December 30, 2004
Guest Viewpoint: Of all places, Sri Lanka doesn't deserve this fate
By Tony Waters
"The island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) is a small universe; it contains as many variations of culture, scenery and climate as some countries a dozen times its size... . If you are interested in people, history, nature and art - the things that really matter - you may find, as I have, that a lifetime is not enough." - Arthur C. Clarke.
Until 7 a.m. last Sunday, Mother Nature had been very generous to Sri Lanka.
The island itself is a thing of tear-shaped beauty, best seen in satellite photos to be found on the Web. It lies just off the southeast coast of India, of which, under British rule, it was a part. Before it was British, Ceylon (as it then was called) was Dutch, and before that it was Portuguese. So it was that what was once the Asian headquarters of the P&O Shipping Line, a riot of mahogany and ceiling fans, had, when I lived in Sri Lanka, become a hotel with a Dutch name run by a family named Perera. I doubt that it survived Sunday's tsunami.
For the British, to whom the island was ceded in 1796, Ceylon was not primarily a colony to be exploited for its natural resources, although valuable spices did grow there. It became instead a favored destination for the rest and relaxation of British civil servants and their families escaping their toil in India, Singapore, Burma and assorted other places where the sun never set.
The island is 270 miles long, and a mountain range rises in the central part of the south. The town of Newara Elya, perched at 6,200 feet, was a favorite of the British - which may be why, to this day, it provides the nation with excellent beer. Other hill towns dotted around the country's highest peak, Pidurutalagala (8,281 feet), were also favored, and there are some very British houses still up there to prove it.
Lower down, between 5,000 and 6,000 feet, the country is carpeted with the lush green of tea, growing happily in the temperate climes of the mountain slopes. Like the roads, the rails and the rule of law, the tea plantations are part of the British legacy. Until about 1870, Ceylon produced very high quality coffee but the British, being British, preferred very high quality tea. Which it is.
And then there are the beaches, and the world-famous scuba diving. It is the beaches, of course, and the simple communities that lived behind and along them, that were hardest hit this week.
Sri Lanka is a parliamentary democracy, and has been since independence. It is also a socialist country. That fact has resulted in excellent health care (I didn't need a single shot to travel there; I needed a fistful to go to India) and, according to the United Nations in 2003, a literacy rate of 92 percent, compared with 35 percent in Pakistan, about 50 percent in India and 97 percent in the U.S.
There is none of the obscene, grinding poverty one sees in India, cheek-by-jowl with great wealth. To be sure there is poverty, but with a population of 19 million (one 50th the size of India's), a mainly rural environment and a benign climate, the poor live simple, healthy lives. The World Health Organization reports that life expectancy in Sri Lanka in 2002 was 67.2 years for men, 74.3 for women (compared to 60 and 62 in India), and the country has the highest per capita income in South Asia.
The scale of the natural disaster that hit the island early on Sunday beggars belief. In more than a few other countries, looting and crimes of violence would soon follow (there was looting in the town of Galle, but only after hundreds of prisoners escaped from a nearby jail), but I was not surprised to hear survivors in Sri Lanka - tourists all - tell tale after tale of being fed, clothed and sheltered by local people who had lost almost everything they owned.
"Person after person," one tourist reported, "apologized to us, apologized that this had happened to us while we were guests in their country."
And in Colombo, the capital, ordinary people of modest means are lining up to donate blankets, clothing and food to those in the south and the east.
That sounds just like Sri Lanka to me, a precious place with very precious people.
They need our help, and I cannot think of a more worthy cause.
Tony Waters, a resident of Waldport, was visiting professor of law at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1986. He has also taught at Lewis & Clark and the University of Oregon law schools, among others.
