UMW Regional GeogBlog

The face of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanai Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan Negara Brunei Darussalam, the 29^th monarch of Brunei, gazed down from just about every building in the capital city, Bandar Seri Begawan. It was July 2006, and I had the good fortune to be in Brunei during this small oil-rich country’s month-long celebration of His Majesty’s 60^th birthday.

The Sultan’s birthday, according to the guide who showed me around Bandar Seri Begawan, is the occasion for the biggest celebration of the year. There are ceremonies, concerts, and festivities. Corporations erect banners lauding the Sultan,  newspapers carry stories of birthday celebrations and the congratulations of the citizenry; indeed while I was there one newspaper even published a full page of poems lauding His Majesty (below right.) The in-flight magazine of Royal Brunei Airways had a cover story on the Sultan (“Under the benevolent leadership of Sultan Haji Hassanai Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, Brunei has enjoyed peace and prosperity”) and the front page headline in the daily Brunei Times was “Brunei’s top brass pay tribute to their Supreme Commander.” Magazines, newspapers, and billboards carried advertisements of congratulations from Shell, Total, Citibank, and Rolls Royce.

It is impossible even to begin to understand this strange country without learning something about the Sultan (or “The Big One,” as he is known in some circles.) And it is impossible to visit this country without seeing ample evidence of its leader. My day tour of Bandar Seri was a case in point.

The tour began with a visit to the huge mosque built in honor of the Sultan. Its Italian marble staircase has 29 steps, there are 29 domes atop the building, 29 chandeliers inside, all symbolizing Brunei’s 29^th monarch. There are two pulpits inside the main prayer hall, the lower of the two for the imam leading prayers, the higher one reserved for His Majesty. An escalator at the mosque’s main entrance is covered; it is only uncovered when it is used by the Sultan himself.

Next stop on my tour was the Royal Regalia Museum, a place which showcases, with no apparent embarrassment, some of the excesses of the Sultan. There is the Sultan’s coronation chariot, a large gold land-boat (left), with a gold throne atop it. It was used at the coronation in 1967, and was pulled by a team of 40 men dressed in black. This vehicle pales in comparison with the Silver Jubilee chariot, a monstrous affair similar in concept but much larger in size than the coronation chariot. It is motorized, being too large to be pulled by forty men, but was ceremonially accompanied by forty men in black, represented in the museum by full sized headless mannequins in full costume.

Each of these two giant chariots was used only once, apparently also a common fate of the 5,000 or so smaller vehicles currently in the possession of the Sultan. Hi collection includes at least 350 of Rolls Royces, also Ferraris (production models and concept cars), Lamborghinis, Bentleys, BMWs, Audis, Porsches, and various very limited edition Italian sports cars. The Sultan also owns a collection of Formula 1 racers, but only those that have won races. He has bought many of these vehicles himself, but many have also been given to him as gifts by those wishing to gain his favor. (And gaining his favor is important in this country, where his power is absolute. Indeed, his title is Sultan and Yang Di Pertuan – absolute ruler – and, in the words of my tour guide, “If you live in Brunei, he owns you.” But the Sultan himself is not the most avid automobile fanatic in the family. That honor goes to the Crown Prince, who apparently buys a new fancy sports car or two every few weeks, then tires of it, and purchases another. His latest purchases were two very limited edition Italian sports cars so exclusive that I didn’t recognize the name. One is blue, for himself, the other pink, for his wife, who can’t drive.

All of this information was relayed to me in awed tones by my tour guide, and I was wondering how much of it to believe as we left the museum. Just then, sirens sounded in the distance, and shortly thereafter two police motorcycles drove by, lights flashing, clearing the traffic. Following behind was a bright yellow sports car that looked to me like a Lamborghini from the quick glimpse I got of it as it whizzed by. The Crown Prince, apparently, was out for a drive.

The Royal Palace complex is another example of the lavishness of the royal lifestyle. It is off limits to the public, but we did get to glimpse its rooftop from the river. It has 1,788 rooms, cost US$450 million to build, and has a staff of hundreds. The household is managed by Hyatt. The Palace at the moment houses 17 members of the Royal family, plus whatever guests are in residence at the time. These guests, if my guide is to be believed, are a major reason for the size of the palace. There just aren’t enough hotel rooms in the country to house the Sultan’s foreign guests, and they have to stay somewhere (“The Sheraton isn’t big enough.”)

Citizens of Brunei benefit from what has been called the country’s “Shellfare state” (an allusion to the largest oil company operating here). Health care is essentially free for Brunei citizens; they pay a token B$1 (about 60 US cents) for a visit to the doctor, including, consultation, medication, and surgery if necessary. If a citizen requires treatment not available in the country, the government picks up the tab for that too. Permanent residents pay B$3. K-12 education is free. So too is education at the local university, where students also receive a government stipend while they study. Students studying abroad can also obtain government scholarships. There is a catch, though. When they return to Brunei, students are required to work for the government for 3 years. This doesn’t seem like such a bad deal: Government employees are reasonably well paid and many receive free housing. (Civil servants got their first pay raise in 20 years in celebration of the Sultan’s 60th birthday.) Like everyone else, government employees get to keep their entire pay, there are no taxes. Subsidized gasoline is currently about B50c per liter, diesel about 30c. (The photograph above is the Billionth Barrel Monument at Seria, in the oil-producing west of the country.)

“The Sultan is a very generous man,” explained my guide, who apparently saw no distinction between the State coffers and the Sultan’s personal assets. This is not surprising, since it seems that members of the Royal Family have suffered from the same confusion. The Sultan himself has not been the worst offender in this regard. Indeed, his ways are almost frugal by comparison with those of his younger brother, Crown Prince Jefri. Jefri’s name is not mentioned much in Brunei, and my guide because very uncomfortable when I asked him why. He would only let on that Jefri had engaged in unspecified “un-Islamic behavior.” Perhaps this included naming his 152 foot yacht Tits and its two speedboats Nipple 1 and Nipple 2. Or perhaps it was because billions of dollars of the family’s (Brunei’s?) assets went missing while Jefri was running the Brunei Investment Agency, the government’s main investment arm. It isn’t clear exactly where all the money went, but the BBC reported in 2001 that some off Jefri’s assets were seized and auctioned off. Items for sale included 8,500 slabs of Italian marble, 200 wrought iron Victorian lampposts, two fire engines, a flight simulator for an A-340 airliner, and numerous gold-plated toilet accessories. The Prince’s other assets included 2000 cars, including the latest Ferrari, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin models.

In terms of Brunei law, none of the Sultan’s excesses are against the law, since the Sultan is the country’s “supreme executive authority” or absolute ruler. No elections have been held since 1962 (when a party opposed to the royal family won), and the country’s 16 member cabinet (which contains several members of the Royal Family) serves only to advise the Sultan. The Sultan himself serves as Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, and Minister of Finance. The country’s Parliament was abolished at independence in 1984; it reconvened in 2004 (without elections.) According to an article in Brunei Times (July 28, 2006), the new Legislative Council consists of 30 appointed members and 20 elected members. Details of the new body seem a bit hazy: in a description of the country’s system of government, the Brunei government’s official website inexplicably makes no mention at all of the country’s Parliament.

Kelme is not a common destination for visitors to Lithuania. It is a small and unremarkable town in the northwest of the country; it has a population of about 11,000 people, and serves as a market and administrative center for one of the country’s 60 municipal regions.

It was a cloudy and chilly day in early April 2007 when I arrived here with my friend Abraham Allison. Abe was in Kelme to research the history of the Chaluzin family, farmers in the area for generations. In the 1929, a young member of the family, Louis, left the depressed economic conditions of Kelme and made his way to South Africa, where he made his home and changed his last name to Allison. Louis was Abe’s father.

According to an 1897 census, 2,710 of Kelme’s 3,914 inhabitants were members of the town’s Jewish population, the vast majority of whom — unlike the Chaluzins — were merchants and traders and lived in the town. I saw only three signs of this once-thriving community during my visit. There were the upended and fading headstones in the old Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Kelme (right). There was our host and guide in Kelme, the widow of the town’s last Jewish inhabitant. And there was a memorial alongside an unpaved road, adjacent to what had been a gravel pit on the old Grozhebiski farm. In Hebrew and Lithuanian, the memorial notes that this is the site of a mass grave holding the remains of the 483 Jews who were killed here in 1941.

The fate of Kelme’s Jewish population is in many ways similar to that which befell similar communities in much of Europe during the Second World War. After Lithuania was invaded by German forces in June of 1941, some of the Jews of Kelme fled north and east, hoping to escape to the safety of the Soviet Union. Others remained, hoping that the cordial relations Jews had had with Germans during the First World War would be repeated. As it turned out, it was not only the Germans Kelme’s Jews should have been concerned about, it was a small group of Lithuanian nationalists. In the wake of the German occupation, they rounded up Kelme’s remaining Jews, confining women to a barn on the Chaluzin farm, and the men to a granary. Days later, the killing began.

Roadside marker at the site of a mass grave, Kelme. The memorial is the work of the survivors and descendants of members of Kelme’s Jewish community.

On July 24, Lithuanian soldiers arrived at the Chaluzin farm, and ordered the Jews to stand in rows in the farmyard, and to put any jewelry and the contents of their pockets in front of them. The soldiers then announced that all Jews who were capable of working would be taken to a labor camp. They were marched off, and none were seen again. Locals later reported that they had been shot. On August 22, Lithuanian soldiers announced that all of the Jews still living in Kelme were to be taken to a work camp in the nearby town of Padubisis. They were ordered to load their possessions onto waiting wagons, and to follow the wagons on foot as they left the town.

Their destination was not Padubisis. It was the gravel pit on Grozhebiski farm. There, most of the remaining Jews of Kelme were shot, and their bodies dumped into a mass grave.

A few did, however, manage to escape the massacre. Among them were five members of the Chaluzin family, Abe’s grandparents, three of their sons, and two daughters. All were aided by sympathetic Lithuanian gentiles, who risked their lives by giving food and shelter to Jews. One of the young women managed to pass for a gentile for the remainder of the war, and worked as a seamstress. The other lived in the home of a gentile family, hidden away in a drawer when outsiders came by. The three young men spent most the rest of the war hiding out in the forests, arming themselves with weapons taken from the bodies of dead soldiers, and surviving by their wits and the kindness of supportive Lithuanian gentiles.

The Chaluzins did not all survive the war, however. An informer tipped off the Gestapo, who in 1943 ambushed the Chaluzin sons at a local farmhouse. A shootout ensued, and one of the sons was killed. Abe’s grandparents were captured, taken to a prison camp in nearby Raseinaia, where they were presumably killed.

Today, there is a small local history museum in what what used to be the mansion on the Grozhebiski estate. A framed two page document headed “The History of Kelme Town” is on display at the entrance to the museum. It tells the story of the town from 1410 to the present. The description says nothing about the fact that a majority of the town’s population was once Jewish. And it makes no mention at all of the 1941 massacre, or of the mass grave only a few hundred meters away.

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I have drawn here on several sources in addition to my own observations in and around Kelme. There is detailed account of Jewish life in Kelme on the website jewishgen.org, based largely on the recollections of one of the Jews who escaped the 1941 massacre. The site also contains a description of the Kelme Jewish cemetery, and a list of names transcribed from the headstones at the cemetery. Part of the story of the Chaluzin family was told by our Lithuanian host, Lilli, and her mother. Many of the details here were provided by Abe Allison, who has done extensive research into his family’s history.

I am now on my way home after a month-long journey in Southeast and South Asia. This has been a fascinating and enlightening journey in so many ways, and it will take me a very long time to digest all that I have learned.

This has been a long and varied journey, and I have seen a great many interesting things. I got to thinking today about what part of the trip, what image or scene, particularly stands out for me. It didn’t take me long. The most memorable and thought-provoking scene of this trip was a watermelon, sitting on a shelf in the produce section of the Meidi-Ya supermarket at Clarke Quay in Singapore.

It was a fairly ordinary looking watermelon, except for the fact that its price tag read 119 Singapore dollars (US$83.) It wasn’t a pricing error. A smaller cantaloupe-like melon alongside was priced at SGD 79.90 (US$56).

I sought out the supermarket’s produce manager to find out more. I asked him why this fruit was so expensive. “It’s flown in from Japan,” he told me. Well, no wonder it’s so expensive. Air freight isn’t cheap, particularly for something as bulky as a watermelon. But that wasn’t really what I wanted to know; I wanted to know why anyone would pay this amount, particularly when similar (probably identical) fruits from Southeast Asia are available at a much lower price?

“It’s very sweet,” the manager told me, without conviction. And these prices weren’t particularly high, he hastened to add. Sometimes watermelons sell for SGD 200 each (US$140.) But who buys this stuff; was it homesick Japanese expatriates? “No,” he said, “It’s local people, mainly. Local people with ….” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. But why?

The answer, in short, is that wealthy local people probably buy those melons because they can. Not because the melons are sweet, not because they are good. Not despite the fact that they are expensive, but because they are expensive.

Over the past weeks, I have found myself thinking about that watermelon again and again. I thought about it when I visited the tea plantations in Sri Lanka, and learned about the women whose backbreaking work plucking tea buds earns them $3.50 a day. It would take them 24 days to earn enough money to buy that sweet Japanese watermelon.

I thought about that watermelon in Vietnam, as a friend told me about factory workers who live in his neighborhood in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 11. They work in textile factories, sewing together clothing that is exported and sold under various famous brand names in stores in Europe, North America, and Singapore. These workers earn $65 - $75 a month; they work six and frequently even seven days a week, with only a few days leave annually around the time of the lunar New Year. A month’s work wouldn’t earn them enough to buy that imported watermelon.

I thought about the watermelon as I flew last night from Vietnam to Qatar. My flight from Ho Chi Minh City was full, and most of the passengers weren’t Vietnamese tourists on vacation. Many – perhaps most – were young people, mainly men, apparently on their way to jobs in the Persian Gulf region. When I entered the arrivals hall at Doha International Airport I saw many other travelers from Southeast and South Asia. Several stood in the customs and immigration line ahead of me. Others slept on the floor in the arrivals hall, presumably waiting for connecting flights to Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh. These are the countries that, in the words of an article in this morning’s Gulf Times, are “[promising] market[s] for Vietnamese labor exports.” The melons in Singapore were Japanese exports; the people sleeping on the floor at Doha Airport were labor exports.

I thought about the watermelon as I browsed the shelves of the duty free shops at Doha and Ho Chi Minh City airports, shelves filled with a wide array of goods. The carried names like Gucci, Ray-Ban, Burberry, and Polo, but they were all really Japanese watermelons.

I had expected to learn about Sri Lanka, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam on this trip, and I did. But the real value of the journey was that it helped me to see connections more clearly than I have before. The four countries I visited are separate places with their own stories, but they are all connected, to each other and to the rest of the world, including the part of the world where I live. I knew this at an abstract level, but somehow during this trip the connections ‘clicked’ as never before. This was intellectually very satisfying, and made the journey particularly rewarding. But there is another side to this. Understanding connections may have been intellectually rewarding, but it has also made me feel very uncomfortable.

It’s about that watermelon again. I think that what really made the melon such a striking image for me is that it struck very close to home. As I saw that watermelon, and as I came to see how it was connected to so much else I have learned on this journey, I also came to see more clearly something else, something profoundly disquieting. That melon is connected to the society in which I live. And it is also connected at a very personal level to my own life and my own lifestyle.

In a world of textile workers, tea pickers, “labor exports” and melon buyers, there’s not much doubt where I fit in. And that doesn’t make me feel very good.

Doha, Qatar
January 13, 2008

Citizens of Qatar make up a minority of the population of the country. Most residents are temporary foreign workers. Doha also serves as a transit point for temporary workers en route to and from other Gulf States, several of whom also count foreigners as the majority of their populations. In most cases, foreigners cannot become citizens. This prohibition also applies to the children born in Gulf States to foreign nationals.

Below is an article from en English language Qatar newspaper this morning. Above are some labor exports in transit at Doha International Airport at 1 am this morning.

Construction sites and modern buildings near my hotel in Doha. I couldn’t walk around and take pictures today because it was pouring with rain, a fairly rare event in these parts.

For some basic information on Qatar, see the BBC’s Country Profile, CIA World Factbook, and the New York Times.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
January 10, 2008

I met Duong Van Ngo this morning in Saigon’s ornate colonial era post office. He was sitting, as he apparently does just about every day, at the end of a long desk in the center of the main hall, beneath a portrait Ho Chi Minh, and next to a sign that reads, in Vietnamese “Place of instruction, writing, and translation.” When I arrived, he was hunched over a typewritten document, reading it carefully and writing with a ballpoint pen on sheet of paper.

Mr. Duong is a translator, and makes a living helping Ho Chi Minh City’s residents communicate with their loved ones abroad. When I arrived at the Post Office, Mr. Duong was in conversation with a young Vietnamese woman and a somewhat older French man, helping them overcome some kind of communication problem (Mr. Duong speaks Vietnamese, English, and French.) Much of his business, he told me, is translating letters. Some of his clients are Vietnamese women with foreign partners, some are grandparents communicating with foreign-born grandchildren, and some are now-adult children fathered by American servicemen during the Vietnam War (or, as it is called here, the American War.) For translating one handwritten page Mr. Duong charges 20,000 Vietnamese Dong, or about $1.35; typewritten pages cost a bit more, because they contain more words, he says.

I am by no means the first foreigner to chat with Mr. Duong about his business. He proudly showed me a photocopy of a 2007 article from Toronto Star, profiling him as part of a report on Vietnam in the paper’s travel section. He has become something of a celebrity here, with locals and curious visitors like me stopping by to say hello to him.

I suppose Mr. Duong is a symbol of globalization in the 20^th century, as he makes a living helping people with relationships and connections that wouldn’t have existed a hundred years previously. But in a rapidly changing world, this 78 year old is also a symbol of an era fast receding into history. In the 21^st century, a translator isn’t in a post office, but rather in an internet café. And the translator isn’t a person, it’s a website like Babel Fish.

Kandy, Sri Lanka
January 6, 2008

Tea requires poverty. That is the main conclusion I reached after a visit today to the heart of Sri Lanka’s tea growing region in the hill country around the town of Nuwara Eliya.

The scenery in the central highland area of Sri Lanka is magnificent. Steep hillslopes are covered with the rich green of thousands of tea bushes, often with trees interspersed among the bushes to provide shade. Today was a rainy day, and I passed numerous spectacular waterfalls and cascading streams. The road from Kandy (elevation 500m above sea level) to Nuwara Eliya (1900 meters) is steep and narrow, frequently doubling back on itself in hairpin bends. Along the sides of the roads are stalls displaying fresh vegetables, almost dazzlingly colorful in the fog and drizzle.

Tea is a rather particular kind of plant. (Yes, one plant, All true teas come from the same species of plan, Camellia sinensis) It prefers steep, well watered hillslopes, preferably at high altitude (the best teas come from the higher elevations.) Ideal conditions for tea growing are found in upland areas in the tropics. The mountainous interior of Sri Lanka is such a place. Tea is made from the leaves of a shrub that, if left to its own devices, can grow to 10 meters in height. For the purposes of tea cultivation, the bushes are pruned to keep them no taller than about one meter. The tea plant grows by sprouting new leaves, and it is these new leaves that are used to make tea. (see photo.) The new buds are plucked off the bush by hand, then taken to nearby factories where they are dried (or ‘withered’ in teaspeak,) rolled, fermented, fired (to halt fermentation) and then graded.

What struck me as I saw the tea plantations was that these are places profoundly unsuitable for mechanized farming. Slopes are very sleep, expanses of tea bushes are frequently broken up by boulders and gullies. No tractor or mechanical harvester could negotiate this terrain. The process of plucking the tea buds also makes mechanization difficult; only the tips of the bus are plucked off, and it is difficult to do this any way other than by hand. What this all means is that tea is a very labor intensive crop, particularly where plucking is concerned.

I visited the Mackwoods Labookellie plantation and factory, one of the largest in the Nuwara Eliya area. According to the company guide who showed me around, the plantation is 1,200 acres in size, and employs 900 women as tea pickers. I asked my the Mackwoods representative why only women are used as tea pickers. “Because they have more sensitive fingers,” she told me, “which are necessary for picking the buds.” A more plausible explanation came from my guide, Sarath. Women can be paid less than men. (The photograph at the top shows tea pickers working today, Sunday, in the rain near Nawaru Eliya.)

Let’s do some arithmetic here. Each picker picks up to 40 kg of tea a day. According to a 2005 BBC report, workers’ wages depend on how many leaves they can collect, but average wages are about US$60 per month. My guide gave me a somewhat higher figure of $3.50 per day. Using a figure midway between these two would mean that Mackwoods pays something like $2,500 per day in picker’s wages, or about 7c per kilo of tea plucked (this is the weight of the newly plucked leaves; the weight is reduced signficantly during processing.)

If tea were grown in the United States, with pickers earning the minimum wage of $5. 85 an hour, a Mackwood-sized contingent of 900 workers would earn around $42,000 per day, or about $1.17 per kilo of tea picked. At this price, the cost of processed tea to the consumer would be prohibitively high, and tea would price itself out of the market. And because of the peculiar needs of tea cultivation, the possibilities of using mechanization to lower costs are not very great.

In other words, it’s just as well for the world’s tea drinkers that their favorite beverage is produced in poor, tropical countries like Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, and Tanzania.

Because tea production depends on poverty.

(Most of what I have written here is based on what I saw today and learned from my guides. I am no expert on the economics of tea production. Perhaps my logic or calculations are wrong. If anyone reading this is better informed that I am, please post a response and correct me.)

Laying fish out to dry, Negombo

Negombo, Sri Lanka
January 2, 2008

Today we headed north, out of Colombo and along the coast to the town of Negombo. We passed by some of Colombo’s poorer areas, where people live in wooden shacks in densely packed informal settlements. Then along an old Dutch canal, with fishing boats moored along much of its length.

By “we” I mean me and my ever-informative guide, Sarath Chandrasekar, a mine of information on everything from the history of Sri Lanka to the details of its educational system and the composition of its exports. As we drove north, he filled me in on some of the geography of colonial influence in Sri Lanka. The Portuguese and Dutch, it seems, did not stray far from the coast, and this is where their legacy remains today. Between Colombo and Negombo the legacy of the Portuguese is evident in the large proportion of the population that is Christian. I saw evidence of this in the numerous (mainly Catholic) churches we passed along the way, as well as in the many dozens of elaborate nativity scenes outside not only churches but also many homes (see photograph). A large statue of Jesus overlooks the fishing harbor at Negombo. Domestic architecture in this area shows Dutch influence, with sloped, tiled roofs and overhanging eves on many of the houses along our route. Other evidence of the Portuguese colonial legacy remains in the names of many Sri Lankan families, particularly in the coastal areas. Silva was the last name of the taxi driver who met me at the airport on my arrival, I found the Fernando in a Christian cemetery near Negombo, and I saw a business owned by the Perera family.

The town of Negombo is an interesting place. The Portuguese were the first outsiders to establish a base here. in the 1600s they lost it to the Dutch, for whom this area became an important source of cinnamon. As the Dutch East India Company faded from the scene at the end of the 18^th century, the British arrived, taking over the town in 1796.

There are two distinctly different parts of today’s Negombo. The northern end of town is the tourist area, where guest houses and small hotels give the very distinct impression of having seen better days, It seemed to me that this place is an lower budget alternative to the beach resorts south of Colombo. The southern end of the town, though, was the part that fascinated me. This is where the fishing harbor is, and alongside it a bustling fish market. The market is at its busiest early in the morning, when the fishing boats return with their catch. But it was still a bustling place when I got here at around noon, and I walked around marveling at the enormous variety of fish available here: everything from giant prawns to squid and tuna.

Selling fish, Negombo

I have posted more pictures from Negombo on my travel photo site.

Colombo, Sri Lanka
January 3, 2008

Colombo is a city with a serious case of the jitters.

I learned this first hand when I went out this morning to do what I do when I travel, which is to walk around and take photographs. I have walked around many cities taking photographs, and I have seldom had any problems. In Hanoi, capital of Communist Vietnam, I took photographs of anything I wanted to, and the only occasion I was stopped was when I tried to take a photograph of the US Embassy. In authoritarian Brunei nobody prevented me from taking photographs of anything I wanted. Ditto in Communist Laos, and in Communist China

But not in Colombo 3, the part of the city where my hotel is located. It is safe to say that if there was a security guard, soldier, or police officer anywhere near me, as soon as I lifted my camera to my eye the official would come rushing over to me saying “Not allowed, not allowed.” I was prevented by a soldier from taking a photograph of a Western Union sign on an office building. By a bank security guard, when I tried to photograph a sign which read: “Due to the current security situation, this parking lot is closed.” Another soldier with a very large gun stopped me from taking a picture of a traffic jam. As an experiment, I took out my camera as I stood two meters from a soldier, facing away from him, and aimed it at a street vendor. “No, no, not allowed.” In the town of Galle, I was even prevented from taking a photograph of a Shakespeare quote, painted on a wall outside a military base. The working assumption of all security personnel here seems to be that anyone with a camera must be up to no good.

And so I gave up photography and walked down the street, just looking around, my camera safely holstered. “No sir, you cannot walk here. You must walk on the other side of the road.” I pointed out to the soldier that there were three lanes of traffic between me and the other side of the road, and said I would be happy to cross if he would help me. It’s amazing what an effect a soldier with a very large gun can have on traffic. All three lanes screeched to a halt, and I crossed to the legal side of the road.

Sri Lankans have every reason to be nervous. For the last 25 years, the predominantly Sinhalese government has been fighting Tamil rebels of the LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam), a group that is seeking autonomy for the predominantly Tamil northern and eastern parts of the country. A total of about 70,000 people have so far been killed in this conflict. A previous government signed a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire agreement with the LTTE in 2002, but this agreement is clearly no longer being observed. The current government is taking a harder line against the rebels, arguing that the only way to end the conflict it to defeat the Tigers militarily. And the LTTE is fighting back.

Two days ago – the day I arrived in Colombo – a Tamil Member of Parliament, representing the main opposition party, was gunned down in a Hindu temple in the capital. Yesterday, a mine was detonated in the heart of Colombo as a bus carrying government soldiers drove by. Four soldiers were killed, and 26 people were injured. Meanwhile, an article in this morning’s newspaper reports that the government has decided officially to abrogate the tattered cease-fire agreement with the LTTE. Hence the jitters.

Yesterday my guide took me to the fishing town of Negombo, north of Colombo. The return journey took us past Colombo’s international airport. I decided to count the number of soldiers with guns that we passed between the turnoff to the airport and my hotel, a distance of about 30 km. I only counted soldiers carrying AK-47s or the similar weapons. We passed 63 qualifying soldiers, many of them at security checkpoints. But we were only pulled over at for inspection once. Clearly the soldiers didn’t realize that I was armed with a potentially lethal camera.

Update, January 4th. Today I visited the historic fort area of Colombo, where soldiers prevented me from taking a photograph of the old clock tower, the ornate Victorian Cargill building, and the gleaming modern World Trade Center towers. I was also refused permission to take a photograph of a sign that said that photography is prohibited. But I eventually found a place where there were no soldiers: the spice and vegetable market, a bustling place of wonderful sights and smells, and some very friendly people. I’ll post some pictures here soon.

Another update, January 9th. I left Sri Lanka today, and although I had a wonderful visit, the country has had a difficult time during the past twelve days since I arrived here. Yesterday, a government minister was assassinated not far from Colombo airport, the second assassination since I arrived here.  A few days ago, the government claimed to have killed the intelligence chief of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE.) If the country was jittery on January 3rd, it is even more jittery now. Several Sri Lankans I have spoken to express pessimism over the country’s future. The cab driver who took me to the airport this morning told me that he wants his children to get a good education so that they can leave the country. “There is no future for them here,” he said.

Colombo, Sri Lanka
January 2, 20o08

The first thing that travelers see upon arriving by air in many countries is the duty-free shop, or more commonly, many duty-free shops. Duty-free shopping used to be the preserve of departing travelers, but many countries now allow arriving passengers to buy duty-free goods as well. Sri Lanka is one such country.

And so it was that, shortly after stepping off my Singapore Airlines flight at Bandaranaike International Airport near Colombo, I found myself walking through a shopping mall. What was unusual about the shops in this airport mall, though, was not that they were here, it was what they sold.

There were perfumes, liquor, and cigarettes, but these made up a tiny portion of the goods on offer. Most of the stores were selling major household appliances: television sets, microwaves, washing machines, and refrigerators. This was odd, very odd. I couldn’t imagine a jetlagged passenger getting off an international flight and making a quick stop to buy a refrigerator before going through customs.

I didn’t have to imagine it. When I got to the customs hall, there, in front of me, was a woman pushing a luggage cart on which there was a brand new full size double door refrigerator in a large cardboard box. This warranted some further research.

It turns out that what I had seen at the airport was a clue to nature of Sri Lanka’s economy. The country’s largest source of foreign exchange is money sent home by Sri Lankan citizens working in other countries. Nearly two thirds of migrant workers are women, and over half of these are employed as domestic workers, particularly in Middle Eastern countries. Upon their return to Sri Lanka, these workers are entitled to a duty-free allowance, the size of which depends on how long they have spent abroad. A worker returning from a two year stint in Saudi Arabia, for example, might be entitled to a duty free allowance which exceeds the cost of a refrigerator. Since refrigerators carry high import duties, it pays the returning worker to buy her refrigerator (or washing machine, or microwave) at an airport duty free shop.

I found more evidence of the importance of remittances in the landscape outside the airport. The most common corporate logo in Colombo, as well as in smaller towns, is Western Union, “the fastest way to send money.”

During my travels in other parts of the world, I have seen the other end of this remittance link. In wealthy Singapore, I visited a Western Union facility in a shopping mall in the heart of the city on a Saturday afternoon. It was packed with foreign workers, lining up to send money home. In the same mall were several business specializing in the recruitment of foreigners to work in the homes of wealthy Singaporeans.

When I visited the oil-rich country of Brunei in 2006, I was struck by the fact that many of the people I came into contact with in my hotel were migrant workers, not Bruneian citizens. I asked a hotel receptionist about this. She told me that the management and front office staff at the hotel were all Bruneian, but the housekeeping staff, cleaners, porters, maintenance workers, and grounds staff were mostly foreign. Even my tour guide was Malaysian. The taxi driver who took me to the airport was of Chinese ancestry, though he was a Bruneian citizen. There was a shortage of taxi drivers in Brunei, he told me, “Bruneians don’t like to drive taxis,” he said, “Because it’s hard work. Bruneians very lazy.”

Fortunately for wealthy and lazy Bruneians (and Kuwaitis and Saudis and Singaporeans) there are poor and hard working Sri Lankans (and Bangladeshis and Filipinos and Indonesians) willing to leave their homes and families to earn money to send home. And fortunately for those of us who live in the United States, there are poor and hard working Mexicans and Salvadorans and Guatemalans willing to do the jobs that we aren’t be prepared to do, for wages we wouldn’t be prepared to accept.

Many Sri Lankans (and, no doubt, Mexicans and Guatemalans) are grateful to the wealthier countries for the opportunities they provide to earn relatively good wages. If only more of us in the wealthy world were willing to show our gratitude to those who sacrifice family, home, and more to allow us to live in the style to which we have become accustomed.

Not a problem!

Colombo, Sri Lanka
January 1, 2008

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