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(in response to surprised news reports about women’s participation in Tunisia and Egypt)
by Samanthi J Gunawardana

When Claudette Colvin took a stand, sitting on a bus,
When Adrienne Rich wrote to us,
and my sister bell hooks spoke back,           
they reached across time to another place where
Bahissat El Badia implored from the Egyptian desert
Pandita Rambai travelled, and started women’s organizations
and Seitosha asked women to awake.

UPDATE, February 8, 2011:

The people of Sri Lanka still need your help. The districts of Anuradhapura, Amparai, Batticaloa, Polonnaruwa and Trincomalee are inundated with floodwater for the second time this year. As of February 3, 2011, 254 mm of rain pounded the area in 48 hours, disrupting ongoing relief efforts and re-flooding villages where displaced people had begun to return to their homes. The rains have also triggered terrible landslides in the hill-country of central Sri Lanka. Over 1.2 million people -- 1 in 20 Sri Lankans -- are affected by the floods of January and February 2011.

We encourage our friends to give generously to those in need. We also look to the government of Sri Lanka to demonstrate strong leadership and a commitment to reconciliation by moving swiftly to support its citizens in this time of crisis.

This month, torrential rains flooded several regions of Sri Lanka. In response to this humanitarian crisis, Lanka Solidarity seeks donations to support efforts to resettle and assist impoverished communites displaced by the floods. In a country of 21 million, over one million people have been affected by the floods. The Eastern Province was hit especially hard. According to reports, after 7 inches of rain per day for 2 weeks straight, 75% of Batticaloa is currently under water, where over 50,000 people live in flood-relief camps as of January 17, 2011. An additional 25,755 are in camps in Amparai.   It is expected that the rains will continue until the end of monsoon season in February. 

In total, the floods covered 11 of the country's 25 districts, flooding homes, causing landslides, ruining crops, damaging dams and wells and killing livestock.  In addition to rebuilding housing and infrastructure, Sri Lanka faces the challenge of ensuring food security for its people, as the floods destroyed an estimated 125,000 acres of rice paddy, the country’s staple crop.

As flood waters recede and people slowly return to their homes, they need basic supplies such as rice, flour, stoves, and water purifiers.  These floods are especially devastating to an impoverished region that is still rebuilding after decades of a brutal war and the 2004 tsunami. Lanka Solidarity has compiled a list in support of grassroots organizations that are established among local communities and doing flood relief work. We will add to this list as we acquire more information. If you work with a Sri Lankan organization doing flood relief and would like to be considered for this list, please email us at contact@lankasolidarity.org.

Despite all its contradictions, controversies and corporate control, it was the American Liberal Arts College that first got me thinking. For the first time in my life I was taught to look beyond textbooks; for the first time in my life I didn’t hear the phrase, “don’t be too smart” when I challenged a teacher or questioned their authority over me, and for the first time in my life I was actively critiquing educational oppression that I had struggled against for years as a student in Sri Lanka. Once, during a class called the Intimacy of Terror, students were asked to recount experiences in which the pervasive nature of state control affected us on a personal level.

Instantly, I was reminded of myself as a thirteen year old, sitting in my English Language classroom in an international school in Colombo. We had been assigned an essay about “An Unforgettable Day.” I wrote about a Tamil family from Colombo who took a vacation to their ancient family burial ground in Jaffna. After a full day’s travel, the family reaches the graveyard to find that the bodies have all been dug up by Sinhala mobs. Corpses are everywhere. The family attempts to digest this kind of violence, the kind that is hell-bent on claiming ownership over the land, over the right to be there. One of the other girls in my class wrote about a date rape. Another friend of mine wrote her essay on an unforgettable day with a physically abusive father. The teacher failed us all on the assignment. She claimed we had not ‘followed instructions.’ “Unforgettable doesn’t mean these things,” she shouted, flourishing our essays in her fist. “Unforgettable means going to the park, or having a party.” We were forced to re-write our essays. This is not a particularly exceptional anecdote; rather, it represents the limits of what, in my opinion, is publicly, socially and politically sayable on a national level in Sri Lanka. The class carried on, other students chiming in with their own personal stories of state control. But the lesson lingered in my mind long after I’d left the lecture hall.

During moments of national crisis, certain groups bear the brunt of state repression. These groups are: the minorities (oppressed races, sexes or language groups); the labor unions (representing disenfranchised workers); the independent media (harbingers of truth) and the students (visionaries) It stands to reason, then, that these are also the groups that can be counted on to pull a nation out of crisis – by championing democracy, equality and change in the face of stagnant dictatorships. The faster a government clamps down on these groups’ freedom of speech and expression, the easier it becomes to ascertain the magnitude of their threat to the established regime.

This article, by Darini Rajasingham Senanayake, first appeared in Groundviews, at http://www.groundviews.org/2010/05/27/fighting-windmills-diaspora-and-militarism-in-post-conflict-lanka/#more-3489