spring2life take2

In the tsunami of 2004, Saintamaruthu had lost its health care center, leaving thousands of citizens without local medical facilities. Overcoming a sequence of difficulties, setbacks and delays, by donations of the GFK and the citizens of Nuremberg and the management of UN-Habitat, a new health care center was erected and now is serving its purpose. When I visited the site, the weekly breastfeeding promotion consultation hours took place – with visible demand.

Not far from last post’s school I found this mural/collection of ads on the remaining walls of a house destroyed in 2006′s tsunami. I like the lead image for its repeating patterns and their blending into the wall. The image to the right fascinates too because of that whole universe that opens up behind the corner and the stairs.

The Al-Wahidhiyyah Arabic College in Kalmunai is a small privately funded school for boys. Like the Christian Parochial Schools, nowadays rare in Europe, this school teaches along the official government curriculum, but gives special religious lessons. The boys were interested to use the little English they knew, and really open and friendly. I hope they keep this attitude and not only learn the words of the surahs, but also their deep and in many aspects very tolerant and open essence.

Update: I was thinking about Aaron Vincent Elkaim’s photographic essay about remnants of Jewish life in Morocco. Definitely worth seeing, not only for the photography but also the context and content.

let the beauty of the flags speak for itself. the flag doesn’t bother who is raising it and why.

even this much abused national symbols keep their relevance, the more so when all those malpractioners are gone.

no dessert for me after a working dinner, instead 10 min. break and a very short walk on the beach. the colors here were wonderful, the beach certainly attractive for tourists. however i was told that people here in kalmunai would not feel at ease with tourists as conflicts with muslim traditions and teachings would be preprogrammed.

the kids, and the boys especially, meanwhile do enjoy their life, and a stranger on the beach is definitely a reason to say hello and try one’s language skills.

^*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

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.

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

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.

some days ago i discovered the landscapist blog. what an amount of food for thought, in a way almost intimidating. man & nature # 19 ~ reading a photograph grabbed my attention, and even my illiteracy regarding barthes’ punctum thesis did not stop me from at least trying to follow.

later on, going through my pictures again, i was pondering this idea of the punctum again, trying to find a connection to my own body of work. the picture above maybe comes close – do you discover the punctum?

maybe i should read the original of this theorem. the landscapists interpretation at least seems to be flawed in the sense of ignoring the cultural roots of all our interpretational skills, and my image of the vesak lanterns is an example for this. from perceiving the subject, the odd combination of barbed wire and colorful lanterns, you don’t get the point of the picture even if you know where it was taken and what vesak is – one of the most important buddhist holidays in sri lanka – and this point cannot be photographed or included by omission, but it has to do with some further knowledge.

the picture was taken on the east coast of sri lanka, in a region where tamil villages mix with muslim ones. without influence of racist politicians, all these ethnics and religions coexist with the buddhists, and those are the absolute minority in this region, almost non-existent outside of army and police. an army, which is at war since 30 years with the tamils who form the majority on the east coast. hence the barbed wire. punctum.

but maybe i got this whole idea wrong…

nice pat on the back yesterday: in my flickr account i found a mail from a journalist of tamilweek.com, notifying that they had – in accordance with the creative commons license i put on my pictures and blog – taken my blog entries and compiled them to a news feature named portraits from kalmunai. What I found appealing and a positive experience is the fact that they did not clandestinely copy and paste, which is something that so many authors experience nowadays, but behaved like high-standard journalists from the good old days in the midst of the snake pit internet.

content-wise i made my rants about the political situation there heard, now i just wait for the miracle that this has some effect.

since the tsunami of december 2004 those women live with their families in temporary shelters: that means huts with corrugated tin sheets as roof, maybe one and a half rooms, cooking outside, toilets and washing facilites shared with a big number of other families. while this may look bearable under warm and sunny conditions, in the 4+ months of monsoon it becomes a total mess – a deep swamp everywhere, seasoned with the threats of cyclones.

when foreigners on an official mission become visible, now there are sounds of protests. and it hurts me that we could not offer some more houses to be constructed from our funds, as apparently their own state prefers to spend the money on a war they cannot win: sri lanka spends 2.4% of their gdp (est. 2004, compare with 1.5% in germany) for their army, plus the (unknown to me) amount the need for police and special task forces, let alone their losses of the agonizing economy due to the civil war of more than 25 years.

oh, and did i tell you that this country could be a paradise on earth?

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.

first post after 17 days. not that i had given up photography or was just lazy. no, i was simply without network connect – thanks to my administration which didn’t bother to come up with a gprs connection for my mobile (only applied for it 5 months ago) – in eastern sri lanka on a business trip. and business kept me busy so i couldn’t go to one of the internet cafes. ok, the first days i was too busy but then incidents started so i didn’t want to go any more. that whole sri lanka could be heaven on earth without that bloody war (pun intended) and not enough that singhalese and tamils fight since 25 years, now also the muslims and the tamils use kalashnikov bullets as arguments. it makes a difference reading about this in the newspaper or walking into a 16 year old chap without uniform but with a gun. ok, he was friendly “what’s your name, where do you come from…” but probably due to my white skin, which is giving me an edge down there. in the 11 days i spent in batticaloa, probably 10 people were killed in the neighbouring towns, for political reasons.

you see from this burst of words how upset and fed up i am.

photography-wise it still has to be evaluated: 20 gig of raw files, but mostly of official events. at least i took my chance to sometimes get up really early (sunrise is at 5:45) and go to the fishermen at the beach, here in kalmunai.