Field Day

We are staying at a hotel that wants to be a motel, or a hotel without a shell. And in true S. Asian, style, the construction on upper floors does not get in the way of being fully operational. Which explains the ban-saws at 6:45am. My room is supposedly one of the best, and I guess I just lucked out, because it is opposite the restaurant, the service desk and a sitting area where the staff seems to take its rambunctious breaks late at night. But I don’t mean to complain, just to be descriptive. It’s the best hotel in town, the foyer is rather luxurious, there should be wireless but seems to be on sporatically, and it has good A/C, but only cold water.

Our first full day in Ampara, saw us traveling out to the field to visit a village to pilot a training for farmers to use a record keeping tool. This form will help the staff collect data about how the program is or is not helping the farmers and will also help the farmers keep track of their expenditures to better assess their production needs. Our van got lost trying to find the meeting, and after a hour or two of traversing one-lane dirt roads between rice fields, the staff opted to call together a bunch of other beneficiaries. So with a late start, and a training that took an hour longer than planned, we missed lunch. And just when I thought I was going to become one with my plastic chair, one of the trainees jumped up and started handing out the king coconuts that they had earlier cut down from a larger palm tree nearby and had hacked off the tops with a rustic machete. Oh, that coconut water hit the spot. Then they cleaved it in half and scraped out the meat for us. This kept us going until we could finally get back to town for some snacks.

It was a beautiful day out in the village. A storm was thundering off in the distance and a cool breeze made me feel (albeit without the hunger factor) like I should be sitting on a colonial patio whiling away the day. Instead I tried to stay engaged while farmers calculated how much it costs them to produce a harvest, and since many are illiterate, several of the young women in the community were helping the older men fill out their forms. Once done, away they went, newly acquired pencils, pens, knowledge, and absconded calculator tucked in pockets, on foot and on old bicycles, absorbed back into the nooks and crannies of the community from where they emerged. We got back in our good ship MC – flag to boot – and headed back down the bumpy roads to Ampara, to the internet, a/c, and noisy hotel rooms.