poverty. in this area of batticaloa, sri lanka, the soil does not provide drinking water from wells through the whole year. as the next permanent well is 5 km away, the typical wedding present for a couple residing in this area consists of a bicycle and a set of water cans.

through European Union funded project activities, ferrocement rainwater harvesting tanks now will complement the traditional dug wells and alleviate the household chores, freeing valuable time especially for the women.

thanks to the help of the unhcr, these civil war refugees are offloaded again next to the remainders of their village that they had to leave 2 years ago when the sri lanka government had decided to “liberate” the east coast. aah, it’s so easy: the government decides to displace, and the international community does not have many options but to assist so that government’s actions don’t result in a humanitarian catastrophy. so the refugees come to camps, and when government allows, the UN can bring them back to what war has left from their belongings. and when this picture looks as if a lorry had just dumped a load, well, it was almost like that.

after having lived in a shelter, one family one room, cooking outside, platform to lift the beddings above the water that in rainy seasons is on floor level, most of the refugees are glad to go back. so they queue up under a glazing sun in the transport area, bear the screening by the army and the special task forces and then get transported back in buses, their belongings brought after inspection for weaponry on some tractors.

and there is no question that the unhcr does a good job here. after returning with a tarpaulin kit as a first measure of protection, shelter building groups will come and assist the refugees in repairing damaged houses or set up provisional ones. quick impact projects afterward may come to their support and may create new means of earning a livelyhood.

but all this poverty is not a result of a natural catastrophe, but results from the inability of government and insurgents to negotiate a peaceful solution for the conflict. this is the shame.

martin doonan posted some days ago about blog action day and this years topic of global poverty. as poverty is what i am constantly confronted with when on mission in sri lanka – and what guides my actions, too – i gladly took up his reminder and registered. so you will see in the following days many pictures around this matter.

those fishermen in batticaloa i visit regularly since 2005, just see here, here or here. many of those lost relatives and all their belongings in 2004′s tsunami. the curve of their net and their silhouettes are an ongoing fascination for me

the man in this portrait is actually a beneficiary of our project, and i hope to get more details about him soon. up to then take this as an expressive face with trails of deepest injuries.

the local heroes in sri lanka are a sad affair: that ‘martyrs day’ poster is from eprlf, eelam people’s revolutionary liberation front. this group now fights together with the sri lanka government against the ltte, liberation tigers of tamil eelam. and doleful heroes they (and many of the others) are: yesterday 3 young tamil men were found on the coast, hands bound and shot to death. this is a fight of so many groups against each other, on the side of the goverment or against it, among themselves or against an (imaginative) enemy.

i was trying to seek beauty here, wander with open eyes and a quiet mind, but this sad reality does not let me go. everywhere, and even more in every talk you have with a local, that tragic reality of especially the life of the tamils here is present

flying on a project monitoring mission to sri lanka again, woke up at probably 4:00 am local time over the indian ocean and saw this wonderful light.

even after 30 or more long flights from germany to sri lanka i still am fascinated by the quality of light at sunrise, seen from a plane. i still love flying…

octoberfest with the camera was fun, and i was lucky to have company in person of a colleague who protected me from drunkards pivoting one liter glasses of beer (the famous “Maßkrug”) in front of my lens. The beer halls were too noisy for me – you have to drink in there, talking slows down drinking so the band pushes the volume of the music to the limits in order to increase the beer consume – but outside the sellers of the gingerbread hearts grabbed my attention.

you can find quite a number of them, and the hearts are a real relict of the early times of octoberfest. of course now you find international inscriptions on the hearts, too, but the basic form still is the “i love you”.

and when processing these shots, i found a way to make use of lightzone’s regions to simulate a bit of vignetting, both in brightness, but also in selective sharpening.