A story of a boy from Ampara a reflection of the state of our ‘Rural Youth’ Part 3

Continued from the previous blog entry

Then it was the case of how much liquid cleaner one could mix to mop the floor; it was hard enough to explain why a capful was needed and not any more. Once this had prematurely run out due to overuse, I said use a dab of Dettol and lo and behold I found the whole bottle used in one bucket! I had the bottle for years unused till that moment! Then there was an unopened bottle of Listerine mouthwash in the bathroom cabinet. I think the curiosity must have got the better of him, and he had opened it and swigged most of the bottle. When I came home and asked him there was only an embarrassed grin, and no attempt at explaining what had happened. I was so curious to know if he had drunk it and said it was fine, and I just wanted to know what actually happened to it, still no owning up that he even knew what I was talking about!!

One day he complained about a headache and I gave him two Panadols and said that should clear the headache. When I came back from work he had taken 2 every hour saying it was continuing and he thought that the more he took the better he would get. I was about to take him immediately to emergency to have his stomach pumped out as he could have died with the overdose. Mercifully he survived!

I took pains to teach him how my clothes should be washed. He had never washed clothes as his mother had done all that. So that was quite a learning experience for him. There again he had mixed a new trouser he had bought with an expensive sarong I had recently bought to wear to work as my stomach cut as a result of the bone graft did not permit me to wear trousers. Surprise surprise the color ran and the sarong was ruined. His trousers were black so that was fine.

I got him a new phone, something I had promised as I also needed to be in contact to give instructions and check his whereabouts, as I told him I had given his parents my word that I would take care of him. He wanted to listen to music all day when he worked so a chip was bought music, hundreds of songs were loaded. Then one day he came with another phone, he had been played out as it was exchanged for another phone that looked good but was an Alcatel which in his neck of the woods is a big name, but this was past the use by date as the battery was malfunctioning and new ones were not available for that type of phone. Imagine my fury at the stupid exchange!

My mistake was in giving him a post paid SIM with strict instructions that he could speak to his parents for 5 minutes each evening. Lo and behold he ran up a bill in two weeks that was double my monthly phone bill, by chatting with his friends all over the Western Province, working all over, security guards, working as farm laborers and construction site workers. The flip side was that once his exchanged phone stopped working, I could take my SIM back as he had no use for it. So I got out that problem with little grief.

To be continued in the next blog entry

A story of a boy from Ampara a reflection of the state of our ‘Rural Youth’ Part 2

Continuation from the previous blog entry which was Part 1

I later found out that he was addicted to smoking; that is, cigarettes if he could afford it but also “suruttu”, a thicker form of “beedi” or rolled up tobacco leaves, which he brought from Ampara. I understand that hours in the fields taking care of his cattle with a friend for company, makes smoking any sort of tobacco they can lay their hands on and weed or ganja is also part of the common relaxation!

I forbad him from smoking, but he was not about to listen sneaking in one here and there. I later realized he was also partial to alcohol and he has swigged a balance of red wine I had in the fridge and actually kasippu and arakku are his standard. He referred to the alcohol I had as arakku! And that it was not at all strong!

To cap the whole line of reasoning, when he saw the stack of DVD’s in a drawer, he automatically assumed they were all pornographic, and none of them are and I could not prove otherwise without a DVD player, and was reluctant to show them on my laptop for fear of him using it to watch the movies. I had not realized the extent of Hard Core Porn in far of Ampara! Watching under solar power outlets.

Moreover, I was offered any type of “thada mas” and he could bring it in the bus from Ampara, cooked of course. They being chena cultivators, often come across game when they go out to protect their chena for months on end and therefore the meats they eat there are those that they kill while out in the forests protecting their crops. The cattle they rear are sold for cash, none are milked, by the way.

It transpired that these nomadic kids have a lot of freedom in their turf, with no grown-ups to instill discipline. I had hoped his short stint in the Army, where discipline is the first thing they teach before the use firearms would have allowed me to train him in any fashion I wished, but was sadly mistaken.

Once I had bought a whole load of stuff from Food City and specifically told him not to take anything from the bags, which he took to mean that he could take whatever goodies he wanted from there. No one had impressed on him that raiding the employer’s fridge was a no no! A case of a jungle boy in town! Of course lessons were needed in everything. I told him that it was quite OK if he knew nothing, and that I would show him how everything was done, but he knew better!

What beat the cake was the day my sister gave me some yummy chocolates from overseas. I ate two and left the rest of the pack in the fridge and upon returning from work discovered the balance about 50 eaten. That put paid to the level of insubordination. But there is more, which I will leave to the next installment hopefully tomorrow.

A story of a boy from Ampara a reflection of the state of our ‘Rural Youth’

He did not have an ID card, a staple for survival in SL. He is very dark and in the salubrious roads of Colombo 7 could be mistaken for Tamil. His accent of speaking Sinhala is a little difficult for us to understand and some of the expressions they use are also unfathomable and require explanation. He spoke about faking his age, for Rs100 for a letter from the Grama Niladari in his home village of Laatugala, in Uhana, Ampara and joining the Army at 15 in a barracks near Kurunegala, towards the end of the hostilities, which he was yanked out of by his parents after 6months before he was fully commissioned once they knew of his whereabouts.

He dropped out of school a grade before his O levels and can barely read or write Sinhala, and apart from his absences has been taking care of his large herd of cattle, that go out on their own to forage, stopping by in a water hole on the way out and back in the evening, when they return to their pen on their own right on schedule at 5pm. (I wish I can train my cows to do that! More to the point he does nothing with the cow dung in the pen except shovel it out!)

He had worked for bouts in Colombo, on building sites and none of his stints lasted more than 60 days and now I know why. The Sunday evening buses from Ampara apparently is the one with all the Colombo bound workers, masons and bricklayers and other laborers, which gets in to Pettah between 3am and 5am.

He is the youngest of 18 offspring in the family of mainly females, and it was his elder sister’s son who was older than him who accompanied him. All survive except his brother an Army sergeant who died from severe injuries in battle in January of 2009 and whose Rs35,000 a month pension his parents are grateful for.

His one aim is to do what is necessary to marry in two years, so as the youngest his wife can take care of his parents, the father in his early 70s and mother in her 60’s. That really floored me when parents whose surviving 17 children cannot take care of them in rural Sri Lanka, as many of his sisters are married living out of the area.

He has already been locked up when under 18 due to assaulting another boy who had stolen a cow, and had a case pending which is pending arbitration to pay the thief for the costs of his recovery in hospital. He and his nephew were in an Ampara jail until the patient recovered and released from hospital.

(to be continued hopefully tomorrow)

The long break from blogging had its reasons which are hard to explain

I have spent the past few months in contemplation in realigning my life to take account of the new circumstances, and did not wish to use the blogosphere to air my thought processes but rather in reflective evaluation of the options available to me, to make the appropriate choice of work.

After my second more painful operation of taking pieces of bone from my hip and implanting them in my leg as it had not healed after the first operation, the setback affected me a lot, as I was without the help I was used to, and had a long period of recuperation as somehow the pain seemed that much greater and my indisposition that much harder to come to terms with.

It has now been almost 3months since the operation, and I am now walking with crutches and getting about from place to place, so am feeling far more at ease and despite a part of the leg still remaining numb, I am able to get about with ease and with rare bouts of mild discomfort from time to time. I still have no transport, my vehicle being written off due to the accident and the insurance payout not sufficient even to replace half a vehicle, I have had to consider other alternatives.

I attended the Dudley Senanayake commemoration lecture last Friday and the Bandaranayake Center for International Studies at the BMICH complex and was seated at the front row only two positions away from the Minister of Justice, whose security vehicle it was that put me in this state. It was ironic that the Minister himself admitted his culpability to other distinguished guests, when we were engaged in idle chit chat, and spoke to me asking me if I had resumed my farming activity. I just asked him to look at my state to ascertain if could as I was the driver and was in no position to find alternative person for that post, that is if I had a vehicle in which to do so.

Ironically it was a very comprehensive lecture by an eminent lawyer from Malaysia, Pram Coomaraswamy on the “independence of the judiciary.” The lecture could have been directed at the Minister as it was partly on how to choose judges for their independence and impartiality, something which is lacking and was the reason behind my not suing the President or the Minister for damages, as the Judges being paid by the Ministry of Justice, would hardly likely hear a case against their paymaster, opting instead to delay or postpone hearings, meant to wear down the litigant until he walks away empty handed.

I was not in a position out of respect for my hosts to put the minister on the spot as he too was a director of the Dudley Senanayake Foundation, which held this event, and remind him that he had promised some form of redress, but it was clear to him that I was not all hunky dory and the time that has elapsed since the accident, namely January 30^th 2011 was indeed extremely difficult and life changing, not to say hugely financially debilitating, if I could not resume my farming activity.

I believe that I should be out of the requirement for a walking aid by years end, and to that extent will hopefully resume my agricultural activity in a limited way, and will not be able to do the extremely tiring schedule that I had got accustomed to.

I would therefore need some other form of remunerative employment, and was fortunate to have been offered a post in assisting an opposition MP in the Sri Lanka Parliament with his various official and private matters. I am therefore working with him in organizing a very comprehensive project to regain a political following as an alternative to the present regime, completely contrasting ourselves from the current untenable system of Government that these days seems to be a nation floundering in a web of underworld gangsters whose Godfathers are either members of the Government or the ruling family.

This challenge is immeasurable and the goals extremely worthy to empower the youth with a different set of values and morals to move forward in the future. The initial surveys show the lack of discipline and commitment amongst youth to attain the goals they have set themselves, and this will have to change if the country is to move forward from an easy come easy go laissez fair attitude.

I live in an apartment on Gregory’s Rd and my office is just up the road. Due to my inability to walk to work, a vehicle is sent for me and I accompany the MP on most of his out of town engagements and meetings in the district and electorate, along with many an interesting rally during the recently concluded Minicipality elections islandwide, where he was called upon to speak on behalf of many of the young candidates who are expected to develop into a new breed of civic and socially minded leaders, a huge contrast to the current state of play!

My impressions of one aspect of an MP’s duties, namely of attending numerous funeral houses, was one of horror at the realization that more than half are those where the dead are younger than me. Many are for young boys being killed while riding their motorcycles. Just last week it was a boy of 19 and a neighbor of 16 dying in one accident, with the former having forced his father to buy him a Motorbike on his return from overseas, and losing his life within a month of that.

The Surgical Team and the Operation

My operation was done under a spinal anesthetic, so that I was completely conscious during the whole procedure. They inject a numbing injection to the spine first and then inject the anesthetic into a three places in the spine with a long needle. I was not too crazy about that! I had gone through a similar operation before so it was not a surprise.

During the course of the operation, there was a technician who was giving a running commentary top the surgeons about the positioning of the various procedures. He was using x-ray technology to guide them in their work and was an integral part of the team.

The automatic blood pressure monitoring system in that operating theater failed during my operation, so the doctors had to use the old fashioned manual ones, until another automatic one was brought from an adjoining operating theater and settled that problem. It was a little panic stations at first, as it is not easy to check the blood pressure every few minutes manually while under surgery.

The two main surgeons who performed the surgery, Dr Pubudu and Dr Dhammika were the ones who had performed the surgery last time on me. It was interesting that one of them suddenly came up with questions about my life, that he knew and said he had been reading my blogs!! Dr Banagala, was the overall consulting Orthopedic Surgeon, who was handling the case and was reviewing the work done by his HOs or House Officers.

The surgery took a while due to some adjustments that has to be made to the original plate implants as some nuts had to be removed and tightened etc. and then the tissue in the area of the joint had to be removed for the bone graft to be inserted. So it was not easy to reach all the areas to remove the tissue that had formed in the past six months instead of the bone tissue which would have formed if it fused. The cut nearer my waist to take bone near the hip for the graft had to be stitched up soon after the bone fragments were removed, as otherwise the anesthetic would have worn off. as it starts wearing off from the waist down.

A cousin who is an Anesthesiologist was also in the operating theater, and she knew the consultant anesthetist at the operation. I was not taken into the operating theater immediately so I was waiting for another surgery to finish. When mine started late, and went on for a long time, the number of staff in the theater also seemed to diminish, much like them going to lunch while the operation was going on, like hang on I am still cut up, where are you guys off to? Anyway I guess the surgeons were so confident of their tasks, even the consultant sneaked off giving final instructions on exactly what procedures to do, knowing he could rely on his team!

After the operation, I was waiting a while to be taken back to the room, and then the next team for the afternoon surgeries were getting ready with their roster. It is amazing how busy these operating theaters must be in the National Hospital. Once I got to the room, there was no one to greet me and as I did not have my mobile phone was unable to tell my family that I was OK and back in the room, in case they were wondering why it took so long.

Later another member of the surgical team dropped into meet me and have a chat about Polonnaruwa, which he may have heard from the other doctors. He said he single-handedly got funds for a rural hospital in Pulasthigama and had it all done up during the time he was in charge including the land around with fruit crops. He had been in Polonnaruwa for about 8 years, and is now specializing in Orthopedics and not had time to go back to see how things are at the hospital.

It would be nice to go with him one day soon to see his handiwork which he is very proud of. I asked his name at the time and now completely forgotten!! Another doc in the team, Dr Duminda came to have a chat about his interest in the outdoors as he has a place near Sinharaja and would like to have more time to go birdwatching. He likes the colorful ones there, and I told him I see more of the raptors in my area, the big Owls, Hawks and Eagles. He must also have gotten word about my background and wanted to share some of his experiences. It is so nice to find some common ground with people who lead such different lives.

I am due to be released in a few minutes, when one of the surgical team came earlier, we chatted about the fact that some of the instrumentation is overused and needs replacement. Apparently some are used 5 times as much as the recommended usage, due to the shortage of the stuff, presumably due to the costs for the health service. I can imagine that some of these tools of the surgeons cost over Rs1m each. So I asked the doc to give me the full details when I come to the clinic in two weeks so I can ask my contacts if they could help out with funding one that was used in my operation, which would have helped me if it had not been so worn out!

Thanks guys for all the effort and assistance in my case, and would love one day to host you all in my little forest hideout in Ratmale, when I finally am able to finish it and spend some quality time there. So please contact me. (www.ratmale.blogspot.com)

My experience at the National Hospital

At the time of my accident I was in an ordinary ward starting with the overcrowded, accident wards, however this time round as I could chose the date I was admitted the Doctor gave a note for me to be admitted to a Class I paying ward.

Once the admission formalities were completed on Monday, July 25th I was admitted after 1pm, and was told due to the preparation times etc, that I would not get any food till after 1pm the next day. It is part of the bureaucracy on their part!

The room in on the 5th floor of the Bandaranayake building, and overlooks the new Central Hospital and various Colombo landmarks. There is a very wide balcony, the widest I have seen anywhere in Sri Lanka, wide enough to put a bed lengthwise. The attached bathroom is also very big, clean and basic, but fully tiled.

The room has the high hospital bed with two pillows, but the head or foot cannot be independently raised as some of the beds of the regular wards are. A desk and chair, and two more chairs along with a clothes cupboard, a dressing table,a bed side table and a clothes horse. There is plenty of fluorescent lighting and the two plug points hold square plugs. There is a speed controlled fan that gives enough power. Due to the elevation, there are no mosquitoes, and it is very breezy as the sea breeze comes all the way here, and I sleep with all the windows and doors open.

The regular service schedule is as follows. A nurse usually comes at 4.30 am to check the temperature. They are just impeccably turned out in their kits, with not a hair out of place throughout their shift. The morning coffee is brought at 5 am and at 6 am morning breakfast is served along with tea, in a large tray, (wooden) and a plastic cover to prevent flies. This morning there was green gram for breakfast.

At 7 am someone comes offering hot water either for the flask or for washing one's face, then at 8 a person comes to sweep the room and on alternate days to also mop the room. The bath room is cleaned daily by another person at around 9am. The nurses come around 8 about 5 of them to discuss each patient's particular treatment and drug schedules. The doctors assigned to the patients come later with a nurse who takes down any instructions. Then the instructions like cleaning my wound is done very professionally by two nurses with disposable face masks and gloves just for that activity.

Another team of two come every other day to change all the sheets and pillow cases! even I do not change them this frequently. There are male hospital orderlies whose task is to take patients to x ray surgery or similar function, clean them up if necessary and prepare them for surgery, like in my case the whole area where the operation was performed had to be shaved and cleaned with antiseptics.

At around 10, coffee is served and then a tray of lunch is at noon. We have already had a few days of yellow rice, and fish or chicken curry along with other vegetables, and dessert is either a yoghurt, or fruit salad or a slice of papaya. Then afternoon tea is served around 3pm, with either biscuits, or a cheese and crackers and today it was a savory sandwich.

Dinner is served around 6pm, and it was a soup, followed by boiled vegetables of cabbage, beans, carrots and potato with a piece of chicken in a gravy, along with two thick slices of white bread. the cold jelly comes about an hour later so one can eat it as is then!

The nurses come during the day with the various medicines relevant to each patient, and after dinner a final review of last medicines to sleep and after meals, and in my case the antibiotics, and pain killers to take before bed time. There is no TV and I go to sleep around 8.30pm.

The general visiting hours are 6am to 7, noon to 1pm and 5 to 6. Surprise surprise I have no visitors during visiting hours and they all seem to come at the other times!!

I have a 24 hour attendant who is a retired hospital employee who is in the room all the time except when he goes to get his food, and I have the luxury of sending him at 6 am to get me all the newspapers to read for the day! If one does not have a family member with the patient, then one is recommended.

The attendant is paid Rs1,200 for the day and room charges including food is Rs1,750. The strong Augmentin 1.2m injections at operation and thereafter we have to buy, and the follow up Augmentin 625g antibiotic course is also bought by us, but all other medications including the Walteren for the swelling and pain is supplied.

The surgery and related doctors' visits and x rays as well as the daily physiotherapy is NO CHARGE

When a visitor told me about appalling service at a 5 star hotel, where the servers were quite clueless in how to serve, I told them, that in comparison, I received 7 star service in the largest State Hospital complex in the world!

Please note that the non paying wards usually offer three rice and curry meals a day with red rice, whilst we are offered one white rice lunch as well as the less healthy white bread in the morning and evenings.

I read somewhere that the Colombo Hospitals are overstaffed, and the rural ones are understaffed with doctors as well as all the ancillary workers. Surprise surprise!

I am about to leave the National Hospital

It is Wednesday the 3rd of August, and it was last Wednesday that I had my rather complicated 'bone graft operation". This operation took about 4 hours and was longer and more painful than the one fixing my leg with with pins in February as reported earlier. I will not go into the details as I don't know much, but they took the graft bone fragments from my right hip area, and implanted them in the area of the joint that had hitherto not fused, a "non union" situation.

I found out that in about 10% of cases like mine the bones don't fuse, necessitating this second operation. I am told it went as well as it could and that it should work out, though the time frame is a little vague owing to my personal circumstances, age and ability to absorb and fuse. Until the bones fuse I will not be permitted to put any weight on my right leg, and so I am in for a long period of physiotherapy and rehabilitation.

I am still in a little pain, reduced by pain killers, but my leg is extremely stiff and painful to move, but move I must to get as much movement as possible with the help of the physio, to speed up the recovery.

I was told I will be discharged tomorrow. Where to may I ask?