Wow, what a ride!!

I’m in Sri Lanka now, where I have been for the past 6 nights, and man talk about paradise. While here I have visited the higher elevations where there are more tea estates than one can count, the extremely dry and hot areas where the remains of the ancient cities still exist, Buddhist temples hidden from the world on winding roads in the middle of the jungle, a traditional drama (which was very colorful), and Kandy town where the Buddha’s tooth is kept in the most gorgeous temple I have ever seen. I have enjoyed sharing the lives of Piyumika’s family, whom I stayed with this past week, and learning about spices and cooking from her Mother, someone I will refer to as Mother for the rest of my life. Talk about being blessed by someone’s presence, whew!

Our lives sometimes become intertwined with others like the vines I saw growing through the jungle landscape. When removed, you can always find evidence of them having been there. This will be Mother’s imprint on me. Buddhism with it’s gently leading ways and profoundly inspiring notions of interdependence and separation seems especially strong in the pulse of my time here with this family. Estuti.

I am on a train watching the hills flatten out in the Sri Lankan countryside as I head to the coast. THE coast, where thousands of people died a few short years ago in the tsunami. Palm trees, banana trees, tropical plants and beautiful equatorial flowers are the scenery sliding by the window as I remember Rajika telling me yesterday how much she dislikes the ocean because of what IT did to her country. She told me the giant waves that flatten towns and kill people by the thousands had only existed in their historical consciousness but is now a painful memory in their collective souls. Her facial expressions and the heightened sense of unusual urgency in her words spoke of her fear and made me wonder whether nature had enough stress in her great tectonic plates to slip and build another monster wave to come ashore while I am there tonight. The beauty of life is that one never knows but I am at least safe in my thinking- my date with destiny doesn’t include a rogue wave, but a new friend I am meeting in Colombo. Yohan Ferdinando (I know, like from a novel right?) was born in the paradise of this country but has lived in Washington DC since he was a toddler. He has the unique ability to straddle both countries with language, thought, and looks, but holds a passport from ours. I was surprised when he approached me looking very much like a native but spoke the sweet sounds of my native tongue. I know my face must have moved quickly into that expression I am so frequently accused of, but I promise, it was surprise and happiness. I can’t begin to explain to those of you who haven’t yet had the opportunity or desire to spend an extended amount of time outside of America, how deliciously sweet the sounds of our language can be when you haven’t heard it in a long time. The universe has interceded twice now to place directly in my path 2 people from home at the best possible moments of this trip. I say thank-you at least 50 times a day. Thank-you for orchestrating the circumstances that have made this trip possible, and I'm always on the look-out for lessons in every moment. Thank-you to those of you that have donated money to this experience and your time reading what I have written.

Now I need you to do India a serious favor if you will. Imagine for a moment that fresh, clean drinking water isn’t something you are able to take for granted, or even expect. Imagine handing your child a cup of water containing arsenic or fluoride at such great levels that it can be considered poisonous. Over time, each of these naturally occurring elements found in groundwater contribute to serious and fatal degenerative processes in the human body. In the north, on the eastern side of India, Arsenic poisoning has been called by the World Health Organization the great mass poisoning of our time, in the south around Bangalore, it is fluoride.

Let me explain the evolution of how this came to be.
Until the 70’s, surface water was the primary source of drinking water in India. As in the USA, there were/are multiple pressures on the rivers and lakes affecting both quantity and quality of drinking water. Quantity issues (How much water is available?) such as water withdrawal for agriculture and people, dams upstream decreasing downstream flow, and extreme drought decreasing flow everywhere led to decreasing availability of freshwater, or freshwater present but in places where it was inaccessible and therefore unusable. Quality issues (How clean is the water you have available?) compounded by decreased quantity (which decreases the dilatory effects, among other things) made many systems unusable. Pollution from point-sources such as unregulated industry and non-point source pollution from open defecation and garbage dumping further contributed to surface water degradation. Think tragedy of the commons, tipping point….Then came the World Bank.

Complexity in nature allows this planet to survive, but it also means that a change in one part of the system can have cascading effects in another. It emerges from a small set of controlling circumstances and these circumstances are often very easy to mess with. This immutable component of nature mirrors human decision-making in that choices have consequences, whether intended or not, that can become real components of a new system. And like a tapestry unraveling, sometimes it is hard to find a place to tie a knot.
In India, surface water in many places became unusable as a result of decision-making, often times born out of necessity, but decisions that disregarded the clean-up capacity of this system nonetheless, so with World Bank funding and technology (hmmm….) the decision to switch to groundwater was easy for India. Electricity, like water, is not a foregone conclusion in India so, like water, it became the great Ace in a winning hand, the power in politics, and was often promised by politicians during their campaigns. Forget about finance reform and promises to do away with lobbying. I’m going to give you lights! Imagine electricity as a campaign promise.

With heavily subsidized electricity to power the drills to dig bore-wells and technology bought with money from the World Bank, India has become an unregulated, bore-well kingdom of water thieves. And what else would one do when so desperate for life-giving water? (This is a discussion for the book as there are many contributors, i.e, population growth, poverty, inequity in gender roles, the Green Revolution that protected India from famine….etc…) That was in the 1970’s and India is running low on groundwater now. Groundwater is fossil water, created over millennia, much like fossil fuels, and stored by nature in great underground caves called aquifers. We have them in the USA, and have also used them heavily. Point is, with all our other decisions compounding the process, (think impervious surface cover?) it isn’t easy to replenish it. And when stored for millennia against bedrock, groundwater can become laced with elements like arsenic and fluoride. See the complexity in decision-making and unintended consequences? This isn’t so bad when you are using water harvested from wells dug to depths where there is water setting on water, but in less than 50 years, with heavy, unregulated use, the wells are having to go deeper and deeper to reach water, and this water is poisonous.

You might be shaking your heads and wondering why people are drinking from these wells. I’m going to list the reasons I have been told about and read about:
1- POVERTY is the root of all evil. It contributes directly and indirectly to all the other reasons and marginalizes those living in it.
2- Lack of education. I was told that people with crippling skeletal deformities from fluoride and those dying from arsenic poisoning in many cases aren’t aware that it is coming from their water.
3- The tragedy of the commons in that people have actually said, everyone is using it and if we don’t, we won’t get our share!
4- There is no disincentive from the government not to use it.

The most frustrating part of the whole situation is that in Tamil Nadu, a state in the southern part of India there are towns where industries, including American industries like Wal-Mart (and for those of you that have heard how environmentally friendly they say they are this is going to make you really mad…), Tommy Hilfiger, H & M, and Reebok that are dumping effluent everyday into the surface water- I read up to 21 million gallons a day has been recorded….As a result, the surface water is completely unusable, unless you are poor and have to use it, forcing local people who should have rights to this water to use the groundwater. The really tough part though, is that farming groundwater has become more prevalent here than farming agriculture because 2/3 of their wells have dried up. Trucks come to people’s homes with wells, buy naturally produced groundwater from the farmers, take it into the towns setting over the aquifer, and SELL it to people who live there! So lets look at that again: American industries pollute surface water making it unusable for local people, Indian water farmers sale groundwater to the people exploiting their obvious need for freshwater, government does nothing.

How would you adapt to these circumstances? Should water be a right as a necessity because one cannot live without it? What potential for change is there within this system set against the backdrop of poverty and runaway population growth?

Sorry it has taken so long to write again. My last several stops in India had no Internet access and in Sri Lanka my family had me up at dawn and home after dark! Hopefully, I will have Internet access pretty steadily for the rest of my trip.