There is more to it than the eye can see

By Renton de Alwis

 Written in May 2010, this column is my effort at understanding what happens around me. Shunning the cobwebs I had gathered along the way in living my life and questioning the myths, I believed in as well….

It is amazing how what happens around us is woven like a web. Everything connects with the other, like a functional ecosystem. It’s a social web, much like the web of life that defines the interactions of humans with nature and its related dynamics.

Social webs

Here everyone has a role to play. Everyone’s bit counts. This is true, regardless of it being for the good of the society and communities around, as much as it is, when what it yields is bad and ugly. It’s all interwoven, interconnected and interdependent.

Within these social webs there are spiders weaving their own webs too. In these cases the concept of entropy, much like in physical and natural systems must prevail if communities, societies and as its summation; the nation, is to develop in a sound and harmonious way.

State of disequilibrium

In a rural environment like a village, unlike in an urban setting, the elements that form the web have been clearer and somewhat better defined. Within the context of our ancient heritage, they were broadly identified to be the Wewai, Dagabai, Gamai, Pansalai (Source of water, built-heritage defining our ways of the past, people as a community and the spiritual centre). In today’s context, with a self-centered brand of ‘more is better’ and ‘make money before all else’ type commercialization acting as predominant agents of change, these institutions rarely exist in states of functional equilibrium as they did in the past.

In most instances, now the school sits disconnected from the spiritual centre, except at ‘function’ time. Both political and moral authority stands above society and the communities that created it. Maintenance of law and order remain under-defined, often left to the state of the will, integrity and determination to act, of the incumbent persons in charge. Deep indebtedness, excessive use of toxic substances for seeking escape, taking on easy ways-out and the inability to breakaway from such cycles of poverty, often are manifestations of this state of disequilibrium.

Right fundamentals    

You may wonder why I have taken on an exposition of fundamentals or the ‘back to basics’ of sociology here. It is in fact my preamble to let you in, on my understanding of how the systems work in a rural village in the Deep South of Sri Lanka, where I now live in retirement.

During the Sinhala and Hindu New Year season, a teacher from a nearby junior school came to visit us with her family. On our casual inquiry as to how things were at her school, she related a sad tale of how, about one third of the school’s student population came to school without a square meal. She also related instances of children subject to such neglect who faint during school sessions. We must not get her wrong, the school is a beneficiary of the grades 1-5 free meal programme provided by the government, but the ones’ affected here are mostly in grades 6-11, where such facility is unavailable.

Seeking easy riches

This, by no means is a poverty stricken village. Most of the village folk are farmers, fishermen or extract seashells from the resource rich top soil of the area. On a cursory look, one sees no reason whatsoever, for people of this village to be sending their children to school without access to a reasonable meal. It is a village visibly green with rich vegetation, most of which was rebuilt in the aftermath of the tsunami of 2004, where new adobes in a new model village, tools for fishing; boats and nets and cash compensation were received through caring donors and the State, for them to rebuild their lives.

Most villagers were cash rich and found an even easier way to riches, through investing in an informal high interest yielding money lending system that was operated by a person who was popularly known as “Daduwam Mudalali”. Whatever riches they had were turned into cash and deposited, to make a fast buck. This operation after running well for a few years crashed and in an instant, majority of villagers lost their ‘unreal’ interest incomes and incomes from other thriving businesses built around this activity. Attempts at recovering from that shock, has indeed contributed to some of the negatives we witness, manifest in over-indulgence in alcohol, betting on horses, and domestic conflict and violence leading to neglect of children. 

Focus on nutrition

According to several caring teachers of the school’s health committee, this is a social phenomenon that needs urgent attention. They are of the view that the only way up for these children in social mobility will be achievement in education and /or skills development. The success of that will depend, not merely on attempts made by teachers at school, but on the stability and caring in their home environments, the resultant state of mind and of course on the right levels of food and nutrition they get.

No cures for all

The lesson to be learnt by this situation is a realization that the ‘village’ we seek to develop, needs to be looked beyond the infrastructure to be provided and the production centers each of them can potentially become. The complex play of the social webs of each of our villages needs to be understood well, before seeking ways to develop them. The ground reality is that no ‘single’ recipe or a ‘cure for all’ type solution is available. With the proposed ‘Janasabha’ system in the offing, our academics, researchers, bankers, members of business chambers, protectors of law and order; all will do well soon, to step down from macro domains to the micro, to support and assist our villagers carve out a bright future for them and their children.