Beyond the Vapour Trail Read online

  Later in the day I headed the other way, down into and across the narrow valley. Only a handful of people lived further down. I discovered a valley completely cut to ribbons by the little streams and rivulets. The ground was sodden and slushy, as if this were the place where the world’s water was generated, running down the sides of these slopes. Simple handmade bridges crissed and crossed. I met a few locals, in their own gumboots, carrying baskets or bananas or maize, and conversed with them briefly and awkwardly in my meagre Spanish and noted their amusement when they caught me photographing insects. Particularly butterflies. An art gallery of abstract colour was painted like acrylics over their wings. Deep and bright. I studied them closely through my lens, blurring the world and putting them in focus, their unique wings and faces. They paused momentarily, seeming to admire their own shadows, then lifted in the paper poetry that is their flight. As so often before, it was not the grand brochure-like vista that caught my attention. Here on the edge of the rainforest, it was the little sensory details that defined the experience as much as anything else.

  The weekend finished. We grabbed our gear and headed back to the vehicle. This was possibly Felipe’s last weekend here. He was moving on. He had sold the property to an American couple who shared his vision to protect one small corner of the forest from slash-and-burn.

  Hours later, I was back in the hotel in Quito for our meeting. Back to wireless and deadlines. The wireless and wifeless states that take up so much of my life.

  It wasn’t the unpasteurised local cheeses from the village. Or the tostadas. It was a meal from the nice hotel in Quito that gave me food poisoning. It was the meat, because sixteen others got sick. Now, I don’t get sick very often at all. Bit of a cast-iron stomach most of the time. I take reasonable precautions but don’t go overboard, and don’t even bother with anti-malarials. But this was pretty serious. It turned out to be my first drip on a trip. I have never been so sick in my life. Then by 1 a.m. the cramps started. Getting cramp in your feet is no big deal. I mean, ever since I played under-fifteen football I knew to jump out of bed and bend my toes. But this was electric cramp in any and every muscle, so any move to counteract one cramp resulted in multiple new ones in my feet or up my legs. I was literally crying out in pain. In desperation I crawled along the floor to the shower and let the hot water pour over my legs. This was a desperate invention to try something. It worked. It eased the cramping to the point where I could crawl back to bed, lie the wrong way and put my feet on the wall above the pillows at just the right angle (another invention) and minimise the cramp for about forty minutes. I knew the potassium levels or something in my body must have been quite low, but I didn’t want to disturb anyone at that hour. It was an uncomfortable night, to use some Australian understatement.

  I often don’t bother with pyjamas when I travel and usually sleep in boxer shorts. On a whim, I packed pyjamas for Ecuador because I would be staying at my friend’s farm and I didn’t know the arrangements. This night in Quito, for no particular reason, I was wearing them. It was fortunate, because I called my colleague from Ecuador in the morning, and within thirty minutes there was a knock on the door and the doctor arrived. I staggered over, head spinning, opened the door, and then rushed back to my ridiculous back-to-front position on the bed, with my feet on the wall. The doctor was a woman. She was followed in by an assistant. Ximena and several other women from my organisation came in with them to see if I was OK. And another curious guy from the hotel also wandered in, for no obvious reason. The room was crowded and my feet were on the wall like some kind of birthing position. I realised, just like a woman in childbirth, there is a point where you are past any dignity, so you have to go with the flow. I just acted nonchalant as if this was the way we sleep in Australia.

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 01/02/2013

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: the other Katie

  …Today was a really important day, but I spent it in bed, with constant interruptions, despite a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door.

  I had an intravenous drip today. The hotel covered the medical expenses and then wanted me to sign a waiver so I wouldn’t sue. I could have refused, but I just wrote on it in Spanish, ‘But I’m not paying for the meal’ and signed it.

  So today every time I dropped off to sleep there’d be another knock. Someone asked to talk to me this morning and I wanted to wait for the drip to be removed …

  I miss you. I really wished you were there. The pain from the cramps in the middle of the night had me begging for it to stop, because there didn’t seem to be anything I could do and it was really intense.

  On my last night in Quito, feeling a little better, I made a fateful decision.

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 05/02/2013

  To:

  Subject: covers

  … Yes, thanks, feeling better. A colleague told me, as part 2 of your recovery, Zazu’s restaurant in Quito. It has to be the camarones, and it has to be the pink sauce. Great dish, but big mistake. I was sick all night again and had to leave at 5 a.m. to fly a ridiculously circuitous route to Manila. The trip was fine though. That choice to take an open door over the predictable and sensible doesn’t always come off. Ah well. The same choice the previous weekend took me to an edge-of-civilisation farm set into the Amazonian jungle.

  CHAPTER 23

  Pakistan – A Cancelled Trip

  I was invited to Pakistan to conduct a training on Most Significant Change. This is a story-based monitoring approach. No indicators, just stories of change, and anyone in the community can tell them. The stories are validated by the group selecting which ones are most significant to them. I love it because it engages everyone in the community and democratises the process of deciding what is important and what’s working or not. It gives insights into lives and perspectives through powerful human stories of change. It unearths unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences. And hang it, this was a chance to see Pakistan. So I wanted to go.

  But you know what work can be like – there was too much going on just then and I had to defer.

  The week I was supposed to be there, in March 2010, fifteen militia in pick-up vehicles stormed the office in Mansehra with grenades and guns. They robbed the staff of jewellery, wallets, cell phones, money and computers. Then they opened fire and exploded a homemade bomb. Six staff were killed, including two women, and another eight were injured. A colleague, George Ward, described the scene: ‘They dragged people one by one and shifted to an adjacent room and shot and killed them. We could see them firing.’ One woman called on God and they spared her.

  All of the staff were local Pakistanis. I had never met any of them personally. This particular office had provided aid after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake killed seventy-three thousand. They were continuing to help people who were fleeing the Swat Valley. These were good people doing something with their lives.

  There was some speculation that putting on more visible security required by someone far away in an office in New York or somewhere may have in fact drawn more attention to the office. Who knows.

  And what did it accomplish for the perpetrators? I’d venture to say, very little. No policy was changed, no US bases closed, no terrorists were released. Perhaps a psychological feeling that they were acting in their world – acting in precisely the opposite way to the people they killed.

  CHAPTER 24

  Two Weeks into a Ceasefire

  I arrived at some god-forsaken hour of the night in Colombo. It made me wonder whether the airline schedule here was the tail end of other connections that allowed civilised hours at other airports. But by the next morning, memories of arrival details and post-midnight taxi rides had vaporised like last night’s dream, and I awoke to a new country streaming in through my window. Colombo, Sri Lanka.

  From: Brett Pierce

  Sent: 03/03/02

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: Colombo (‘Oh, there was just one more t
hing …’ Remember the TV detective?)

  Hello you.

  Colombo …

  Doesn’t matter that you think you’re familiar with Asian driving – it’s always … interesting. Kerry Anne used the same word to describe her drive to Colombo from the airport too. So many near misses. They could save a lot of white paint by not bothering with lane markers, since everyone ignores them. The little 3-wheeler motorbike rickshaws are considered fair game for all – they’re like crows on Australian roads that casually dodge when cars come through.

  Colombo is a typical mix of modern and looks-like-it-needsrenovating, and everything has that soaked-in-smog colour. The building next door is 8 floors, with only four finished, so they just left it like that and moved in, looks like about 30 years ago. There’s an armed trooper patrolling the seventh floor (there are only bits of an 8th floor). There’s a sporting club with immaculate lawns across the road – I think it’s a cricket ground, not sure – with some slum-looking buildings poked behind it along the water’s edge.

  It’s warm! It’s who-forgot-the-exhaust-fan-in-the-bathroom humid too. If the city wears drab, nature wears vivid, and the trees have generous-sized leaves. Palms, big-leafed trees, and bright red flowers. The birds think they’re in a Tarzan movie by the sound of things. A pair of crows are sitting two feet from me thru the window preening each other.

  Off to the Eastern project on the east coast in an hour – 6 hours’ drive. Its security level is code yellow. I assume that’s worse than green but not as bad as red. I guess if you’re under fire, it’s code brown! There are refugees in this project who fled the fighting.

  I really want to get the story and photos for WV News magazine if I can.

  Love ya.

  Brett

  From: Brett Pierce

  06/03/02

  To: Kathleen Pierce

  Subject: You’ve got mail

  The trip

  The driver’s name is Joseph. (Why are the drivers always called Joseph?) He seems nice.

  Q. Is it OK to miss another vehicle by 1 foot?

  A. Yes, if there’s a bicycle in between. Otherwise you’ve gone 10 inches further than you needed to.

  What more can I say? Vehicles here move randomly in any direction – even sideways into you as you pass them. I’m not sure Joseph is nice. I think he has a death wish. I think he’s trying to kill us all.

  Rice fields. Ridiculous tangle of jungle ready to swallow up even the telephone poles. Odd-shaped mountains plonked at random on flat ground. Monkeys cross the road, wild elephants (how cool is that!!!), contented cattle in town and out, slow-motion buffalo. Towns with garages side by side that pass as shops crammed with everything. Women in stunning saris.

  7 hours later …

  I’m staying in a bungalow in a place with an impossibly long name on the edge of a tropical lagoon.

  Evening - from my door I can see prawn fishermen with fires on their outrigged canoes casting white nets on the glassy lagoon. Mosquito net reminds me I forgot anti-malarials again. Oh well …

  In the morning frangipani falling outside my front door. At first light I took shots of pink on grey with dark prawning platforms protruding from the grey water. What the hell am I doing up at dawn? Must be jet lag.

  The project

  The project is amazing. Bombed-out buildings, army checkpoints. Yes, OK, it is right in the middle of the war zone. But there’s been a ceasefire for two weeks, and it’s considered bad form to get your overseas visitors killed. We passed landmines, pressure mines, blown-up buildings, and we moved freely between both sides – government and Tamil Tiger (LTTE). Troops everywhere, roadblocks. We met families displaced by the war who have been resettled by the project. 80% of everyone in one part of the project have lost a member of the family. One of the staff was abducted some years back, and the project manager was with his daughter on a bicycle when a grenade was thrown - he still has shrapnel in his shoulder - daughter OK. The project has made some real impact despite the war … Didn’t have time to get spectacular shots, but maybe some nice ones.

  OK, any longer would be … more boring, huh!

  We had crossed the country from Colombo in the west to the east coast. The place with the impossibly long name and the beautiful lagoon was part of the city of Batticaloa. Just a few years later it would be one of the areas devastated by the tsunami.

  The Eastern project was out of town, and as the local team briefed me their commitment and courage became clear. Because of the war, by 1997 all NGOs had been banned from working in the area – except World Vision. Both sides respected the organisation and allowed the team to continue to pass through the conflict area. Nevertheless, in the following year a senior member of the team was taken hostage by the Tamil army (LTTE), although he was later released. In 1999 the LTTE destroyed power to the town, which meant six months without any electricity. In 2000 there was a major flood in the area, and the team had to move into assistance mode. This work had been tough, demanding, stressful and difficult.

  Amid all kinds of other business they sat me down and told me they had a problem. Or, as people often put it: we had a problem.

  Two hundred and sixty children in the program area had disappeared – all sponsored, all aged between nine and fifteen years old. The staff wanted to discuss what to do. The parents had hidden these children to prevent them being recruited into the Tamil army. Children might be out walking and suddenly be abducted to join the army. So the parents hid them and told no-one where they had gone. And the project staff needed to keep it like that, to keep the children safe.

  So the important thing was that the children were safe for now. But it was a problem for child sponsorship because if we lose touch with a child we immediately contact the donor to finish the sponsorship. Yet in this instance that didn’t make sense to me. Most child sponsors want to be involved in the life of a real child in the real world, and be there for them. This was an incredible drama unfolding in the lives of these children. And normal procedure would mean just sending a letter telling them the child has left the project. I thought the sponsors deserved to know and then make their own choice.

  Since there were elections coming up in Sri Lanka and possibly better Tamil representation, there was hope this situation could be resolved and the children able to return home within a definite time frame. We decided to tell the sponsors what was happening. They could either cancel their support or choose to wait and see what happened. The communication had to be simple and brief because, for many, this might seem like just another letter among all the junk mail. But I thought they might understand. As it turned out, this was quite powerful for them.

  So, armed with a camera and a notebook, I set out to find some stories to demonstrate how the sponsors’ contributions were being used in the meantime to help the families.

  We visited a small farm which was using a brilliant, simple intervention. An example of ‘appropriate technology’. We use this term to describe solutions that use locally available materials and parts, things that are simple to build and repair, and cheap. As early as 2002 the community here reported that their climate had begun to change. Patterns of rainfall had altered after many generations of predictable rains. So the program manager, Sutharn, had introduced a simple bucketfed drip irrigation idea. When we arrived, the farmer was in the process of irrigating a crop of chillies. He just had to pour water from the source into a bucket that led away to drip-feed irrigation piping for his crop. Simple as that. Yet this system now meant he was able to get more than one harvest of his cash crops.

  The farmer met us wearing only a sarong and footwear, and it was so hot I wished I could, too. He would have been in his late forties, and talked openly to us about his life.

  Mr Kanthapoddy had arrived here with his young wife twenty-five years earlier to make a new start. It had been government land, but they had just recently obtained the title deed, so it was finally their own property. But their life had been tough. Their eldest son was in
the military when he was caught in heavy fire and died. Another son died of snakebite when he was sixteen – a disturbingly common story around this area. They now only had a son and a daughter at home. He dearly wanted his eldest girl to be married and she was already twenty-six. For his youngest son, he would need to divide his land so that he too could get married – but he still needed to be able to make a living himself. The farm was seven acres, but there was only sufficient water to work three acres, and he was dependent on water from the lagoon. The bucket-fed irrigation now allowed him to put in two crops per season.

  … The heavily armed troops at the checkpoint recognise the World Vision vehicle and wave us through with barely a look. As we drive past fields of landmines and burned-out buildings in the project area, I realise what an amazing job the World Vision staff have done. This project has operated successfully and neutrally in the middle of a war zone. Everywhere I can see signs of community building. I meet two hundred people who fled their village, now rehoused in buildings provided through the project. I meet two sponsored children getting dental care in a new clinic; a farmer who has been introduced to a new drought-aware irrigation technique. And I meet the enthusiastic care team who visit children and families, and despite the war, give voluntary time to coach children after school towards their exams. This is future-building in the midst of conflict …

  Devika, the child sponsorship coordinator, was a marine biologist educated in Colombo. I’m not sure how she washed up here, but she was very smart. As we sat at her desk she explained to me how she had managed to continue to operate throughout the conflict and even reduce costs. She had everything running like clockwork, working through local volunteers, and like many of our staff, she worked very long hours. They were monitoring three and a half thousand children. Her desk was neat and organised, but covered in photos of children. At random I picked up a photo sitting more prominently on her desk – of a boy maybe twelve or thirteen years old.