Hill Country; part 3 – MENCAFEP

When I came to Sri Lanka in 2000 (on a University ‘field trip’) I visited a school in Nuwara Eliya for children with disabilities and learning difficulties. Twelve years later (when I knew we were coming back to Sri Lanka) and having found myself, more by circumstance than plan, with a good deal of experience of running participatory photography workshops for kids, and adults (both able bodied and not so) I thought that it would be good to return to the school and do some photography with the kids.

MENCAFEP (Mentally Handicapped Children and Families Education Project) is the only organisation in the country to provide educational support to children with disabilities and learning difficulties, and was started in 1988 by Englishman Chris Stubbs, and his wife Ranji. They now have an extensive program in Nuwara Eliya comprising a school for Pre School up to 18, a Vocational training unit for over 18’s, a home for kids who live too far away to get to the school everyday, or who just don’t have any family, a home visit service, various satellite centres around the area, and centres in Batticaloa, and Trincomalee.

I offered to do some PR shots for their website; http://www.mencafepsrilanka.com/ as well as running some workshops with the kids.

Music and dancing in the severely disabled unit

Severely disabled unit

Pre-school

Pre-school...hand printing

Tamil and Sinhala Educational Unit

Vocational Training Unit

Kids getting ready for lunch

Everyone wanted to have their picture taken...

Lunch is prepared, over a wood burning stove

Rice and curry...outside as the sun was out, (which apparently it's not, always here...)

and no knife and fork...this seems odd at first but eating with your fingers is normal here.

Home visit service...this is for kids who are unable to make it into school due to severe disabilities, or their families are unable to get them there

The home visit service provides valuable advice, nutrition/medical packs, and also companionship for the parents

This single room, and single bed, is home to four people.

Little girl with Downs Syndrome, outside her house. I took a little portable Polaroid printer with me on this occasion and gave this girl a print...then everyone down her street wanted one too. 

Having done lots of this kind of work in the UK it was interesting to compare with Sri Lanka. I was told that the prevailing attitude towards people with disabilities in Sri Lanka was that they had done something bad in a previous life, and therefore it was their karma which had determined their unfortunate existence in this one. In a country that is predominantly Buddhist and Hindu I guess that should hardly be surprising, but as a 21^st Century Westerner I obviously find that kind of thinking backward (to say the least) and offensive…who am I to judge though.

The attitude at MENCAFEP though is of course quite the opposite, and over their nearly 25 years they have managed to make considerable progress in both changing lives, and attitudes. Even over the intervening 12 years since I last visited, the school had grown considerably. We were given accommodation in the Family home unit which was a treat as the kids were really happy to have some new faces, and in particular because Noah now had some new friends to play with. Over the week that we were there we got to know a lot of the kids, and felt like we were briefly becoming part of the family.

Boy in the Family Home Unit

Family Home Unit

Homework in the Family Home Unit

This is Sarath, in the Family Home Unit. I'm not sure how old he is, but he's  over 18 and is now employed by the school. I'm almost positive I have a photograph of him, as a little boy, sitting on a swing, from the last time I visited! 

This is Amma, which means Mum...she looks after all the kids in the Family Home Unit

Unfortunately, funding at MENCAFEP is now becoming an issue, as Terre des Hommes, their major funder has decided to pull out of Sri Lanka due to the fact that the government keep insisting on the money going through government channels, rather than direct to charity...presumably so that they can use it for other things that they deem more pressing. 

The workshops I did with the kids were great fun too. These are kids who probably don’t even have their photo taken very often, let alone actually get to take photos; many of the kids at the school come from extremely poor backgrounds (from families of tea plantation workers etc) so the opportunity to have fun with a camera was something fairly unique. When I do this kind of work back home, most kids enjoy it too, but they all have a camera on their mobile phone, so it’s not as if they’ve never used a camera before! We did various different things but the pictures I like the most are the Macro ones they did;

'Something Blue' from the "picture Treasure Hunt" I did with the kids

Raindrops on a leaf...macro work with the kids

Colender,  from macro work with the kids

Light and dark on a leaf...macro work

Macro eyeball...with camera reflection

Necklace and skin texture, macro work

Me with some of the kids at the end of a workshop

When I showed them the photos on a projector they were clearly quite pleased with themselves, and this, for my part, is the thing I like most…seeing someone get the bug for taking pictures, and being really exited and enthusiastic about it is just great. I had been a little apprehensive about whether the language barrier would be too difficult to deal with, but photography being a visual language I guess that just didn’t matter in the end!

Chris, and some of the other staff I worked with were also very happy, and I’ve been invited to go back at some stage to do some more work there with the kids, with a view to doing a fund raising exhibition…bring it on, I love it! 

Hill Country; Part 2 (a small photography pilgrimage)

Back in Bolton, before leaving for Sri Lanka I had been talking with my  MA course leader (top Yorkshire man and great photographer) Ian Beasley about what I was going to do In Sri Lanka. During the course of the conversation we discovered that the famous Victorian portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron had died there on her families’ coffee plantation. So we decided that I would have to see if I could try and find her grave.

Julia Margaret Cameron was born the daughter of a colonial official in Calcutta  in 1815. Moving in circles of Victorian high society she knew many of the great artists and thinkers of the time, such as Charles Darwin, John Herschel (astronomer) and the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. She was given a camera by her daughter on her 48^th birthday and spent the next couple of decades making some of the best known (not to mention most arresting) portraits of the time, documenting a cross section of Victorian society. She didn’t work commercially, she did it because she loved doing it (presumably). In 1875 she moved to their family home in Ceylon, after their coffee plantation failed and the family fell on hard times. She died in 1879, after catching a chill. Her husband Charles Hay Cameron, 20 years her senior died the following year.

So, I looked on the internet (home of all truth and nonsense) to find out where she might be buried, and found a website called (would you believe it?) ‘findagrave.com’. This cheery website told me that she was buried at Glencairn church, Dikoya. So, whilst up in tea country near Nuwara Eliya we decided to go and see if we could find it. We took a (really uncomfortable) two hour bus ride to the town of Hatton, and then a short tuk tuk ride to Glencain, just past Dikoya.

In need of somewhere to stay we found an old tea planters Bungalow (built  1906) called ‘Upper Glencairn Lodge”. It was like stepping back in time - full of furniture from the 1930’s and looked as though it had all been there since then too. 

Upper Glencairn tea planters bungalow. 

Inside; the living room and bar.

Living room and bar

Dining room

It was surrounded by hills covered in tea, mostly from the Norwood Estate which you can stay in for a small fortune, and a beautiful lake at the bottom of the valley. It was like a living postcard. 

View over the tea fields to the lake. 

We asked about the Anglican church and were told it was only about 1 km away, so after unpacking and having a look around the house we headed off for a stroll to see if we could find the grave. The road wound around the valley a short distance, with tea pluckers and kids waving and saying hello. It all looked idyllic. Then we found the little church, which was straight out of an English country village…perched on top of the valley, overlooking the lake. 

view of the lake on our walk to the church

A couple of kids on their way home from school...Umbrellas are not just for rain. 

The English country church at Glencairn, overlooking tea fields and the lake. 

As we began to read the names on the headstones (all English names, all died late 1800’s/early 1900’s) I was feeling quite exited! Could this be it? If so, did the good lady herself attend this church on a Sunday morning?

Well actually, no.  After about a minute a lady came out of the house next to the church and started chatting to us. I explained that I was looking for the grave of a lady called Julia Margaret Cameron and she said “ah yes, Julia Margaret, not here…church at Bogawantalawa”. How disappointing…it had seemed such a nice place for the great lady to end up, with a cracking view too, I was sure she would have appreciated it!

Hey ho, we were dutifully shown around the church, and had a look at the ancient Bible (which the lady was particularly proud of). Feeling a bit deflated I took down the name of the place – Bogawantalawa (a bit of a mouth full) which the lady seemed positive was Cameron’s correct burial place (the fact that she had heard of her at all was encouraging at any rate) and then headed back to the planters lodge for gin and tonic.  

The Bible, dated 1879 (the year that Cameron died)

Some graves, but not THE grave...overlooking the lake.  Not a bad spot to end up.

Back at the Bungalow for drinks on the lawn, and Noah badly needs a haircut. 

View from the bungalow; sunset over the lake and mountains. 

View from the bar; old drinks cabinet.

The next day, we set off for Bogawantalawa…another stunningly beautiful 40 minute tuk tuk ride through the plantations and tea factories, hills and waterfalls and eventually arrived at the small Anglican church. Not so much a village, as a collection of houses, the church wasn’t quite as quaint as Glencairn, but never the less looked old enough to be right. 

Bogawantalawa Anglican Church

We got out and started looking, and almost immediately Britta found it! There it was, sure enough; Julia Margaret Cameron…the dates were right, 1815 - 1879, and it was a double grave, with her husband Charles Hay Cameron 1795 – 1890.  Standing looking at it, I suddenly realised that perhaps I should have brought some flowers or something to put on the grave…it looked as though it could do with some! I didn’t have anything to leave on it I’m afraid, so I just took some photos instead, hoping that would be in some way appropriate. It didn’t look much different from all the other graves (also all English names, mostly double barrelled) and to my mind looked a bit sad and forlorn sitting in a dusty, weedy graveyard. Not sure what I’d been expecting (some sort of grand monument, or Jim Morrison style shrine perhaps?) but I suppose after all the anticipation of looking for it I must have thought that it would be at least marked out as a bit special…

Here it is; the slightly unremarkable joint grave of Julia Margaret Cameron and her husband Charles Hay Cameron. 

The grave, with church...she was apparently quite religious (as were most people back then I suppose) so I guess this was her local parish church. It felt slightly surreal to be there, and to imagine her coming here.

Well, there’s a lesson for us all I guess…no matter what we do in life, after a few generations have been and gone we all end up as just a dusty old grave. And I suppose it’s not as if her surviving descendants can pop along to put some fresh flowers of the grave every now and then! That makes it even worse that I forgot to bring anything...

The tuk tuk driver was slightly bemused…why had we come all this way to look at this unremarkable grave. I explained who she was, and he seemed none the wiser. I took some photo’s whilst wondering what Mrs Cameron would have thought about me making this little pilgrimage to her final resting place, until eventually the vicar arrived and asked us in to his house for a cuppa. He was called Jonathan (which apparently is a Tamil name) and told me that in his spare time he was a gospel singer and had released three albums. I wonder what the vicar of Bogawantalawa in Cameron’s time would have thought about that?

Inside the church...lots of plaques were on the wall to long dead and forgotten Englishmen.

Jonathan; the Gospel singing local parish priest.

I don’t know why, but now that I’ve been and searched out her grave, I’ve been looking again at her work, and feel just that little bit closer to it. Her portraits have a feeling of intimacy, and I suppose I feel at some level a little more intimate with her too, now that I’ve been and seen where she ended up.

For those that need to see her work, just google her, or follow this link;

http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/Julia-Margaret-Cameron.html

Hill Country; part 1

Hill Country; part 1

After nearly three months based in Negombo we decided it was time to move on. We needed to move around a bit more to get access to areas of the country useful for Britta’s research, and also we felt like there were other places we’d like to spend more time in. So, when my parents came out to Sri Lanka to see us we moved out of the house we’d rented and did some touristy stuff with them… We hired a van, and a driver called Sam. First we went to Galle (I’ll do a separate post about that) followed by a painfully slow eight hour drive up to the hills, and the town of Nuwara Eliya.

Nuwara Eliya is just over 1800 metres above sea level, and is overlooked by Sri Lanka’s tallest mountain. It’s at the heart of tea country and is surrounded, as far as the eye can see by tea estates. Because of it’s altitude it has a warm temperate climate, which makes it good for growing tea, and the whole region, it seems, is given over to it’s production. The climate is also good for growing European vegetables like lettuce, potatoes, carrots, and especially strawberries.  Many of the people in this region of Sri Lanka are employed in either the tea industry, or growing vegetables.

Also known as ‘little England’ Nuwara Eliya was the summer residence of the former governor of Ceylon, and is dotted with former colonial houses and bungalows all pleasantly situated around lake Gregory. There is a park called Victoria park which is packed with all kinds of tropical and European flowers, as well as fountains, and a small railway line for the kids. Walking around the town you can see lots of old colonial buildings which just look like they’ve been picked up from an English town and dumped in Sri Lanka, such as the post office, and Hatton National Bank. Some are looking a bit shabby (an old 1930’s cinema (‘the new Tivoli’) and Cargill’s ‘food city’ (supermarket). There are also a few shops, (such as Cargill’s) that seem to have retained most of the original fixtures and fittings from the colonial period (such as beautiful wood and glass cabinets and shelving (see my post on Cargill’s in Colombo) but which are now filled with more modern and Sri Lankan wares, samosa’s and rotti’s. Clogard (toothpaste) etc…

Not hard to see why this part of Sri Lanka is called 'Little England'. 

Victoria Park, full of European and tropical plants and flowers, such as the giant fern on the left

As we were with my parents at this point, we’d booked into the ‘Grand Hotel’. This was apparently where the Governor held various social functions and has a large garden and ballroom. Although definitely grand, and a bit more expensive than we’d normally pay it seemed like a bit of a treat. Naturally we had to have some tea on the lawn, but were a bit disappointed that they didn’t seem to know what a cream tea was, or have a croquet set! There were other places we could have stayed that would have been far nicer and a good deal more expensive, but all in all, I can’t complain. Apart from the lack of cream tea. Or croquet.

The Grand Hotel, Nuwara Eliya. 

The Grand Hotel, view from one of the gardens

We did seem to have timed this badly for my parents visit though as on our second day there (which was also my parents last day) the Buddhist and Hindu festival of Vesak began, which meant that things like tea factories were closed (which my parents wanted to look at) and also we weren’t allowed to buy any booze. Fortunately my dad had half a bottle of gin in his suitcase (that makes him sound like an old soak… he’s not, honestly) which we were allowed to drink in our rooms.

Time flew by with my folks and they seemed to enjoy being here, sharing this place with them was great. They had to return to Colombo for their flight home the day after Vesak began (which by the way goes on for about a week, and feels like a lot longer because the Buddhist monks keep chanting all night, and you can’t buy any alchohol) so we put them in the van with our driver Sam and sent them on their way, feeling sorry to see them go and hoping that it wouldn’t take them eight hours to get there! Sam, by the way is almost definitely the slowest driver in the world, and we were overtaken by buses and lorries, going up hill, on the way there!

On my previous trip to Nuwara Eliya in 2000, I visited a school for kids with disabilities and learning difficulties. So this time round I had arranged to go and do some work there for about a week. We had a few days to kill before that started so we decided to explore ‘hill country’ a bit. For one reason or another we went to a town called Hatton, and stayed in a hotel which was at the other end of the spectrum from The Grand, as far as Grandness goes, with two cockroaches and a rat (in our room at any rate).

Hatton isn’t really on the tourist route, but was great for two reasons; the Vesak festivities, and the train ride through the mountains back to Nuwara Eliya, which is probably the most fun I’ve ever had on a train. We opted to travel second class. We thought we may have made an error of judgement when we saw the packed train pulling into the station, and the other western tourists on the platform leisurely seating themselves in the ‘first class observation coach’. We clambered aboard the 2^nd class coach to find there was standing room only (not sure what 3^rd class is like) and the only place left to stand was by the toilets. Initially we both lost our sense of humour about this…a two hour train ride, standing up, next to the toilet, with all our bags, and Noah of course, wasn’t looking all that promising. But, after the first twenty minutes or so a few people got off and there was actually room to sit (on the floor, by the toilets). The great thing about trains in Sri Lanka is that they don’ t ever seem to shut their doors, and no one cares if you sit/stand in the open doorway looking out as the train is moving. So I spent the next hour and a half, all the way back to Nuwara Eliya hanging out of the doorway taking pictures…! Fantastic! Beats the Trans Pennine from Leeds to Manchester hands down I’m afraid! 

After leaving Nuwara Eliya for a couple of days, the Vesak festivities in Hatton were loud and colourful, with lots of  special 'vehicles' covered with ornate carvings, being pulled by rows of people up the main street to the Kovil (Hindu Temple). 

No idea what these instruments are called but they sound great...

Ace drumming too...

...and lots of crazy dancing.

Quite hard to dance with this kind of hat, but he was going for it anyway

Everyone was in party mood, despite the lack of alcohol in the shops...free fruit juice was flowing plentifully though.

The Kovil...centre of the festival. (Vesak is primarily Buddhist I think, but the Hindu's celebrate it too). 

One of the statues outside the Kovil...not sure who it is, the Hindu's have thousands of gods...

...though this one I know is called Ganesh. 

Train ride back to Nuwara Eliya from Hatton...through beautiful hilly tea country, leaning out the door. I love the fact that no one gives a toss about health and safety here! 

There's almost a party atmosphere on the train...and every time we went through a tunnel all the kids screamed at the tops of their voices, just for the fun of hearing it echoing down the tunnel...fairground style! 

Hatton to Nuwara Eliya is about 50 km's, and second class, for all three of us, was about a quid...Bargain!