Sophia Lizares-Bodegon
The regular military and police checkpoints on the roads leading to Colombo are but an introduction to what one encounters at its heart. Yellow barricades, two meters high, guard Galle Road, the main artery that ends in a graceful curve at the Galle Face Green where the city is closest to the sea. Here there are watchtowers and barbed wire, and signs that underscore the obvious: “This is a high security zone. No photographs are allowed.” The grand stone building, which used to be Legislative House, itself looks like a prisoner behind the steel enclosure. So does the Kollupitiya Police HQ. No one use the sidewalks in front of the Presidential Palace, no cars can drive through the lanes on that block. Here the checkpoints every 10 meters, booths manned by soldiers and police with rifles slung over their shoulders. Especially at night, vehicles are stopped and passengers must show identity cards. The points of reference in time not dates but the last bomb attack for example in Grampaha (6 April) or Piliyandala (24 April).
But mostly life goes on in Colombo. The blue police checkpoints advertise: “Elastics, Laces, and Webbings,” or “Donated by Unicom,” or “Union Assurance -- We will care for your life.” The guard at the food court in Crescat Mall watches a band singing, “To all the girls I’ve loved before” while French-speaking tourists check out the Camembert at Keells Supermarket. Across the road, the seedy Super 8 Motel of pre-tsunami days has a new name, sports a new coat of paint and a brass plate announcing the Honorary Consulate of the Dominican Republic. Down the road after the high stone walls of the US Embassy, is the Kollupitiya Methodist Church where on Saturday afternoons, street children sing “This is the day the Lord has made” in Sri Lanka’s three main languages. And on Sundays at noon, the youth band rocks!
Out of the high security zone, the market on Dam St. throbs with coolies and tuk-tuks, truck helpers unload sacks of grain and fruit, and the Colombo City Mission goes about its work. The city population officially at 1.2 million swells in the daytime with an additional 200.000 persons, many of them street workers.
“One gets used to living in instability,” says Rev. K. Jeremiah Arulrajah, the new director of the Colombo City Mission of the Methodist Church. He has seen more action in his native Batticaloa in the Eastern Province and was severely injured in a vehicular accident 17 years ago that shattered one leg. Be ready for an amputation, one doctor advised him. But he believed more in what the same doctor had prescribed –prayer. He was led to a specialist who performed an operation, which saved his leg.
“I’m on a recovery mission,” he says of the work at the center. Pressed by the end of support from a children's aid NGO, and guided by its own knowledge about development, the MCSL is moving into community-based interventions while seeking to maintain its diaconal institutions. The Colombo City Mission used to have 70 children in its day care center. With the end of KNH funding last year, however, the number of students is down to 27. This leaves the mission with large empty rooms, which the director proposed to turn into hostels for out- of-town residents who visit the city hospitals. Already the center has women’s and men’s hostels, offering rooms for Rp 2000/month for workers in the city. Currently 15 women and 10 men use the rooms.
Beneath the dust of the city is a joyful, healing presence that attracts people such as Sajee, a middle-aged man who desperately wanted to leave his addiction to drugs and has succeeded. It has drawn Samanthi and Tamara, who need space to recover from family crises and believe that life can be full. Trained in India as a counselor, Rev. Arulrajah shares his gifts in the Theological College of Lanka and the Methodist school for evangelists. “Jesus is a mechanic,” Rev. Arulrajah says with a broad smile. “He repairs people.”
Rev. Arulrajah uses counseling and pastoral care “to reduce tension.” In coordination with the church’s prayer ministry, he has trained two pastors and two volunteers to help out with the counseling. He hopes to put 50 new counselors through 120 hours of qualified education.
With inflation at 20 percent, the mission has had to further subsidize the hostel and other services. A property development plan could provide the needed support. Due to its central location, the mission center buildings could easily fetch more money. Current tenants sub-let store space for almost 20 times more than what the church charges.
Meanwhile in Karunagama, in the city outskirts, the center runs a kindergarten, where a family has offered the use of land in their backyard. There the church built a basic structure, which will be turned over to the family at the end of the period as a form of rent. The construction, however, is ramshackle, its roof not even a continuous span, allowing in rain.
The school, like much of the village, is frequently flooded or muddy. Dengue and elephantiasis is a common disease. The church sends a doctor to the village each week and plans to start a preventive health care program there. Rev. Arulrajah sees great possibilities in community organization there using the nursery as a starting point. He traces the beginnings of the nursery as a strategy to resettle its host family, which had found shelter in the city mission during a big flood several years ago –a clear line showing how relief, rehabilitation and development could proceed.
Community organization is fraught with difficulty. The pioneering work among street children and coolies, for example, had to be stopped for “security reasons.” Any gathering of youth is suspected by the police. Before the 1980s, porters had access to loans with which to buy trolleys, thereby freeing themselves from wealthier owners who had controlled the carts.
Life goes on -- but not quite. Rev. Duleep Fernando, minister of the Kollupitiya Church, calls the night before the children’s bible study. The activity has been cancelled, he says, the leader has been a casualty in a grenade attack.
Meanwhile 75-year-old Auntie Debora is a bit lost. After her house in Batticaloa was occupied by the LTTE, she moved to a new house in Colombo. She prays she would get a residence permit from the UK where her son works as a doctor. But as her house is in the high security zone, no one wants to rent it because of the hassles of going through the checkpoints. In the wake of a bombing in the end of April, 14 soldiers searched her house. She has thus decided to donate it to the Methodist Church. City dwellers read the signs just like they read the changing weather. (Yes, the monsoon is early this year.) They know that after an attack, security would tighten but eventually relax until more and more checkpoints become empty, just as they were during the Singhalese New Year, just before a bomb attack.
"If Sri Lanka is anyone’s space, it is theirs,” journalist Patrick Lawrence writes referring to the police and army units that dot the country. Not quite. One needs to go through the checkpoints in Jaffna to see the fear and loneliness in the eyes of Singhalese soldiers in the Tamil homeland. Rev. Noel Fernando tells of how soldiers have asked him about the cross he cross he wears on his lapel. His explanation about a God who dies, surprises the soldiers. But what happens next, the story of the resurrection, the meaning of the lamb and the fish, the Alpha and Omega, move the armed men to ask for a cross to them to wear. We want to know more about this God who protects, they say.
In a country under siege, how does a church grow? Rev. Arulrajah is unfazed and instead tells of God’s power: “We witness to a God of Hope, an omnipotent God.” Such testimonies are characteristic of the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka. After a 50-year period of stagnation, the church membership has been growing again -- in fact in the most difficult areas. In one region, there are seven new worship places under the leadership of a minister who was ordained only in November. Particularly in pre-dominantly Buddhist Singhalese areas, constructing a church is equivalent an offense to religious militants who hold up Sri Lanka as the cradle of Buddhism.
In this contested space where the need for safety is high, conversion can be cheap, so evangelists are careful. They hold off baptisms until they know the person “experiences the love, grace, healing and peace of God or proves his or her faith, usually after persecution.” When their faith is tested, the evangelist does not come to their rescue, says Rev. Layasing de Silva, the Evangelism Secretary. “If we do, they will depend on us and not on God.”
“There are different models and strategies but this has nothing to do with evangelism,” says MCSL President Ebenezer Joseph. “Something else is happening. One simply works with commitment. It’s all God’s business.”
Sophia Lizares-Bodegon visited Sri Lanka in April 2008. She is one of the executive secretaries for Asia of the UEM.The Methodist Church of Sri Lanka (MC-SL) is a UEM member church.
Prayer of Confession at the Kollupitiya Methodist Church
Lord, forgive my anxieties, which cloud my vision of you who are all powerful and all loving.
God, forgive my incompleteness: not hungering to grow in Christ, not expanding my knowledge of the Scriptures, not developing my talents.
God, forgive my disinterest: a lack of concern for needs around me, apathy regarding the lostness of millions, blindness to hurts I could help heal.
God, forgive my dishonesty: taking the easy way rather than the right way, speaking in one manner while living in another, silencing the truth to preserve tranquility, settling for less than what is best, loving tradition more than obeying your pioneering Spirit.
God, forgive my loudness: talking when I should be listening, proclaiming when I should be studying, busying myself with new tasks when I should be finding a quiet place to rest.
God, forgive my silence: receiving love and not speaking words of thanks, enjoying your blessings and not praising you with gladness, knowing truth and forfeiting an opportunity to share it.
God, please forgive me.
