SRI LANKA CALLING
Yesterday Winsor Kanakaratne phoned me from Sri Lanka. I had tried emailing him over a month ago and the message didn’t go through. But several days ago I found him through the Sarvodaya district office in Moratuwa.
We have been friends since 1984 and he was the person who guided seven or so Warren Wilson College groups through Sarvodaya village development projects in Sri Lanka. As I have been wandering this year the yearning to visit Sri Lanka has grown stronger and stronger. You can tell why by looking at the photographs of a Warren Wilson Presbyterian church group I led to Sri Lanka and India in 2006. The photos are from a book of that trip available on Blurb.com.
These trips, which my daughter Susie also helped lead, were strenuous. My yearning at 85 is to see old places and old friends but also to sit quietly at the beach front vacation town of Una Watuna and to look out at the sea and walk on the beach. The tsunami of 2004 swept through Una Watuna a month after we were there with the final student group. I have one photograph of a train where 1270 people were drowned. But by 2006 when our church group brought money we had raised the beachfront had been rebuilt, partly with AMerican funds through a Clinton/Bush fundraising effort, and was bustling. That is where I want to sit quietly for a month and type and smile.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 