Working at Sarvodaya
Note: I am posting pretty steadily at www.sarvodaya.org.
I think my last email was a little sad. Now I feel more hopeful. The site has done well, and helped people, I hope.
Apple and Google have given Sarvodaya space on their front pages along with the big charities like Red Cross, OxFam, etc It’s the only Asian NGO to be featured on both. I don’t think that has much to do with the site but rather the fact that Sarvodaya is an established and effective organization, but it does make me a little proud.
www.apple.com
www.google.com or (http://www.google.com/tsunami_relief.html)
Those pages will change, but sarvodaya.org was there.
We have 315 photos up on the site, from all over. Some of them I can’t look at, but photos of us getting the relief out make me very happy. Tomorrow I’m going to visit a camp to see first hand for the first time. Some Fulbright scholars are in Sri Lanka, and I’ve got them uploading the photos and the news. It takes a lot of the load off me and I like talking to them. Tomorrow we’re going to visit the camps for the first time. I’m a little nervous. I’ve just been working 24 hours and the destruction has been sort of an abstraction to me. I don’t know if I want to see.
I find it strange cause in Colombo people are very quick to return to normal. My publisher wants me to launch the IT Magazine this month. I find it very hard to care. I am actually very angry at them.
Sometimes I think that I just want to work in the orphanages and get the kids to blog. Maybe get some of the poorest of the poor on the Net. But then I won’t have any money. I won’t be able to visit any of you.
These last few days I think I’ve done something that’s OK. But I don’t know what to do now.
indi
I started off not really liking General Sarath Fonseka, him being part of the aggressive war effort. I didn’t support the war (largely cause I thought it would fail), and I thought Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and Fonseka were gleefully stomping everything. Fonseka even came out and said “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people,” in 2008 (
General Sarath Fonseka was arrested on a bunch of trumped up charges, but mainly for daring to threaten Mahinda in a Presidential election. Despite his poor health, Fonseka was arrested in February 2010 and sentence to three years. Word on the street now, however, is that he’ll be released soon. Like any day now. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has told 
I’ve been testing a lot of apps. A very interesting one is iPlayboy, from Playboy magazine. It’s bad porn but a good magazine, especially since you can read issues from its cultural heyday – the Mad Men era of the 60s.
I’m going to get back to blogging. I buy a shitload of stuff on my iPad. Not that I like spending money, and the exchange rate terrifies me, but it’s just so easy, and so good. For example, I’ve been reading comics again. Spiderman, and 
It’s good to know that Asian relief groups have been given recognition. Google has also provided a link to another Lankan organisation that is provding relief – the Karuna Trust http://www.karunalanka.org/index.html The more I read the news reports and watch the news, the more I begin to think that this horror is far from over. It will take a long long time to get things back the way they were.