Desperation everywhere on the streets of Colombo
People struggling to buy fuel and food, schools are closed and power cuts are all too common
Driving towards the stately white colonial building that until recently housed a corrupt president, I glance down to check my fuel metre.
It has dropped to two bars and my heart sinks. I tell myself this is the last time I will venture out in my car. I must save petrol in case I need to take my elderly mother or one of my three young children to hospital.
It is a difficult choice though. I also need to work to earn a living, and I can’t afford to spend four days waiting – the average time a Sri Lankan queues to fill up their car these days.
It’s something I see right outside my house, where a snakelike column of people stretches more than three miles down the main road in central Colombo. I chat to some of them while they live and sleep in their cars in the 32C (90F) heat. Janice, 73, lives alone and needs the fuel for emergencies; Randa, 42, is a caterer who delivers food to offices; Namini, 52, is a single mother and her two daughters, 11 and nine, have been at home alone for three days, eating crackers.
Every day, the faces in front of my house change, but the stories are essentially the same: they are all distraught, tired and resigned.
But the petrol queues are not the worst of it.
I come back and park my car in the garage, feeling grateful but guilty for the privileges my family and I have. I can walk and cycle to destinations because I am fortunate enough to live in the centre of the capital city. My family suffers power cuts, sometimes lasting for as long as three hours twice a day, but I can afford electricity despite the cost having jumped by 100 per cent. We still have three meals a day, though we have cut down on the quality of our food.
Meanwhile women I know are struggling to feed their children one meal a day. One of my son’s classmates – in one of the most prestigious schools in Sri Lanka – dropped out because his parents could not afford school shoes.
More than 50 per cent of my creative writing students cannot afford to pay the fees anymore.
This feeling of guilt threatens to suck the joy out of my life. As a reporter I have covered wars, the 2004 tsunami, riots, had meals with suicide bombers, stepped on a landmine (that miraculously didn’t explode), and much more. But this time it’s different. This time, it’s slow and more real, perhaps because it’s closer to home.
When I visited a school in a little village in the Puttalam district, the children were sleeping with their heads on the wooden desks during the break instead of having a meal.
Most of the children come from under-privileged, single-parent families with no fixed income. One of the teachers was almost in tears when she told me: “They don’t have food to eat anymore. The school had a budget of 28 rupees to give them a meal of rice or chickpeas, which was a great incentive for them to even come to school. But now the same meal costs 100 rupees per child, so we can’t feed them anymore. These kids are hungry.”
And hunger, I believe is the key reason Sri Lanka witnessed so much chaos this past week. As despondent as I felt when I joined thousands of others to walk through the newly vacated presidential palace and prime minister’s office, I understand the frustration.
While I stood worrying about the collection of historical, invaluable books housed in the colonial buildings, I heard a woman with a child saying, “Look at how they live – when we are hungry.” It humbles and shames me.
Hunger and fear is what drove hundreds of thousands of normally placid and kind Sri Lankans to revolt. Hunger and poverty is what fused the fractured divisions between this island’s races and religions to create a single movement. It is what drove the farmer, the housewife and the schoolboy to overthrow the corrupt and tyrannical dynasty of the Rajapaksas – something they would have never dreamt of just a few months before.
My family is not hungry. Yet. And I pray that we continue to be in a position to help rather than be helped.
In the meantime, we keep going. In my home, I have banned words of despair because my children are young and I don’t want them to pick up the hopelessness of the entire situation.
With schools closed indefinitely, they hang around at home and remind each other to conserve power. I can see the changes sweeping through the country reflected in them, hear the nation’s new shared consciousness in their words.
The other day, my son Yusef told me: “Remember the 12-year-old boy who died because his father didn’t have enough petrol to get the medicine from the pharmacy on time? Maybe if we saved more power and fuel, he might have lived.”