So this was it. I had 3 more days left before I had to make my way back to Colombo and begin my 36 hour journey back to U.S. soil. I had two choices…I can head down to the beach and just marinate for a few days, or I can continue the cerebral stimulation and head to Kandy, “The Cultural Capital of Sri Lanka.” Against most of humanity’s better judgement, I chose the latter.
Not again. No way was I going to miss my ride this time. It was pseudo-palatable to eat the 10 bucks for ticket I bought for the missed train ride they day before, but after not being able to secure another ticket for the next 3 days, if I was to stand any chance of making it to Nuwara Eliya in the highlands, I would be forced to hire a private driver...
It was over. The main reason I found myself in Sri Lanka was all over. Here we sit at the train station waiting for our ride back to Colombo, reflecting upon the events of the past two weeks, and quietly wondering how we’d say goodbye to each other. After all, we had become family over the past few weeks and bonds had certainly been formed. And here we were, in the middle of Sri Lanka, in a village that none of us may very well ever see again, and wondering if we’d ever even get to see each other again.
When you think to yourself you’ll be taking a trip that would last a little over 3 weeks to the Southeast Asian island of Sri Lanka, and 10 of those days would be spent traveling through, and experiencing some of the lushest landscapes and most culturally significant areas in all of Asia, you wouldn’t think that the most memorable and enjoyable part of the trip would be the other 12 days. The ones spent isolated in a 2-structure walled-in compound built by the World Bank in the outskirts of Vavuniya, one of the most impoverished communities in the country that lay right in the midst of some of the least exciting topography on the island.
It was 5am, just 4 hours after the airport finally dropped off my lost luggage at our Airbnb rental in Colombo, and just 15 minutes before we were to board a 7-hour train from Colombo to Jaffna, the northern most city in Sri Lanka. After our brief, but efficiently utilized, 20 hours of living it up in Colombo, it was time to put our foot on the clutch and get ready to switch gears. Jaffna sits at about 50 kilometers from the southern tip of India and was one of the hardest hit areas of the bloody decades long civil war. As a matter of fact, the very train I was sitting on had barely been open a year after being shut down for over 20 years, effectively cutting off the north from the rest of the country.
It was the most meaningful and rewarding work I’ve ever done.
Bold statement for a man well into his thirties? Perhaps. But I’ll start from the beginning. I received an email from a friend that simply said “What are you doing the first two weeks of February.” Mind you, this was closing in on the last week of January. 48 hours later, a round trip ticket to Colombo, Sri Lanka in my name arrived in my email box.
