JANUARY 15, MONDAY

SARVODAYA

Tomorrow I leave for Sri Lanka. In the early 1980’s Chris Ahrens, an adjunct at Warren Wilson College told me about Sarvodaya, a Gandhian Buddhist village development program in Sri Lanka. Before this I had taken several groups of students to India where I grew up as a boy. But the Sarvodaya program in Sri Lanka sounded like a very good place to get an immersion in South Asian village life. So in 1984 I took a group of ten students for two months to learn about Sarvodaya and Sri Lankan village life.

It was founded by a chemistry teacher, Dr. Ariyaratne, in a private school in Colombo who arranged for his wealthy students to have a village experience. This was transformative both for him and for his students and for the villages they did work projects in. What he learned was that outsiders could have an impact on entrenched village hierarchy and be a catalyst in villagers working better together and engaging in development projects within the village. “We build a road and the road builds us.”

So our students joined villagers in work days, shramadanas, and it wasn’t the work that we did that mattered so much as that the work experience challenged all of our American ideas about how to live well as well as providing a catalyst that brought villagers together in cooperative projects. Dr. Ariyaratne is a devout Buddhist, the major religion of Sri Lanka. Buddha, like Gandhi, preached and lived the simple life. The goal of Sarvodaya is not to integrate with the modern government economic transformations sweeping the world, clothing factories for GAP and other Western retailers, but to have a enlivening but simple village life in which decent housing, basic education, and a celebration of communal life was most important. Sarvodaya got some Western funding but was mostly a volunteer organization which spread to villages all over Sri Lanka. It was also a peacekeeping organization using Gandhian methods to intense polarization of a Sri Lankan civil war between Tamil Hindus and Sinhala speaking Buddhists.

The person who organized our program each of the ten times we visited Sarvodaya was Winsor Kanakaratne, with whom I am going to stay for the next two weeks.