HAPPY BANANA
I am sitting in the Happy Banana restaurant where our groups often ate in our 10 trips to Sri Lanka during our days of relaxation at Una Watuna. It is now a greatly expanded Happy Banana with a huge dining area under a roof and tables stretching far down the beach. It also has a hotel attached and is the Happy Banana Beach Resort. During the tsunami in 2004 the wall of water rose up to the roof and one of the workers here died. 3000 people died in Una Watuna.
So everything has changed and when I come back for a nostalgic meal only the name remains. The nearby Una Watuna Beach Resort where we first stay in 1986 for $4 a double are now $100 a night and the name has changed to the Kalania.
But one of the biggest changes that is slowly dawning on me is that the people who are sitting at the tables here and who are strolling through the streets are not Germans or Italians or Scandinavians, they are mostly Russian I was aware that I couldn’t identify the language that people sitting in restaurants near me were speaking. They weren’t speaking German, Spanish or French, they were speaking Russian. English is a basic Sri Lankan language since the British days and many Sri Lankans speak English and the store and restaurant signs are in English and Sinhala. But a great number of the signs now along the street in Una Watuna are also in Russian.
As usual I have been clueless. When I saw signs in Russian I wondered how Russians could even be coming here. I had somehow assumed that Putin had Russians cooped up in Russia and wouldn’t let them leave because they would flee Russia and never come back, particularly if they had skills that could get them jobs abroad. But that was apparently simply an American chauvinist projection. When I look at these people lounging on lounge chairs in the sun I’m guessing that they are here for the same reason other northern Europeans are, to escape the dark cold days of Russian winter to a place that is warm and the sun is always shining. I’m guessing that they come for a week or two on inexpensive air tickets, have little interest in Sri Lankan culture, and then fly home refreshed. The economy must be good enough in Russia, despite what I we in the US are told, for them to be able to afford the trip. And not only that, but I’m guessing that they are mostly true Russian patriots who have no desire to leave their homes and language and way of life. I am guessing that they are good Russian church going people who are as patriotic as good American church going MAGA people are in the United States. They probably don’t pay much attention to the war in Ukraine and if questioned would probably say that as far as they can tell it is the right thing for Russia to be doing. Patriots, my country right or wrong, seem to be the same world wide.
The Russian dissidents and anti war people I’ve read about are are probably a very small minority. They are probably the westernized educated minority that can’t bear the crackdown on freedom in Russia.
In my family we wonder what we would do if Trump wins the election and becomes a full fledged dictator. We talk of going to live somewhere else.
But would we? Jews fled Hitler’s Germany, when they could, rather than be actively persecuted or murdered. And a small number of German writers and intellectuals and political activists also left Germany. But my wife Kathe’s family didn’t. They couldn’t have imagined leaving their home and family and work. No one wants to leave home and family unless they are threatened or hungry or suffering in some way. That is true of ordinary people everywhere and certainly true for ordinary Americans.
But this must be true of immigrants on our southern border who are willing to spend all the money they have, and to risk death on the way, in order to escape death or illness or hunger or persecution. It is only the determined few who will make the journey, those who are desperate and willing to leave home and family and risk everything in order to escape. And yet, in a country in which we are almost all descendants of immigrants, many of us vilify the few, the brave, the desperate from other countries, illegal immigrants, as somehow being immoral and a threat that should be repulsed.
So, anyway, that is what so many Russians enjoying their time in the sun have made me think about.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 