If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share it This is my 3rd visit to Sri Lanka, but only my first for my ‘Me and My Mirror’ project. I’m on a bicycle again, this time, thankfully. I’m saving work in Colombo until I’ve maybe sharpened up my game again. So I rode 5 days up here to Jaffna on the very northern tip of the island-nation. Jaffna is Tamil heartland and the home of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Your Tigers are, I think disbanded; but Tigers can be secretive… they don’t generally announce when they are fucking off. But the last firefights were not that long ago: North of Trincomalee between 2007 and 2009. Plus I was here in 2007 when the Tigers used 2 home-made airplanes (!!!) to drop a handful of large home-made barrel-bombs on the SL Air Force planes at the Colombo civil airport. They moved around in home-made submarines too. Do not mess with a Tiger. So anyhow here I am and it’s goin’ really well. The whole NGO community has basically abandoned Jaffna; it’s not in the news, see. And they’ve moved down to Colombo (where? – see? It’s not in the news, but for the odd Horrible Giant Incoming Wave). So when the media leaves, so, by and by, do the NGOs. It kinda makes me crazy. I mean, when was the last time you read about Afghanistan? It’s not exactly ‘peaches and cream’ there, yet, after all that fucking shock and awe. But I digress, which is what I do… Jaffna is a good place for me to work: there is plenty of ordnance still in the ground here and plenty of people mutilated by war. Sri Lankans also seem to have a genetic pre-disposition to diabetes and other circulatory issues. That might be a naïve thing to say. But I’ve been around. I mean, their diet is not that bad (super-tasty, if you ask me… and lots of fruit… definitely not anywhere near as rich or fatty as N Indian cooking… right?) and the peeps in general do not tend toward obesity and sugar or sweets do not seem to me to be, like, hyper-prevalent and nor do they...
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If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share it Okay, let’s get the ball rolling here. It’s time to saddle up and take a big batch of mirrors on the road. A brand-new trip to some all-new places and departing very soon indeed. I’m gonna load up the cargo bike and head out on my most ambitious trip ever November 15th. A fabulous NGO called ‘EXCEED’ (the former Cambodia Trust) operate Prosthetic and Orthotic schools – a 3 year program – in 5 countries throughout S and SE Asia: Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia. The graduates are then qualified to fit, mold, assemble and design all manner of artificial limbs and orthotic supports and braces. The students generally come from parts elsewhere in the ‘disadvantaged world’ and will take their new expertise yet further afield. Your prosthetist, the technician who builds your new limb for you after your traumatic loss; he or she is going to be one of first and most important people you will meet in your new and challenging life as an amputee. Right? If I can teach/train these technicians Mirror Therapy to combat Phantom Limb Pain in their Brand New patients… right at the beginning… how Golden is that? Maximum Dissemination to the people who Most Need It. Boom! So that’s what I aim to do: visit each of these P&O schools in each respective country and spend, say, 2 afternoons training them in the therapy and treating whatever in/out patients are there at the time. I’ll arrive on a bicycle on my own steam – it’s a major motivational tool of mine (plus it’s a lot of fun) – with a rack-load of free mirrors which I will in turn leave behind for clinical use and incoming amputees. They can loan out the mirrors the way a library loans books. That’s pretty cool too. Then, I’ll take the opportunity of being ‘in-country’ and take the bike and a fresh load of mirrors into the provinces and visit as many hospitals and clinics as possible, plus directly to the poorer amputees right in their own villages. Relieving amputees of phantom pain and bringing a little joy all along the way. It’s magic....
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Hey Nick,
Okay, so region by region:
LAO : I’ve been once before and there is PLENTY still to do. Lao is quite a bit more backward than Cambodia and possibly even more traumatized. Lao is also, as you likely know, a totally different tragedy. No land mines in Lao because the chicken-ass Americans never sent ground forces in and Lao was anyhow a covert aggression. They never sided with the N Vietnamese or Viet Cong yet a portion of the so-called ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ ran through Lao and for our American friends that was enough to bomb them into the stone-age. It’s one of the dirtiest stories of modern war.
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Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share it In all earnestness, I think being Frank is serving me well. I’m not beating about the bush with these people and I believe they appreciate it. Lots of times I’ll put my hand on a super-mutilated guy and just say, ‘I can’t help you man. You’re fucked.’ They usually give me a shy smile and a nod of resignation. And, of course, people of all stripes are likely to be more honest right back at you. Reciprocity. I gave a workshop a couple nites ago at Battambang’s nicest café, The Café Kinyei (also called the 1 ½ St. Café). They do all kinds of good things for the Khmer community here and are involved with many of the more valid NGOs. The room was mostly expats, a couple doctors and therapists, a few Khmers who mostly spoke English well, and Untac (!!!), my translator for the evening. It’s relatively rare for me to have such a gathering of educated English –as-a-first –language people, and so nice to be able to get a little more technical and maybe a little more expansive. Well, I kinda blew it. I mean, let’s be frank; I’m a bit of a chatterbox and boy can I digress. I was apologizing afterwards to my new friend Andrew who’s a Brit and a doctor for the Brangelina people, MJP (the Maddox Jolie Pitt Foundation). He laughed and said, ‘No, no, it was OK. It was good; it IS clear though, that you, um, CARE about what you’re doing.’ He went on to say that he’d recently told his boss about me riding around on this goofy bicycle with a giant load of mirrors on the back, and the boss the asked him, frankly, ‘Is the guy a nutjob?’. Maybe. But I’m getting through. Getting through to the clinics, the NGOs, the community and, of course, the amputees themselves. I’m being aided enormously by the fact that public interest has really swung to neurology or even, in more layman’s terms, the mysteries of the brain. Even in the small room at KINYEI there were at least two or three people who had read and been fascinated...
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