The Project

The survey began on Tuesday. In the past four days we visited 36 houses – so quite an impressive start! Survey team members: Sameera, Kumari, Tharanga, and me. Ideally, Sameera and Kumari administer the questionnaire to the heads of household and Tharanga and I scout out the property, taking GPS way points of property boundaries and gardens, and taking pictures of important things such as tap lines and outdoor toilets. Tharanga and I also compile a list of the crops that are cultivated on the properties. At first my identification skills were limited to the obvious: coconut, mango, papaya, spinach, rice, and banana. Thanks to Sameera and Tharanga, I can now recognize manioc, sweet potato, jack fruit, pomegranate, lime, jasmine, anoda, silme apple, wood apple, ugarassa, and bread fruit. Tharanga’s English is limited, but it helps that we can point to things and we have gotten good at interpreting hand and face gestures.

Typically, Sameera asks the family some opening questions before asking for permission to take photos of the property. During this interval I quickly sketch a map of the property to orient myself and try to gauge the temperature of our reception, which is difficult since I can’t speak the language. Some landowners are hesitant to let me walk around while others enthusiastically agree and even invite us to share some tea and fruit (these are my favorite houses!). At times Sameera and/or Tharanga have said that something is not right with the household and that I have to be careful while on my reconnaissance mission. For me, this only adds to the adventure and as of yet we have not stumbled onto any unpleasant scenes. But, I have managed to give Sameera and Tharanga a number of tiny heart attacks. Although I do my best to maintain constant vigilance, my attention often gets stuck on a plant I don’t recognize or a particularly interesting out-house set up and I miss the finer details, such as the ant nest or bee hive I am about to crash into. For example, the other day I was scouting out the back garden of a house and Tharanga was walking in front of me. I noticed a water meter and stopped to make a note of it. What appeared to be huge, red ants were crawling all over it and I shouted over to Tharanga to come take a look. As I stuck my face closer to get a better view, I noticed these ants had wings and were in fact not ants, but wasps. Tharanga had a look of horror on his face and motioned for me to move away quickly and quietly. “Very dangerous! Move away, be quiet!” He hissed. Ooops. The next day we went to take a survey of the school principal’s house. Again, Tharanga and I were walking around the yard when I looked up to see a panicked look on Tharanga’s face, “Careful, careful!” He was pointing to the tree trunk immediately to my left that I had been about to rest my hand on. You have got to be kidding me; there was a honey beehive in a flower pot attached to the trunk. As we walked on to another house, I brushed against a bush and a small thorn embedded itself in my finger. “Ah! Oh no, very poisonous, very poisonous!” Sameera cried. Fortunately, there appears to have been no harm done – I still have all of my fingers. On our walk home I was enjoying the sunset and happened to recognized a beautiful flower on the side of the road. It was the wara flower that Tharanga had pointed out to me on the beach at Yala Park. “Ooh!” I exclaimed and I rushed over to smell the flower, glad to finally have found something harmless to admire. I had just started to take a big sniff when Sameera rushed over yelling, “No, no! Very poisonous!” Yeesh, you can’t even smell the roses without putting your life at risk.

Apart from my numerous close calls, the survey really is going well. It is exhausting to walk around all day in the heat, but I get so absorbed in the work that I hardly notice the uncomfortable conditions. The project has great significance to the villagers and local wildlife, and I feel I have finally become involved in the ideal project for me. Here is some more background information and a little of what we have discovered so far. Villagers have settled down immediately adjacent to the park: a barbed wire fence, which is regularly broken by the elephants, and a road are the only barriers between farms and over 600 elephants. Imagine standing in the middle of a road, you look to your left and you see a scrubby, brushy wilderness dotted with elephants, some of whom are close enough to almost snatch you up with their trunks. You turn your head to the right and you could reach out and pluck a banana or mango from a fruit stand. Tourists and locals often buy fruit from these stands, cross the road, and toss their purchase to a waiting elephant. Hmmm…and people wonder why there is human-elephant conflict? The elephants are not only taught that there is a plentiful food source, but are encouraged to partake in it. The really sad thing is that elephants that cross the fence and enter in to the local farms are at risk of being killed because they are viewed as a dangerous pest by farmers. Take a minute to appreciate which party created the problem and which party suffers the most severe consequence. I am implicating power hungry humans as the guilty party, not the villagers. They are just as much victims of the greedy politicians and large industries that have created this unbalanced system. Despite the costs the villagers face from elephants raiding their crops, most villagers tell us that they see the park and its wildlife as a good thing; some are even worried about its future. To make matters worse, we have heard numerous reports that wild elephants are being kidnapped from the park, but we have no clue who is behind it. There is also a battle over the wildlife corridors leading out of the park and people are currently trying to fence them off – elephants are knocking the fences down. We had a visitor yesterday who suggested that the people should be fenced in. So as you can see, it is a very tricky and delicate situation. I find myself further invested in the conflict each day.