Conversation with Kshanika, Suresh in Minneapolis

I spent the evening at Kshanika and Suresh’s place.  It was a wonderful evening of socializing, talking, learning and affirming.

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What I learned:  Food and eating

Sri Lankan food is about mixing.  Mixing the food items themselves, mixing spices, offsetting taste with other tastes (e.g., stronger curry with milder curry).

As with Filipinos, it’s part of the Sri Lankan culture to eat with your hands. Eating with your hands is part of capturing the flavor of the food. At first I thought that Suresh meant the oils, scents from one’s hands. Instead what he meant was, using the hands allowed for a better mixing that gave rise to flavor.

My mother and other relatives ate with their hands, and it was an art form. You gathered food, scrunched it with outstretched fingers bunched together, then scooped it into your mouth. As a child, I tried to do this, as I marveled at it. But, alas, I was not quite satisfied with my level of skill. After awhile, my mother hardly ever did this, and I came to feel that it wasn’t civilized to eat with your hands.  Nay, I ate everything with a knife and fork, even pizza.

Sri Lankans, like Filipinos, also ate with a spoon in their right hand and a fork in their left. Kshanika’s father has heart and stroke problems, and apparently he isn’t very agile in his hands and fingers anymore and must resort to using a spoon to eat.

The dish they served me was a mixture of different foods that were leftover – one with noodles, chicken and vegetables. It was spicy, but so tasty that it was like being a home with my Mom’s cooking: I kept wanting to eat and eat it, past satiation. I asked Kshanika to write down the name of it, but I forgot to ask her for the note.

I talked about lechón as an important food around which Filipinos came together. And it’s so tasty, especially when you add the sauce Mang Tomas. My Mom would gather leftovers of this and fashioned a soup dish that was equally tasty.

I drank Indian Pale Ale. I don’t like ale in general, but I liked this one. I had just one drink, because as I admitted to Kshanika, I’m a “lightweight” when it comes to drinking, and I was feeling the effects of that ale.

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What I learned:  Housing

In light of the tsunamis, foreign helpers in Sri Lanka were keen to build or rebuild houses. What Suresh shared was very, very interesting: What the locals needed was roads. What they needed was to have their livelihoods back. They themselves can rebuild their house – apparently that wasn’t a problem.

It was also helpful for them to have open conduits – not sure for what, but I would guess resources like water.

Schools are part of the infrastructure, so it was important to build them.

For Sri Lankans, it wasn’t about planting grown trees, but rather it was about planting the right sort of seeds – again, roads, conduits and livelihood.

They fashion their houses in ways that meet their needs – and reflect their culture:

• No doors typically, perhaps only curtains – privacy or locking isn’t part of their day-to-day habits.  
• When doors were used, they were usually made out of opaque glass that allowed for as much light into the room as possible.
• The kitchen was separate from the sleeping quarters, as wood-burning was used for cooking and it created an unpleasant smell.
• The bathroom was in an outhouse.  Some basic amenities or facilities were lacking.
• Houses were built in clusters, so that families and relatives could live in close proximity to one another. 

I shared how housing “projects” for impoverished African Americans in the city provided a family with nice, comfortable accommodations. But apparently the projects served to fracture the African American family community, instead.

Kshanika shared that Sri Lankan houses were horizontal, not vertical. And this distinction brought the difference between Western and Asian housing. You created vertical housing, she said, and people were still outside gathering and squatting by the railroad.

I talked about the Heritage House in Dammam, Saudi Arabia: How in the center is decked with trees and plants and little waterways and bridges, and in the periphery are rooms (dining rooms) that represented different regions or cultures within Saudi Arabia. In the traditional family household, different members of the extended family – and their own families – lived in these rooms. Then everyone gathered together in the center. In an Arab household, the father is the head.

I’m not persuaded that city “projects” can’t be constructed in ways that don’t fracture families and are horizontal; in ways that housing units are clustered together, as Suresh described; in ways that also allow for multiple groups within a broad family circled to come and live together.

I also talked about the fishermen from Al-Qatif, Saudi Arabia: How each fishing boat housed a community of people, some of whom I observed cleaning the boat; some hauling ice in a human assembly from a truck to an area below the deck; some playing, jumping and swimming in the water; some preparing the fishing nets; some boats sailing off to fish etc.

What else did I learn? 

It takes Kshanika time to adjust both there, when she’s home in Sri Lanka, and here when she returns back to the US. There, there is a mingling of people.

“In Sri Lanka, a house is never empty,” Suresh pointed out. In one neighborhood, he said he hardly ever saw the residents. “A house is never without people.”

So at first Kshanika is overwhelmed with the crowds and noise of people – so much so that she has to retreat to a room the first couple of days, and close and lock the door. It’s truly unheard of in Sri Lanka to lock anything – house, car etc. But locking things is so much a part of everyday American life.

Then when she comes home, she’s been used to constant presence and talking amongst people that the silence in their apartment is literally “deafening.”

She was working so much last year – working Saturdays and Sundays, e.g. – that she got sick. And with the advent of the tsunami, she realized the need to manage her schedule and change her outlook.

That’s me, too: working so much that I got sick repeatedly. That I’ve worked to control my schedule and reduce my work.

I’ve had the fortune of not having tragedy or disaster affect me directly. Still, my travels to the Middle East the last 3-4 years have a been a life-changer indeed: Instead of living to work, I’m working to live. I put my family and myself through long separations, with my hectic work schedule, so I can travel to places, meet people, and learn and experience.