Morgalogue

Trip two was a ride with the village boys up to one of our micro-hydro sites in the rain forest, high in tea country. My colleague Dasanayke and our driver Premasiri only speak a few words of English between them, which is about the current extent of my Sinhalese, so departing at 4.30am, chat was a bit thin on the ground. By 9am we’d reached the foothill town of Ratnapura, which sounds like the recipe for the curry we ate for breakfast in a grotty wee café. Cleanliness here is a notch above India people tell me. But it’s not easy; in the heat and general grime, if you leave a crumb for more than a minute it becomes an ant-hill. Their solution is to wrap your grubby plate in cling-film and eat off that. 

There is a meeting of representatives of from every micro-hydro village in the region scheduled for 10am in a conference room above a noisy bus-station. We meet the round little chairman and then, after a cryptic exchange, my colleagues rush off to a meeting in the next town and I’m left there. All will apparently be explained later by someone who is an English teacher. I sit on the panel with the chairman feeling like a twat while men and women arrive, fill in forms and sit blinking at me. Ceiling fans whirr. Finally, in a blur of activity, the fabled English teacher (and president of the federation) arrives and the meeting begins. He apparently knows all about me and immediately sets about introducing me as some kind of illustrious political envoy, pausing to ask me my name and where I come from. I pick out “Mohan” and “Holland” in the resulting translation. It’s a mistake he keeps making, so to this day there are people in Sri Lanka, impressed by Holland’s wealth of experience in hydro-electric power generation.

He’s an energetic, good natured guy with a fantastic Richard Prior moustache. He seems to do a good job of inspiring the villagers, some of whom will have set off, on-foot, at 2am (on their day off) to come here and report faulty wiring, low efficiency of turbines or rotting telegraph poles on behalf of their remote little community. If you’re wondering what the hell I’m on about – Micro-hydro schemes are, as the name suggests, mini hydro-electric power plants that are built by villages (with the assistance of NGO’s like ours) who have no access to grid supply. They are constructed, owned, run and maintained by the villagers, though for the resolution of bigger problems the federation provides support.

By way of concluding the meeting I am goaded into making a speech. I feel like Prince Charles, unscripted. Generic, empty waffle flows. At first, the dramatic, arms-in-the-air response makes me think I’ve pulled a Prince Philip and insulted my hosts. But no, they desperately want to know when I’m coming to see their villages and what I’d like for lunch.

Meeting over, I speed off with Wijitha (the President) and our new driver, the boy-racer Susantha, an ex-soldier and once presidential chauffeur. He’s tall and Egyptian-looking with a moustache, gold chain and a flat-top. People have sensible, old hair in this country. I find it strange to see a group of young guys with wartime, Formby-esque side-partings. Some people are pulling crazy 80’s looks, like the flat-top, maybe the odd Bollywood pin-up, wet-look but by and large the gentleman’s barber reigns supreme. I myself am sporting the sort of short back and sides I haven’t had since I first sat on the barbers’ high-chair. I might ask for a spike next time.

Anyway … for the next 8 hours we hurtle along a battered little ribbon of tarmac as it winds it’s way up one mountain and down the next. It’s kind of a tamed wilderness. In the distance, prehistoric-looking rock faces jut out of the jungle, dripping with foliage, pterodactyls circling in my imagination, but as we move through the valleys there’s an endless procession of life – kids playing in rivers, people walking down the road, people staring into space, dogs, cows, roadside shack-shops, houses. The reason is tea. In this area it’s too mountainous for big plantations but every house has tamed a little pocket of jungle and planted neat little contours of the radiant bush next to tiled steps of rice paddy. I love the intricate, geometric patterns they make. Only as darkness falls are there intervals of more than half a kilometre between settlements. Here the road turns to from tarmac to dirt and then to mud as a storm passes over. The national grid finally stops following us (after 8 hours !) and we pass bungalows lit with the amber glow of kerosene lamps. We have to get out and move a fallen tree blocking the road, thankfully just a small one, and I discover leeches for the first time – nasty little things. Our mini-van now seems ridiculously out of place, picking its way through rocks and ditches that would buck a mule but Susantha shows his off-road calibre and we eventually emerge, into a pool of hydro-electrically generated light, at ‘The Village at the End of the Road’.

It’s a short walk through the rice paddy to our host, the postman and village hydro secretary, and his lovely house. I take in the sounds of the rainforest for the first time and everywhere around me, fire-flies flicker in and out of the trees creating a feeling of night-life in the jungle. It’s so weird to go inside and find a clean, well-lit, modern house complete with blaring TV. This self-powered, electrified plateau feels like a mysterious neverland after the road we’ve just travelled. We shower and the guys get into their lounging sarongs. Only me, the Postman and the President drink, so we must disappear off into the bedroom to have a pre-dinner Arrak (coconut whisky – a bit like Morgan’s rum). It’s funny to see the man of the house hiding in his kids’ bedroom having a drink. The usual boys humour easily gets round the language barrier. The Arrak probably helped a bit too.

After dinner I head off to bed and leave them to plan tomorrows meeting with the community. I drift off to sleep with the sound of a trillion crickets filling my ears and a smile on my face. It’s for these rare and special nights that I go travelling. To put your head down on a strange bed, under a foreign sky and become conscious of how perfectly tiny you are and how vast the world is. I’ll try to stay awake to savour the moment and marvel at my luck but on an adventure, the gap between reality and dreaming is so small, I’m off before I realise it. I sleep as if aboard a ship or a train travelling through the night. I’m a passenger of the world as it rotates around the sun and when I wake, I’ll discover it all over again.

We’re up at 7am completely refreshed. I normally get no bloody sleep in this country with the heat and the mosquitoes but I notice that someone has taken one of the two pillows I’d been hogging and I didn’t even stir. For me that’s an achievement. Curry for breakfast – what a surprise. It’s last nights, warmed up to tepid. It’s my main criticism of this country. The curries are nice enough but the variety sucks. It’s the same stuff wherever you go, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I ask someone about the tepid-ness issue later and they condescend to me “you have food that needs to be hot, it’s not so here” – I’m thinking, bollocks. You can eat any food cold, it just tastes shit.

They tuck-in happily to exactly the same meal all over again. We have it for lunch too, by which time I can take it no longer. The rice has been re-heated for god knows how many days and it starts making me gag. I shuffle some food about and then pat my stomach approvingly. It doesn’t work, they heap on more …

We head off in ‘official shirts and chinos’ garb to go and visit a brick-making business making use of the hydro electricity. It takes an hour to walk there along a road cut out of the rich, red earth. I don’t know what sort of vehicle you’d need to drive it. On our left the rainforest towers high as 5 storey buildings, on our right the ground falls away to the valley floor, where one of Sri Lanka’s 5 roaring rivers begins its journey to the sea. At one point 3 serious looking guys hurry past us shouldering a bamboo trunk, with heavy load suspended and wrapped in sheets. Trailing behind are 3 women with parasols, shielding themselves from the harsh midday sun. One is holding a white bundle, presumably a baby. The heavy load is the mother being carried to hospital – 5 miles away ! 

Our business concludes with the much anticipated meeting of the village ‘Electricity Consumers Society’. We head down to the schoolhouse where the 40 or so villagers have gathered and take our places in a line in front of the blackboard. We get the grown-up chairs, they get the kids seats. Once again I’m introduced as the crack-specialist, flown in directly from Holland by helicopter to asses the situation. I give a better speech this time with a beginning, middle and end. Actually, I’m having an out-of-body déjà vu. It’s got to be the single most clichéd image of a development worker – white guy, linen trousers, shirt sleeves rolled-up making a speech in a school, to a poor village community. So that’s what it feels like, not at all as cringey as I expected.

I’m really inspired by the village. It took them a year of working weekends and holidays to build the plant and set up the grid. Turbines were lugged up hills, rivers dammed, headrace channels dug, jungle hacked through, hundreds of poles erected, planning meetings held, contracts signed and loans taken out. And we just flick a switch. I get the feeling they are a stronger community as a result. It was only possible if they all signed up and pitched in and for the last 10 years they’ve reaped the benefits. The resultant societal structure is now being used as a basis for other community works and enterprises. You can’t help but feel these people are self-sufficient to a greater degree than anyone in the West. They own their own power supply, they grow their own food are self governing and yet are connected to one of the biggest and most established global markets – tea. They might not be rich but they’re far from poor. Like everyone though, they want a better life for their kids – education, internet, opportunities. I guess the test is whether the kids disappear off to Colombo - and come back.