Check points and bombed houses

Just after our move to Colombo on Wednesday night, we left Colombo Thursday afternoon for Jaffna.

Objective: meet our partner, Shanthiham, the staff who work there, and to search for housing.

So, with a driver, two VSO staff members, a VSO volunteer from the UK (child psychologist also moving to Jaffna), Bill and I make the very long trek toward Jaffna. After six hours of dangerous driving (bad roads, congestion, high speed), we got as far as Mihintale and booked into a guest house for the night. Next morning, we set off to make it through Elephant Pass and into Jaffna (another six hour journey).

From Wikipedia: Elephant Pass is a major military checkpoint and controls access to the Jaffna Peninsula. Elephant Pass connects the militarily significant town of Chavakacheri in the Jaffna peninsula to the Sri Lankan mainland.

The base was under Sri Lankan Authority control until 2000, despite repeated attempts to capture it by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers). In the First Battle of Elephant Pass in 1991, the LTTE suffered heavy losses while trying to capture the pass.

However in a major military defeat, the Sri Lankan Army lost control of the pass to the LTTE on April 22, 2000 in the Second Battle of Elephant Pass. The pass was finally captured by Sri Lankan force in Third Battle of Elephant Pass, as part of campaign that led to destruction of Tamil Tigers. There is a monument at the summit to commemorate the capture of Elephant Pass.

We encountered the first military checkpoint at Elephant Pass and up until the last year, there was a series of approximately 10 checkpoints that served as scrutiny for anyone entering the Jaffna Peninsula. It was demanded of us to present passports and photocopies of passports and "register" in order to proceed into the eerie salt fields surrounding the pass. We drove the remaining 3 hours into Jaffna. Inside the Jaffna Peninsula, the drive was sobering as we viewed bombed and shelled buildings, depressions in the soil from bombs, blackened palms, bunkered homes, military check points and yellow tape providing boundaries from acres and acres of active land mines.

Bill did very well at the checkpoints, by the way. Bill has always had a strange reaction to guards, immigration officers, security people, border crossings and the like. He is convinced he is going to be arrested. Therefore, he begins to act very strangely, which makes me nervous that we will actually get arrested. He looks and acts so guilty. He gets hyper, flustered and kind of agitated. In advance, of our trip to Jaffna, I warned him that he cannot take all this military stuff personally. He did really well. At Elephant Pass, he calmly reached for his passport and handed it over, never even breaking a sweat.

In the bombed and reconstructed public library, we met our new employers in Jaffna. We later met them and my new colleagues at the worksite, Shanthiham. My new job description excites me. While I learned the parameters of this job placement, Bill did a walk-a-bout and reveled in the blistering heat. Then, we looked for housing. We found a couple of possibilities, but nothing perfect, as yet.

After our meetings and brief housing search, we endured the drive home as far as Dambulla. There, we crashed at a lovely guest house, then drove the last grueling five hours home to Colombo, arriving back this afternoon. We are bushed. It has been a hectic two weeks. Night.