A farmer in Sepon, Laos, stands in his field, which he cleared of ordnance by himself. He said he found many munitions. The small banana behind him grows in a bomb crater.
An international treaty banning the cluster bomb takes effect today. Cluster bombs are large weapons that hold up to several hundred small explosives designed to scatter across the land when dropped from the air. They are deadly hazards to farmers in postwar societies around the world.
Farmers in Laos have faced these dangers for decades. Millions of cluster munitions remain in their soil since the U.S. bombing campaign ended nearly 40 years ago. Since then, more than 20,000 people have been killed or maimed in accidents involving unexploded ordnance (UXO). Aside from soldiers, farmers account for the majority of UXO accident victims in Laos. Note: the United States has not signed the treaty banning cluster bombs—but 107 108 other countries have.
A boy in Xieng Khouang digs for ant eggs on a hillside that was heavily bombed. Many locals have found bombies nearby. When a teacher tried to warn the boy about UXO, he said he was not afraid because he had dug in the area many times before.
Part of a cluster munition found in a farm field in Khammouane province in 2009. Farmers placed the bombie near a tree stump in the hopes that a clearance team would return and demolish it. It was still there in late April 2010.
A woman weeds her garden while a clearance team searches for bombs behind her. The woman did not want to stop working. That day, the team found a bombie in her neighbor’s field.
A boy in Khammoune sits in his family’s field, which they have set afire in order to clear the land for planting. Fires can cause buried bombs to explode, and many people do not stick around for the burning. Another boy in the area said he finds UXO every dry season. “When we burn the rice field—BOOM, BOOM! Explode. Every year. When we burn the field, we run away.”
A villager named Haum waters her onions, growing in an American cluster bomb casing in Kunpho, Laos.
Laotians everywhere have turned war scrap into useful tools. The large metal casings from cluster munitions can sell for upwards of $40—a near fortune to many rural villagers. But some gardeners prefer to keep the casings, turning them into sturdy raised herb gardens. Village to village, province to province, Laotians insist: the bomb is the bomb when it comes to gardens. Read the story in The Faster Times.
Onions grow in an American bomb casing in Gnommalath, Laos.
A villager in Boualapha tends her herb garden, planted in a type of bomb dropped during the early stages of the American war in Laos. Boualapha, near the Vietnam border, remains one of the country’s most contaminated regions.
A pig feeds from a bomb casing that has been used as a trough for years in Ban Pakeo village.
Children stand beneath a rice storage hut built atop posts made from bomb casings in Xieng Khouang province.
A bomb casing serves as a planter in Najat village, where scrap-metal collecting is one of the community’s largest—and deadliest—sources of income.
We arrived in Bangkok last night, around midnight, on the eve of a military crackdown on protesters who had occupied the city core for weeks. “What are you doing in Bangkok now?” the night desk man asked when we checked into our usual hotel, eerily quiet even at 1 a.m. We told him we were trying to go home (to finish our own work), but we’d left several bags at the hotel in February before departing for Laos. Jerry and I are not here to cover this story (many others have risked and sacrificed their lives already). But we had to make our way to the edge of urban warfare in order to get out.
From that vantage, on Sukhumvit Soi 2, the day progressed quietly despite the acrid scent of burning plastic and rubber, and towering black plumes in the distance. Our street was blocked, no traffic in or out. How strange to be two of only three guests at a normally packed hotel. We monitored the news minute by minute, watching the Bangkok Dangerous map and weighing our options: Should we stay? Should we go? We debated (and not always in the friendliest manner.) The hotel was just beyond the “no-man’s land” between soldiers and protesters, and we felt relatively safe inside as long as the violence didn’t spread.
But it did. After the military crushed the main Red Shirts protest camp, we began reading reports of fires scattered around Bangkok. We found a reliable taxi driver who squeezed through barricades and sweet-talked his way past soldiers to get us out and into a hotel near the airport. By the time we settled there, CentralWorld, one of Southeast Asia’s largest shopping malls, burned uncontrollably (you can watch the movie on YouTube or join the Facebook fan page). It’s apparently gone now. (And to think I’d hoped to buy new Tevas there before getting on the plane.)
It was a rush of activity tonight on Thanon Lat Krabang, near Suvarnabhumi. We ate pad thai at a small stall hurrying to fill big orders before the curfew went into effect. Dozens of customers buying last-minute beer filled the adjacent mini mart before the shop gates closed.
And now we wait—to see what the night brings, to see what the day brings, to finally board our plane (we hope) to San Francisco late tomorrow night. Meanwhile—because this is Bangkok, a city with infinite levels of surreal—we flip through channels and find the news in Burmese. It’s not Bangkok on the screen, but images from Cyclone Nargis, which struck two years ago. I listen to the voices and watch the shaky pictures, instantly reminded of where we were and what we were doing just a year and two weeks ago.
And then I look at another surreal set of images from Bangkok, May 19, 1992—precisely 18 years ago today.
The same Lat Krabang vendor juggles several noodle orders.
Irony on a black shirt.
WTF? Jerry discovered these while scrounging for a snack this afternoon. He said, “I had no idea what to make of them. They are crunchy potato tubes with gobs of salt and MSG.”
A soldier on Sukhumvit directs our taxi driver away from the trouble spots.
It’s been one of those weeks of heat and fatigue, and a scratchy throat that won’t clear. A week of dusty boots and sweaty shirts and sunburned cheeks, after chatting with farmers in hot, dry fields. A week of crazy traffic, choking exhaust, and a blanket of air with perilously high PM10 levels.
But then I chat with a young Burmese woman who left home at 19 and has lived in fear and danger ever since. She tells me how she secretly returned to Burma last year, to retrieve her passport; how she hid and covered her head and faked an illness while riding a bus—just so the authorities would leave her alone. How she spotted her sister, briefly, until a neighbor recognized her and she was forced to flee. And how her heart thumped with fear the entire trip until she landed in Thailand and knew she had escaped arrest. She lives in limbo. Home is neither here nor there, she says. She is never truly safe in either place. She pays a lot of money to live here on the sly. So she sinks herself into her work, and spends her happiest hours quietly, in her room, alone. She used to wish for greater freedoms; for the chance to go outside and move around without thought. But then, she says, she met refugees on the Thai/Burma border who have never left in 20 years. Can you imagine? Twenty years in the exact same place, no chance to roam. This brave young woman is thankful for the life she has. I ask if she has ever published her story. No, she says, it’s not nearly as important or poignant as the stories of so many others from her homeland.
These are the reasons I write this blog: the people I meet, the things they teach me. And the food, of course, that intertwines our lives. (The conversation above took place over a simple plate of rice, a bowl of vegetable soup and a serving of fried bamboo.)
Yesterday, I learned that Saveur has nominated Rambling Spoon for Best Culinary Travel Blog in its first-ever food blog awards. Thank you, readers, for that honor. And thank you, Saveur, for the recognition.
In just a few weeks, a very important man will return to Laos. His name is Jim Harris. He’s a retired school principal from rural Wisconsin. He’s the only American working in the field to clear U.S. bombs from the soil in Laos. That’s Jim in the picture above. He’s standing among his boxes and bins full of Lao artifacts, all part of his living museum (currently homeless, aside from this basement storage room) depicting daily life in Laos.
If you’ve been following the Rambling Spoon for a while, you’ll know that we’ve been documenting the effects of unexploded ordnance (UXO) remaining since the U.S. bombing campaign 40 years ago. It’s a grim situation. We met Jim a couple of years ago in Khammouane province, where he worked with a clearance team that went out every day to investigate bombs found by local villagers. (Most of those villagers are farmers, and most of the bombs were found while working in the field.) You might recall my post about a couple of phosphorous bombs that Jim’s team destroyed after local kids pointed them out in the field. Once again, here’s a photo of that detonation:
We had a chance to see Jim again a few weeks ago while investigating Hmong food on his home turf in Wausau, Wisconsin. He updated us on his plans. When Jim gets back to Laos this time, he’ll be heading into the far north, into territory where other clearance groups won’t work. In theory, Phongsali wasn’t bombed enough to warrant clearance. It’s true, just a small portion of the overall area of the province was bombed. But that southern stretch suffered a torrent of explosives that continue to hurt and kill people today. Jim’s going out there to remove the problem.
For the past several months, Jim knocked on American doors and traveled the country looking for donations to fund his work. He’s been on TV, radio and in print. He’s hoping his fellow Americans will feel moved to give since it was the U.S. government that dropped the bombs on Laos in a secret, unauthorized war decades ago. He’s raised enough money to fund a month in Laos—but not the two additional months he hopes to work.
“You don’t get up day after day and go off to do bomb removal unless you are either suicidal or unrealistically optimistic,” he recently wrote to me. “I love life. I guess that makes me unrealistically optimistic. A blessing or a curse?”
Seaside view from the Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, before the tsunami
Exactly five years ago, on the morning after Christmas, an earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra. With a magnitude surpassing 9.1, it was one of the mightiest quakes on record. It spurred a series of tsunamis that devastated parts of Asia and Africa, and it killed at least 230,000 people. Jerry and I had just spent a month in Sri Lanka, one of the hardest-hit countries. When we heard the news, we shifted our holiday plans and traveled to Phuket, in southern Thailand, to cover the aftermath. What follows is an essay based on my journal notes from our month of travels along Sri Lanka’s edges, before Mother Nature altered the coastline forever. It’s the second in a two-part series. The first, a personal essay about reporting on the tsunami from Thailand, ran yesterday.
The Sea Before
Note: We visited Sri Lanka during a ceasefire in a 30-year civil war between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government and the minority Hindu Tamil Tigers. That war ended in May 2009, but thousands of Tamil civilians remain in camps, and country is scarred by war. Jerry and I visited both south (predominantly Sinhalese) and north (predominantly Tamil) during our travels. In every corner of the country, Tamils and Sinhalese agreed: war would come again—and it did. Below are scenes from Sri Lanka’s waterfront, as it was in late November and early December 2004, just before nature pitched Sri Lankans a curveball in already catastrophic times.
Nov. 24
A storm comes. Black towers of clouds fade into a sheet of gray as lightning prickles distant rooftops. It comes, like most Asian storms, hard and fast. We dine tonight on the ocean, in Mount Lavinia, just south of Colombo. We order devilled fish, chicken curry and spicy rice. Two cats mingle with our feet and whine for scraps — feisty.
For a long while, we are the only people at this restaurant, so barren is this beach. A tropical beach with little hint of tourism. A couple of quiet men stroll through the darkened sand, talking and smoking, their silhouettes like mist. They have no light but that faint blip of a cigarette. A southbound train rumbles past, people cramped inside and spilling out the doors. The tracks follow the shoreline, closer to the water than any road. This place has the feel of a town abandoned after battle; roughened, empty, a little spooky.
Nov. 25
This morning I talk with Marcus, the desk man at our guesthouse. He spent 17 years in the Navy, in the north and east, and he describes his combat days with the hallmark precision of a tragic remembrance. “Our camp was attacked by LTTE in 1985. Third through fourth of May 1985. I was engaged in that face-to-face attack. We retaliated after 48 hours of attack.” He remembers three soldiers died and eight were badly injured: an amputated hand, an amputated leg, shrapnel wounds. After all these years, he still remembers the names of the dead and the cities they came from.
Marcus tells me he was excited to fight, not scared. He felt a duty to defend the lives of innocent people from “terrorist insurgents.” He thought he would die in that attack. “I thought there was no way — I must sacrifice my life.”
He admits the Tamils have not been treated kindly in the past 50 years; they suffered under the Sinhala-only law, which made Sinhalese the official language. “We must look at both sides.” But warfare aimed at civilians — bombs and raids in public places, a mark of the Tigers — is unconscionable, he says. “We must stop this nonsense.”
This afternoon, Jerry and I catch a train to Colombo. It takes 30 minutes in a shabby car with hard seats, hordes of people. The tracks skirt little shanties by the sea — nothing else on this coastline. Nothing but the poorest of homes, shacks huddled against each other. Women bathe at communal spigots, dogs laze in the shade. I watch their eyes as we slowly bounce by. (I remember their eyes later when I see pictures of these tracks, ripped from the earth and all these homes, gone.)
We arrive at Colombo’s main station amid hustle-and-bustle and a riotous noise. A moaning, more like it. Buddhist monks occupy the sidewalk, chanting in unison, protesting the LTTE. They do not want a separate country, a monk tells Jerry. They want a unified Sri Lanka, Tamils and Sinhalese. So they sit and chant their story amid the frenzied rush of humanity getting on and off the trains.
The sea, Colombo
Strolling around Colombo’s seaside fort: it feels as though the war is not over. Snipers skitter atop skyscrapers; two wiggle and wave when we spot them from the street. All government buildings hide behind thick barriers of sandbags and concertina wire. A lone soldier peeks from an empty seaside lookout on a playground of rainbow-colored swing sets.
We pass bombed-out buildings, just the shells still standing; we pass others reduced to heaps of broken bricks. Again and again, police officers stop us and ask where we go — no problem to look around, but no photos allowed. Colombo is a place at odds, with the tarnished remnants of colonialism and the feel of a city quietly under siege. There’s a police post, sponsored by Coca-Cola, beside the Galle Face Green, the city’s great promenade. There are checkpoints on the roads. There is tension and worry.
It’s Thanksgiving Day, we’ve almost forgotten. We drink beer at the Galle Face Hotel as the sun sets over roiling seas. Construction workers pound behind us; the ocean pounds before us. A chipmunk visits, taking my offerings of fried spicy cashew, propped on the leg of my chair. Crows cackle in the palms above us. The Indian Embassy stands within view; it is well-guarded, like all others. Soldiers prepare for another storm, erecting a tarp over their rooftop perch beside a mounted heavy machine gun. The sky blackens, the sea turns slate, the air cool and good. The rain chases us inside as it pummels the banquet tables on the lawn, white cloths and glasses drenched. Men in white shirts and black pants leap the wall and sprint to retrieve the dishes.
We return to Mt. Lavinia that night by taxi. As we pass through the Tamil area of Bambalapitiya, our driver tells us Tigers are bad for business. “Tiger people are dangerous,” he says. “They are suicide people.”
I tell our driver we are from the United States.
“Ahh… Bush,” he says.
I ask what he thinks.
If Bush had not been re-elected, he says, America would face more problems with Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda is a problem he understands — terrorists, he says, like the LTTE. How many times have the Tigers blown up hotels? Terrorists are bad for business, he says.
Nov. 26
It’s a Poya day, a Buddhist holiday, and the streets are bare. We head to a cramped little office in Bambalapitiya to buy LionAir tickets to Jaffna in the Tamil north. These days, the agent tells us, Jaffna is “more normal than Colombo,” where every day brings a new murder or three.
LionAir resumed flights to Jaffna with the ceasefire in 2002, after a four-year hiatus. The company opened in 1994 but, “Unfortunately,” the agent says with a downward glance, “one of our planes was shot down.” All 48 passengers and crew disappeared off the coast of Mannar Island.
Egret, Jaffna
Nov. 27, Jaffna
We drop closer and closer to Jaffna, passing over sparkling estuaries. Emerald forests, egrets in rice paddies, red dirt roads, crisp air: It’s beautiful, stunningly so. But the airport is a bunkered high-security zone. More soldiers, more encampments, more looks of war. There is nothing to indicate it has stopped. This is Tamil Eelam, at the northern tip of the island.
The 17-kilometer road into town passes shot-up schools and bombed-out homes, businesses with nothing left, buildings with trees and bushes growing inside; mile after mile destroyed. Most every corner in most every neighborhood is guarded by a Sri Lankan Army bunker with soldiers watching.
Nov. 29
We hire a van for a day trip, driving north and east, then back to Jaffna and west. It’s potholes all the way, nothing maintained. And everywhere, we see the Sri Lankan Army, the Sinhalese. Soldiers occupy the best beaches, Tamils tell us, and they’ve mined them all.
The young soldiers we talk to admit they don’t like it here. Tamils and Sinhalese living together, in fear.
These torn causeways wind through groves of palms, flush with birds and cows and goats, and more birds and butterflies, and more birds, all day long. Brahminy kites and cormorants, spot-billed pelicans and black-crowned night herons, little egrets, great egrets, grey herons, painted storks, red-wattled lapwings. I’ve never seen such birdlife in such abundance. The birds, so light on their legs; they walk through minefields with peaceful feet.
The homes we pass were lovely and elegant in a previous time, perched on the property of retirement dreams. Before: there were colonial art-deco villas set deep within coconut groves. Now: there is nothing but shattered walls and rooftops gone. So many families vanished, and all the contents of those homes with them.
Dec. 2
I’m on our balcony in Jaffna. A cow swishes its tail across the street. People pass on bicycles and a small fire burns against a wall. The sun strikes upon the bombed buildings around me.
We spent the day in a three-wheeled taxi driven by Mr. K, a newfound friend. He has a difficult past, having traded the life of a Tiger for that of a family man. He knows men have been killed for the political thoughts he now harbors – all he wants is peace and normalcy, a future for his children.
Mr. K drives us to Kurikadduwan, where we board a ferry to Nainativu, a small island where Hindus and Buddhists meet. Amid 5,000 Tamil villagers sits a Buddhist temple where the Buddha himself walked 2,500 years ago. He came to Sri Lanka, ironically, to stop a war. Legend says he left his footprint here, which is why thousands of Sinhalese Sri Lankans make pilgrimages to this island. Hence, the government stationed a Navy garrison here.
Just outside the temple, along the road from Buddhists to Hindus, is a Navy bunker. A 21-year-old soldier asks Jerry if he’d like to photograph his gun, a T-56 LMG. The soldier comes from the inland city of Kandy and has been stationed here six years. I do the math and realize he was 15 when he came to this island of peace.
Back on our balcony in Jaffna, the rain comes lightly from a heavy cloud over wavering sun. A clunky armored personnel carrier shuttles a load of soldiers up the road. A bus follows with more officers, then a truck. There has been rioting in Jaffna for the past two days. The circumstances remain cloudy, but it seems to be a squabble over fishing and money. At night, we’ve heard the jolting booms of grenades.
Mr. K has told us two boys died in last night’s fighting. A curfew was set from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., though we don’t know if it still stands. There is no news here beyond word of mouth. This afternoon, we had hoped to see an old ice factory, a five-story building on the coast, so Mr. K began driving in that direction. The narrow road met a cramped intersection crowded with people. We inadvertently found ourselves in the center of rioting, where yesterday’s deaths occurred. The locals politely advised us to leave immediately.
Jaffna has grown on us, but its troubles run deeper than we can go.
Fishing, Trincomalee
Dec. 7
Trincomalee, the eastern edge of Tamil Eelam. It could be Seattle, but it’s decidedly not. A city on a bay, islands and harbors, hills and fishing boats, birds and blue sky. Trinco sits on gorgeous land buffered from the sea. But it shelters the worst of ethnic hatreds and war-formed mentalities. Buildings are barricaded and marked with skulls and crossbones. As Jerry says, it’s as though no one here gives a shit, and shit is literally everywhere. So is garbage, so are guns.
The owner of our guesthouse is a man named Tilko, a Tamil who came of age in London. There, he drove a taxi, washed dishes and put himself through engineering school. He says his people are deeply united in their fight for freedom. “We are terrorists in the world’s eyes. But the people have suffered.”
Tilko returned during the ceasefire to help rebuild. He has opened several hotels, north and south, but he waits for lasting peace to pursue his grandest visions – he wants to build a resort on a small seaside plot outside Jaffna, and another one here, facing a coral island that’s good for snorkeling.
But it is not yet time.
Now, it is time to live with war in mind. Tilko plants rice and bananas on his vacant lands. That way, if the bombs fall one year, the fields can be replanted the next, he says. When he works on his hotels in town, he buys only cheap (though tasteful) materials because he knows the building may not last. “If there is war, we have to rebuild.”
Jerry and I take a tuk-tuk to the nearby tourist beach of Nilaveli. Our driver turns down a dirt trail and there it is, big wide sand, a few men casting lines, and nothing. No hotels, no restaurants, no tailor shops or tattoo stalls. It’s what happens in paradise when paradise goes to war.
A few scattered hotels lie farther up the road. We stop at a place where, for $17, you can rent a basic room with a porch overlooking the ocean. The pool-in-progress remains as it has for years. A military bunker sits next door. There are no guests when we visit, but the manager assures us things pick up in spring.
Dec. 26, Thailand
A tsunami strikes Asia, killing 230,000 people or more. Hardest hit are Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Early January
The little hotel we visited in Nilaveli is gone; we read about it in updated online guidebooks. “Flattened,” “totalement detruit,” “completamente distrutto.” Much like the streets we strolled in Trinco, where the waves scattered landmines far from their designated fields. Much like the tracks south of Colombo, where the tsunamis killed at least 800 on a southbound train. That train was called the “Queen of the Sea.”
A week or so after the tsunamis, an envelope arrives from Mr. K. “I pen this letter to remember you. I and my family are in good health,” he writes. But northern Sri Lanka is not. Mr. K sets off around the Jaffna Peninsula, to help where he can.
Mr. K sets off to do what millions of Sri Lankans have hoped to do for decades: rebuild and renew. And restore life to a devastated land.
This is a story about the best and worst of life, a story that cheers humanity’s goodness yet shames its evil. An Indian cyclist aims to circle the globe, to teach the world about AIDS. He pedals through remote Afghanistan, his 33rd country. The Taliban capture him. They tie him up for 24 days. He cooks them curry—spicy Sunderban curry from his homeland in the sultry mangrove forests of India. His captors eat and enjoy. They set him free.
Soldiers patrol a market in Pattani, in southern Thailand, where more than 3,500 people have been killed in an insurgency since 2004.
More than 90 people died and 200 were injured in a car bombing that ruptured a market Wednesday in Peshawar, Pakistan. As the BBC reports, “The market mostly sells products for women, and most of the dead were women and children.” The photos are sickening.
Sickening, as all such violence is, but even more so because of the venue. A market. Women. Children. Wednesday shoppers, dead.
I have not been to Peshawar, nor have I reported in Pakistan. But I have visited markets under threat of attack. I have strolled the aisles for vegetables and herbs while everyone’s nerves go shaky in the presence of men with guns.
The above photo was taken at a local market in Pattani, where thousands have died in violent attacks that bewilder Buddhists and Muslims alike. When Jerry and I visited, locals told us to steer clear of soldiers because they are often the targets of bombings. We were advised to limit our time in crowded places. “Just do your business and go,” a Pattani shop owner told us. That morning in the market, as soldiers patrolled, the aisles cleared as in the parting of the Red Sea.
When I woke to the news from Pakistan today, I wondered how many people have died in market violence around the world. Google “market bombings” and you’ll find a long string of incidents, mostly in Pakistan and Iraq, but also in places such as Uzbekistan, North Ossetia, Indonesia, and, yes, Thailand, too. How many women die each year while buying a leg of lamb? How many kids are sent out for tomatoes, never to return? What price does the world really pay for a sack of groceries?
And who will publish these important food-issue stories?
This morning I sipped my coffee and listened to an NPR report assessing Sri Lanka one month after the end of war. For a short while, this tiny island nation made world headlines as government forces pushed for victory in a conflict that had lasted decades. And then it all seemed to disappear—the war, the people, the place itself. But of course Sri Lanka has not disappeared, and the aftermath of war remains a daily punch in the gut to 280,000 displaced Tamil civilians who continue to live in tent cities.
Prabhakaran’s house, northern Sri Lanka
Jerry and I were in London last month when the news broke that Prabhakaran, the notorious Tamil rebel leader, had been killed. All around Tooting—home to a sizable Tamil population—shop windows displayed posters decrying genocide against the Tamils, waged by the predominantly Sinhalese military. We shared dinner one night with a Tamil couple from Jaffna. They had left their homeland years ago, for a new life in England. But they still maintain ties and frequent visits to Sri Lanka. That night, over a full table of rice and curries, they told us the same stories Jerry and I had heard time and again when we visited Jaffna years before: the Sri Lankan government was targeting ethnic Tamils through assassinations, rapes, forced sterilizations and other indignities.
This has been a terribly long, brutal war. We have Tamil friends; we have Sinhalese friends. We know people on both sides of this conflict who have suffered, directly and indirectly, in the most horrendous ways. Nothing good can be said of that.
But what I want to offer here are a few glimpses of the everyday life we found in Tamil Eelam, the homeland for which Tamils have fought so long. We met real people—good people—with real families and a real desire for peace.
A little background: in 1956 the Sri Lankan government enacted a law making Sinhala the country’s official language. That new law effectively blocked Tamils from government jobs, and it marked the start of ethnic clashes that eventually spiraled into decades of war. During a brief ceasefire, Jerry and I were able to visit Tamil territory in northern Sri Lanka in December 2004, days before the tsunami hit.
On that trip, we spent time with average Tamils struggling to survive in a land that already had been ripped apart. Everyone we encountered—every single Tamil—knew war would soon return. Still, they hammered away at the skeletons of houses that had been bombed. They would try to rebuild, if only for a few months.
We befriended a taxi driver, Mr. K, who once fought for the Tigers but retired from that life in hopes of saving his children from a future in war. You can click here to read more about our travels with Mr. K, and the food we ate, and the uncertainty in which we left that environment.
Or, simply scroll through the scenes below for a view of everyday life in Tamil Eelam, as we saw it then.
Fish drying in Jaffna
Jaffna fish market
Jaffna women collecting water at a public tap
Fruit vendor at a Jaffna night market
Tamil families gathered for a Martyrs’ Day commemoration, honoring the dead
Sinhalese government soldier stationed in the north
A Jaffna “liquor restaurant,” where men gather for a quick drink before heading home
A Catholic church in the former LTTE stronghold of Kilinochchi, showing its war scars
A Catholic priest performing a prayer service for women in Kilinochchi
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Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
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