My parents have been reading my tsunami diaries on Chowk. I do email home every once in a while but it is the best way for them to hear about the work I am going, or at least what I am involved in. The main theme of the comments I got back from A & A (Amee and Abbu) was along the lines of: “A good writer doesn’t need foul language in order to get their thoughts across.”

I have used the word “shit” once in front of my parents. We are not a household that curses--at all. My dirty mouth has nothing to do with my parents. They raised me right. Somewhere, I managed to go left. So, in honor of my parents, the article today will not use any words that rhyme with itch, yuck, hit etc. I will rate this G. I will “behave”. Colonel Saab, I hope you are reading.

2 months in Sri Lanka. Did the whole unsuccessful NGO route, found something else that fits and exhaustion has set in. I have been in Hikkaduwa long enough where the tuk tuk drivers know not to pull up and ask me where I want to go. In a tourist town, this makes me local. It’s been difficult these days since I have been saying goodbye to so many people. It’s no fun. You work with these people, their project is over, they go home. You do not.

There is something to be said about the exhilaration of seeing a project completed. Seeing 40 families re-housed. You helped them out of the tents and into homes. You can point out nails you hammered in, nails you forgot to take out, bricks you helped lay out. If I could keep working day after day it would be great. I would like less time to think. Thinking these days is a disturbing past time, a necessary one but disturbing nonetheless.

There are aid/relief workers who have been here since day 2. They have been leaving since their 2-3 months are up but there are some stragglers left behind who, I think, need to leave. People who have cleaned bodies and rubble. I met recently, one such person. Or I thought I did. Everything she talked about that night turned out to be a lie. That is another story. She was a catalyst however for things that were buzzing around in my head. Anyhow, we will call this woman X.

X is already drunk by the time we all sit at her table. There is a bunch of us sitting around talking, laughing, drinking, eating etc. 30 minutes into the conversation, X puts her head in the lap of my friend and we all assume she has passed out. I am holding forth on what I wrote about last time. I was sitting in the same scene. Top Secret, drunk people, the beach, and I still hold to this figure, 85% aid workers. X couldn’t hear me, but all of a sudden, she gets up from the lap, looks straight at me (the only woman at the table, and also the only S. Asian at the table) and slurs: I’m not drunk. Don’t you dare judge me. I’ve picked up dead bodies, don’t YOU judge me.”

Everyone was a little shocked but then she was more than a little drunk. There is some silence and we all just resume our conversations. X starts talking to a friend of mine and shoots me venomous looks every once in a while. I find out an hour later that X is a white South African, who thinks the issue of apartheid was blown out of proportion. It wasn’t such a big deal.

She hates Sri Lankans, I’m a half-wit tarted up and she hates this “beep-ing” country. What X is doing in Sri Lanka with so many issues is beyond me. Anyhow, I’m told this information and I’m pretty much ready to kick her drunken derrière into the street and get into a pretty magnificent cat-fight which I am told would be pointless. I let good sense prevail and just feel awful about being picked on since I’m brown. I have thought about this for the last week and I feel very comfortable saying, yes, I was picked on since I was brown.

I don’t want this to be a story about X. She’s an idiot. Clearly. Regardless of her being an A-grade itch, who clearly has some stability/reality/pathological liar issues, it made me feel bad. Really, really yucky. X managed to get under my skin since she was a high intensity encounter.

Most encounters are a constant low intensity buzzing which after 3 weeks can drive a person mad. For example, one of the annoying things that happen to me here is that in a group of mostly white (ok, almost always white), men and women, a stranger coming in will ask everyone, except me, where they are from. They can hear from my accent where I’m from, they have to be able to. But no, no one will ask. I have no idea what they are assuming but a hunch tells me it’s not America. Don’t ask me why it bothers me, but it does.

My first three weeks here and no one thought I was Sri Lankan. The next three weeks, I was part Sri Lankan. 2 months in the sun and everyone (local) looks at me and starts talking to me in Singhala. They realize I don’t speak Singhala and I lose any sort of credibility. Not only do I not speak Singhala or Tamil, I’m not even white.

What kind of messed up responsibility do I feel as a S. Asian that I feel awful that I can’t speak Singhala, that I have no Sri Lankan connection, that I’m not Sri Lankan? It’s silly because hey, guess what? I’m not. I am also working in a South Asian country mostly with non South Asians as a S. Asian who considers herself American. Where does that leave me when neither side really wants me or knows where to place me? Usually I can deal with ambiguity, I thrive in it, (on it-ed?) but I’m having a hard time not having a place. Especially, when I was not expecting to be such an outsider at all times.

Back home, (America is home) for me, brown is one people. It’s just a one nation term: South Asian. In S. Asia, it doesn’t work that way and I knew that before coming here. The difference was that I knew that in terms of the S. Asian population I would meet. Not the mostly white, aid worker population. Am I just getting lumped in with the brown population they see?

This would not be such an issue if the brown population here saw me as one of them. They don’t. No one does. It is an ‘us and them’ situation and I’m just…I’m just here. I don’t want to choose sides and I am used to playing both sides, well all sides of identity politics but this is something so different from what I am used to. I’m sure it’s not complicated either (you’re an outsider, stupid), but I am too exhausted to get my head around anything right now. I just know something doesn’t feel right and that I’m neither Sri Lankan, or white (I’m talking about white in a larger privilege sense, not so much as in skin color and that is a whole separate article).

I should never have left the streets of Brooklyn.

Sri Lanka by the way, is fine. The government still sucks. The volunteers are still working. This place will be swarming with volunteers in the summer. I am outta here in a month. Less perhaps.