Kiri Kella

They've been calling me kiri kella (milk girl), but now I'm a little more rosa (pink) from the ride this afternoon.

Khalu katta! he said to me.

searching my brain for sinhala words I knew khalu was black, but what is katta. he points to his mouth. aha... but why? we had just finished eating and i had washed my hands and mouth... oh, and then i dried my face and hands with the newspaper they'd given me. ink, khalu ink all over my face. what a mess. koheda mage oluwa?! (where's my mind?!)

learning some sinhala is really paying off. i made friends with the woman, sawandi, who owns the rice and curry shop. she speaks a little english so we roughly exchanged stories over a walk to the temple and down to the beach with her 5 year old daughter. she is 28 and she has two daughters, one is 11 the other is 5. she left her husband because of too much arrak. i can see that this is a big problem here. i've run into a few crazy arrak drinkers already. i wouldn't want my partner to be slugging the stuff.

they stood on the beach and watched as i took a swim. they can't swim, but there is a huge push from the government, ever since the tsunami in 2004, to get everyone to learn. or so i've heard. still, they didn't join me in the water.

kiri kella in the water. dumburu kello (brown girls) on the beach.

i went on a safari yesterday in the yala national park. it was exceptionally expensive for what it was, which was really just some crazy driving while you sit in the back of a pick up looking for animals. it's incredible we saw anything at all with all the noise we made. we saw some elephants, wild boars, deer, birds, crocodiles, but nothing i hadn't already seen just from being in a car or on a scooter riding around this country. seems to me you don't need to be on a safari to see these animals here. it was fun anyway, but i wouldn't do it again. the driver of our jeep drove like an absolute maniac. when we stopped i told him "oyata pissude" (you're crazy). he laughed loudly, more from surprise at my sinhala than anything else; i'm sure he's been called crazy many times. he taught me the sinhalese words for the animals. i've forgotten most of them, but i think a peacock is monera, a squirrel is lena and an elephant is aliya. if i remember correctly, that is.

everyone loves to be my teacher. mama kamathi iganne ganne sinhala. i like to learn sinhala.

this morning i was having breakfast with sawandi and indi (my guide who i've hired for super cheap. super cheap because he likes me, sometimes too much). they were speaking in sinhala, and i actually picked up some words here and there. it was exciting, but i also felt bad. i understood when sawandi told indi that she's afraid (mata bayay) and i knew she was trying to assess her situation. sri lanka is not a good place to be a single mother, mind you, i reckon it's a better place to be than some (like egypt or even india would be worse).

so this is less of a recount of what i've been up to and more of a sinhala lesson. i can't be bothered to go into what's gone on the last couple of days... i want to write about the family trip i took with upul, but i'm too lazy.

one more story. yesterday i wanted to be alone so i took a walk along the beach. i really wanted to swim, but when i got to a place where it was safe to enter there was a guy masturbating, a little set back from the water, but i didn't think stopping would be a good idea. he called out to me, but i pretended not to see him and moved on. then as i was heading back to my guest house i was harassed by a group of drunk men. "koheda anne?" (where are you going?)

i don't know how to say home in sinhala, so i just smiled and pointed vaguely "over there."

one tried to touch my chest under some pretext of trying to teach me the sinhala word for heart. "epaa" (don't)

i fled quickly in my flite flip flops waving at the drunk stumbling man "bye bye"

"karunaakara yanna" (please go).

the woman who runs the guesthouse saw me coming. saw me rushing so. i told her i'd met some naraka kollo (bad boys) on the beach.

tsk tsk kiri kella, you shouldn't walk alone on the beach, even in the day. all the boys go crazy for the sudu kella (white girl). parissamen. take care.