Mud Ghecko

From a rather unexpected source, Chatty learns three little tricks, which definitely helped make one marriage work I have a clay water jar in my kitchen and whenever I see it I remember a long journey and a special and interesting character I met. About two month’s back, in the course of duty I was instructed to visit Ampara which since I hardly get the chance to travel was a thrill to even contemplate. Ive seen many photographs of this dusty outback territory and these always seem to give the impression of stubborn survival amongst rather desperate odds and a desolate environment. I have sat and painted the barren landscapes and dusty ruins I saw in some photos and I really wanted to see those places for myself. Names like Ninthavur and Sainthamaruthu have, to my thinking, a wonderfully exotic ring to them, and I had practiced rolling them off my tongue while writing (admittedly arm chair based) progress reports from Colombo : so I really wanted to experience the dust, heat and live a...

is available at http://www.dailymirror.lk/sections/supp/w@w/120607/03.asp some people have told me they could not stop thinking about this story for days, it had moved them so deeply.

I will not forget Dieter, in many ways he made me who I am. . He was different, so different and although he touched my life only comparatively briefly, he made impressions that will never be lost. To say that I owe a lot of what I learnt in life to him, would not be enough. I owe him my life. Christmas Day 2004. When I was at home by the beach ,in Matara, with my father and Dieter, they would be discussing philosophy as usual, and I would sit watching their faces at the dinner table , listening not to the words but to the comforting cadence of their tones. Dieter was soon to leave our country, to go back to his own, to gracefully relinquish a dream that could have been, because we knew it should not. Dieter was leaving me tomorrow and we knew this. We loved each other, we knew this, but we had never spoken about this. There would be too much upheaval caused in the lives of the people I loved. He did not want to cause this. Although I was his student in a language and in his way of th...

from wikipedia, a simplified explaination of what happened, in case any of us have forgotton.. Rajapaksa offers less autonomy than Wickremasinghe to the northeast , home to most of Sri Lanka's 3.2 million ethnic Tamils . His narrow victory was arguably engineered by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who want Tamil Eelam to be an independent country. The LTTE boycotted the election, thereby preventing thousands of Tamils from voting, and so Wickremasinghe, whose election promises included a Federal state to the North and East, from taking power. thoughtprovoking to say the least. makes you wonder what would have happened if the LTTE had not done what they had done...perhaps we would all have gotton SOMEWHERE?instead of goin round and round ?