Tiny World Tuesday

The world isn't tiny. It's big. And full of people. Eight billion and counting! And they're everywhere!

We all (well, I) try to carve out my own space. We all have totally unique stories. No two people have been to all the same places and seen all the same things.

When I was a kid, we lived in Sri Lanka. For a while, I went to a school in neighboring India. It's an international school, so many people all over the world have attended there.

And last night, I met one of them!

I belong to a book club in town, and they choose award-winning books, or classic books that are infrequently read, books from lists of "must read" books. The last book was about the Sri Lankan civil war that was happening - or peaked, or started? - while I lived there. So I couldn't possibly skip out.

One member of our group is Indian. She doesn't live in town, so she's not at every meeting. During the course of discussing the book, my connection to Sri Lanka and southern India came out. After the meeting, as we were all leaving, she pulled me aside and asked, "That wasn't Kodaikanal, was it?"

Yes. The school I attended for a few years in the 1980s was Kodaikanal International School.

The school she attended for a few years in the mid 1990s was Kodaikanal International School. 

Somehow, we two former students of a K-12 school in southern India both happened to land up in central Vietnam 30-40 years later. In this big wide world full of people, what are the odds? And not just that we are both here, but that we both opted to join this particular book club!

K is for Kodaikanal

Kodaikanal, or “Kodai” (pronounced like “Cody”) was my school in India. My first boarding school. My first experience of India. (see post for I)

I have to say, all this reminiscing and trying to find the more interesting stories from my past travels has left me a bit drained. A bit homesick. Nostalgia is great in small doses, but geesh! Why did I pick this theme?

Today I’m going to share just a quick story, then share some pictures that aren’t connected to the story, but are connected to the place.

My first year at Kodai, the whole family made the trek: 4 hours down the mountain in Sri Lanka, an hour flight, then 4 more hours up the mountain to Kodai. The “whole family” includes my three older siblings who were also moving into the dorm, our parents, and my younger brother "Poseidon", who would return to Sri Lanka with my parents to be home-schooled a while longer.

SIDEBAR: Before we moved from the States, the whole family got a vast series of innoculations for an endless variety of diseases. Back in the 80s (I don’t know what it is now) children under a certain age were not required to get the gamma-globulin vaccine against Hepatitis A.  So little brother, who was just 7 when we moved, was exempt from this one.

The gamma-globulin was a booster we re-upped every 6 months. Except for him. In the esteemed wisdom of whatever health organization made the rules, NINE was the magic age whereupon a person was old enough to potentially contract the disease. Because apparently viruses respect age.

(You can probably see where this is going, right?)

Mom, Dad, and Poseidon got home, and within days they called the dorm to say that he had, indeed, contracted hepatitis, and there was no way of knowing if he had it before traveling to Kodai. OOPS!

Everyone in the dorm was pissed. Many of them didn’t regularly get the shot because it wasn’t required for whichever country they lived in, and now they all had to go to the school’s dispensary and get it.

Hepatitis A never leaves your system. As a grown adult, my brother can never donate blood because of that. Other than that, it seems to have had no effect on him. …I wonder how he would tell the story.

Anyway, please enjoy these pictures of/from my dormitory at Kodai. (trick: if you hover your mouse over the picture, there may be a short anecdote to go with it.)

 

Moral of the Story: Get your shots!

I is for India

Today’s journey is entirely in my head. Sorry, no pictures. …Because what 11yo thinks to take pictures of everyday life?

When I was 11, we’d been living in Sri Lanka for a year, and my parents had selected an international boarding school in southern India to send us kids to. All of my memories of India are connected to school. Traveling to and from school, Class trips to other towns, hikes through the Eastern Ghats (the mountains where the school resided).

Dry, dry, hot, dry drives across the plains from whatever airport we had landed in, until the mountains suddenly poked through the dusty flatness on the horizon. Not like in The States, where there’s an imperceptible rise for hundreds of miles as it gradually gets hillier. Then cooling as we ascended beyond 6,000 feet and everyone on the bus pulled out sweaters. Rising above the clouds, to the melody of so many monkeys in the trees.

If you read my post “E is for Elephant”, you recall the strife between the Sinhalese and Tamil cultures in Sri Lanka? It touched me at school, too. In fact, this event precedes “E is for Elephant” by a couple of years.

Kodaikanal International School (KIS) is situated in Tamil Nadu, in the southeastern part of the country: the region that claims connections to the Tamils in Sri Lanka. KIS’ headmaster at the time I enrolled was Sinhalese, as were a number of the students.

At some point during 1980-something, something happened back home in Sri Lanka that was horribly racist against the Tamils. (I was obviously well-clued-in to the political scene. You can tell by my memory of the details.) They were being discriminated against in a big way by the Sinhalese majority-run government of Sri Lanka. That’s what I know.

Knowing there was a Sinhalese contingent right in their midst, the Tamil locals in and around the lovely hill-town of Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, India, rioted. There were demonstrations right outside our campus gates. Protest marches late into the night. The school imposed a strict curfew, and no one was to leave campus. My dorm was on a compound off-campus, so the rule was that we all made the short walk from our compound across the street to campus together in the morning, with one group returning promptly after classes, and another group meeting up after activities to return to the dorm.

I don’t remember being scared.

There were rules.

We were following them.

None of the rioters got onto the school property, as I recall. Presumably somehow, someone met with someone in control to state their grievances, because eventually (two weeks later, maybe?) it was decided that the headmaster would step-down and all the Sinhalese students would return, together with him, to Sri Lanka, for the safety of all concerned. That must have been awful for them. They hadn’t done anything wrong!

For the next couple years, I would hear chanting and marching occasionally at night from my dorm room, which had a window opening towards the road between our dorm compound and the main campus. I thought locals were just reminding us… or remembering… or getting rowdy or something. But there was no more curfew and our lives had returned to normal, so no worries!

Eventually I found out that what I was hearing “randomly” at night was a monthly Hindu festival, I think tied to the full moon! Can you imagine? The sound of religious chanting was permanently tied in my brain to riots, demonstrations, and the chanting of angry protestors. I guess it all depends on perspective. Maybe THIS was when I started getting jaded, years before the Sri Lanka incident.

The Moral of the Story: If you aren’t in the know, pay attention to those who are!

The Big "C" - It's Not If, But When

It's summertime. We are having 90-degree days, and a lot of sun. I may not be at the beach anymore, but I still get outside, and with the hot temps I won't be wearing long-sleeves! You know what this much sun means: Skin Cancer alerts.

Now, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that The Big C has me in its sights. And yes, Skin Cancer, specifically. It's kind of comforting to know something with such certainty, in a world where nothing seems sure.

 

THIS is an absolute! (cue Hallelujah Chorus)

 

How can I, who have never professed any powers of foresight, foresee this?
Dude, I have Every. Single. Risk factor.
Every one.
I know. That's pretty awe-inspiring, right? You may envy me, if you wish.

 

Biologically:

1. Fair skin, fair hair, fair eyes? Check.
2. Direct descendent of skin cancer survivor? Check. My grandfather on my mother's side.
3. Even more direct line: My mom has had 5 spots removed already. One (or two?) of which were actual trouble. ...I guess the others just looked like trouble. Guilt by association!
4. High quantity of moles/freckles? Dude, I used to play connect the dots with the moles on my stomach or legs. My last doctor did a map of my back. Check.

 

But Red, you say, didn't your parents slather you in sunblock knowing this risk?

Well first, that's cute that you think I'm young enough that all the modern info about skin cancer was available when I was little. Secondly, yes, to the extent they could control it, I was always told to wear sunblock. But thirdly, I went away to boarding school at the tender age of 11. Apart from telling me, how much control do you think they had?

 

Genetically, it's out of my control.

 

Environmentally... well let's just do a quick tally of enviornmental risks. They usually count these as risk factors if they happened before age 20 or 25 (CDC can't make up its mind which age counts.)

 

1. Live in tropics? Check. Look up Sri Lanka on a globe. I was about 10* N latitude. Even my school in India and our later home in Taiwan qualify.
2. Live at high altitudes? Check. Most of that time in South Asia was at high altitudes 6,000 ft. or higher, which put me closer to less-filtered UV rays.
3. Number of sunburns? Huge. At least one major, peeling, lobster-red burn every year. At least. I think that's a big "Check!"
4. Number of blistering sunburns? Also high. One that qualified as 2nd degree. Youch. Check.
5. Use of tanning beds? Check. I will admit, with some chagrin, that I started using the tanning beds at my gym last summer. (just a couple hits per month) I don't think I will continue - well, even if my new gym has them, whenever I sign up at a new gym.

The funny (if that's the word I want) - the funny thing is, my sister had breast cancer a few years ago. I'm not at all worried about that. I mean, yes, I do all the check-ups and mammograms, and have since before the usual age they start that, but I don't think I'm a likely candidate.

We have NO family history of that.
Hestia lives a generally less healthy lifestyle than I do. (A lot of processed/fast foods. A lot of soda. Very little exercise. An overall chaotic/stressed out take on life.)

In the meantime, I will try to stay out of the sun during peak hours, and will wear sunblock if I know I'll be out in it. (Regardless of all the changes to sunblock labels. Oy vey, really?)

What do you think? Do you need or not need sunblock? Are you one of those blessed with the ability to tan? Or will I be seeing you at the dermatologist/oncologist?

And...on this day in history:
Napoleon met his Waterloo! ...and we gained a new phrase. So let's all drink something French.

p.s. To those of you who followed this weekend's events on Twitter and were expecting a different post, it's coming, but this was on deck. ...and next up is the 100th Post. Bear with me!

An American in …India!

Reminiscing seems very popular in the blogosphere these days. And then Bozo has me thinking about my days in India. I think a lot of Americans have a one-sided perception of this country, and it makes me a little sad.

A couple years ago the pastor at my church went on a short-term mission trip to India. When I had a chance to talk to him about the trip, I was immediately let down. I don’t blame him, but I have to assume the organizers in India made a point to take their American visitors to every run-down village they operated in, perhaps to emphasize the poverty and the need. I get it. Marketing’s a bitch. Either that or my pastor was so dialed into the need and poverty that he didn’t open his eyes to the GLORIOUS RICH HERITAGE and CULTURE that is India!

Even just driving between villages …did he not drive past any low-walled gardens with shrines and peacocks? We used to pass those all the time! Could be a dry-looking stretch of open highway and all of a sudden there’s this garden/shrine thing right by the road! And I don’t mean “low-walled” as in someone slapped a 2-foot picket fence around a 100-square-foot plot of land. The walls are some kind of stone, usually painted, and somewhat sculpted along the top: scallops and domes, stuff like that. I wish I’d taken pictures, but who knew? For me, it was just life. Really, we don’t take pictures of the stuff we always see, do we? We can’t know that decades later it might seem unique.

Yes, cows roam free in India, but they aren’t really in the way, and they aren’t like American cattle. It’s not like someone just opened the gate of a dairy farm. It’s hard to explain. Maybe I’ll tackle that subject some other time.

My school was in southern India, in the mountains. Home was in Sri Lanka, in the mountains. As the crow flies, the two places were maybe…400 miles apart? Something like that. But… BWAHaHAHAhahahaha! Getting there was something else.

Here you go: Doesn't look very far apart! 

Home was in the dark spot in the Island of Sri Lanka.
School was in India, probably parallel with the northern tip of Sri Lanka.
(map from wikipedia) 

First, we had a four-hour drive (approximately) down through the tea estates of Sri Lanka to the capital city of Colombo. These roads are narrow, with long stretches only one lane wide, and if you came upon another vehicle one of you had to back up until the road widened. The roads were also pot-holey. Motion sickness was fairly common, but not to be complained about. “Suck it up and deal” was the name of the game. We would make a stop around the half-way point and have a snack and soda, or buy pineapples or something. (Oh! The PINEAPPLES! But that’s another post.) Usually this drive was made the day before flying out, and we would stay with another missionary family overnight. That part was good fun, like a going away slumber party.

The flight was only about an hour or so. We’d fly from Colombo to (usually) Tiruchirupalli or (sometimes) Trivandrum – these city names will likely only mean anything to Bozo , who lives in the region. Either place had an airport unlike any I’ve seen since. First, there was no jetway, just a stairway to the tarmac. The luggage was hand-searched. The waiting area was un-air-conditioned, and crowded with people and luggage. …No-no. Crowded. Not like in line for the Phillies game. Crowded. Elbow-to-elbow people. Yeah, more like that… Look again at that map. Firmly ensconced within the tropics. Elbow-to-elbow, hot-and-sweaty people. With no A.C., ceiling fans were in plentiful supply. (funny the things you remember, isn't it?)

The school would schedule (or have the families schedule) students to arrive at one airport or another on the same day, and send down a bus. …not like the yellow school busses we have here, but not totally unlike. There was a huge luggage rack on top and a ladder down the back for ease of loading the luggage, and the bus was blue, and not air-conditioned, but the seats were similar, as were the windows. …I think it was shorter than the standard US busses. Yep, that's right. I rode “the short bus” to school. (but there was no other length.)

After everyone had arrived and the bus was loaded, off we’d go. The bus trip was about 4-5 hours, as I recall. We’d cross a vast plain before reaching the Eastern Ghats – the mountain range containing a town and small lake, both called Kodaikanal. The plains were hot and depending on the season, dry and yellow or green and lush. But the mountains…

I have never seen this any other place I’ve been. The mountain range rises abruptly out of the plain. No gradual about it. You’re driving a straight road on flat land, watching a mountain range come at you from the distance and suddenly you’re on switchback roads where each hairpin turn creates a new view that is distinctly higher than the last. ...again, wishing I'd taken pictures.

You know how the pyramids just come up out of nothing? Yeah, more sharply than that, though. And with hairpin turns.

I’m sure there’s a specific elevation range where the ecology changes, but come on, I was in Jr. High, what did I know? All I can say is pretty soon we were cooling off; then pulling out jackets or cardigans. Again with the pot-holes, but I somehow remember the roads being a little wider than the tea estate roads of Sri Lanka. Who knows – I was a kid.

The monkeys, though! That’s a noise that just becomes ambient noise once you’re used to it. Like the ocean now that I live near the shore…it’s just there. If the bus stopped for a break, we found out the hard way: don’t sit too close to the trees or you’ll get a monkey in your hair!

...I’m cutting myself off there. I could go on and on, and probably will, but I’m getting a little long-winded. Maybe the next time it will be about the dorm, or hiking, or sunrise Easter service looking out over the plains, or the riots in town when trouble broke out in neighboring Sri Lanka between different ethnic groups. Yeah, probably that.

In other news: Something To celebrate!

I’m so sorry I forgot to mention the Friday was Holi – a Hindu festival also known as the “festival of colors”. Part of the celebration includes throwing scented flowers or perfumes on each other, and there’s a bonfire at night. Sweet.

It’s Commonwealth Day in Australia today, so go out and get some Fosters Lager to toast our Aussie friends!