Cougar Bait

I recently tried my hand at a life long dream of mine to street perform on the sidewalk of a busy city with a good friend of mine. Me and Zack set out with the highest of ambitions as we made our journey across the streets of Honolulu to find the most bustling corner of the city. Honestly I don't know what Zack was thinking but I was honestly thinking we'd make at least $100 possibly $200. I'm mean the whole way there we were locating restaurants we were gonna eat at afterwards. Zack was even left his wallet at home having faith that we'd make at least enough money to catch the bus home. Maybe I should've too. After a long walk we finally set up in front of the duke statue in Waikiki with literally hundreds probably thousands of people walking by. After a few songs a couple of attractive young ladies approached us half way through a song. Our first fans! As they came closer they casually continued to walk straight past us and cuttingly remarked that we needed to “start playing already”. I'm not gonna lie that was a kick to the balls. After that I continued to play, maybe more out of spite than anything. We changed our strategy a little and pulled out the slide guitar which made a solid dollar or two, one of which started blowing away down the street. I still kept playing as I watched Zack chased a dollar bill down the street. After about an hour we'd made about three dollars and 5 cents, but then a homeless lady came up midway through a song and asked us if we had a dollar to spare. What could we do, but tell the lady to take her pick out of the two dollar bills that lay in my case. This is not a complaint, like we were both extremely happy to help that old lady, but seriously who comes up to a street performer and asks them for money. Finally we took our $2.05 and made our way to the bus stop. Determined not to let the night discourage me I pulled out my guitar as we waited for the bus to come. Within a few seconds there were a couple of peeps who were quite impressed with out music and came over to listen. One happy middle aged lady came over and repositioned herself right next to Zack. When we'd finished the song all she did was smile and kept repeating that we were “cougar bait”. She then went on to ask us if we knew what cougar bait meant and started stroking Zack's hair while pulling out a beer coloured beverage disguised in a mineral water bottle. After a small amount of dialogue we switched instruments and Zack started busting out an impromptu worship slash prayer song for the people at the bus stop. If nothing else that night, we at least got to give a dollar to a homeless lady and pray for a promiscuous mid-aged alcoholic.

Burnt muffins, pushups, and neighbourhood watch

After a short two week break back in Australia, the storey of Mr Keeffe continues back in the heart of Wahiawa Hawaii. For those who have never been to the beautiful town of Wahiawa I will describe it a little for you. Wahiawa is a small town in the middle of Hawaii on the way to the north shore notoriously known for its bad fashion sense and lack of ethics. Most tourists never stop there, they just drive on through. In fact some people were on a holiday at Wikiki and they were coming to visit STN, but the hotel manager did everything they could to convince this young couple not come Wahiawa. Would sort of be like someone on holidays going to Nambour. As many of you know I'm currently involved with STN and I can tell even in the one year I've been away, that the whole town is improving as violence, drugs and general dodginess decreases.

As you all guessed because of my exceptional cooking skills, my new role at STN is hospitality and campus life. One of my first tasks was to bake a fika (swedish morning tea) for the staff meeting. So the first photo is of me scrapping a burnt muffin from the pan, and the second photo you'll see the muffin tops on top of the muffins. This was because the bottoms got burnt beyond recovery. So the good news is I get to encourage a campus of about 60 staff and students, make sure everyone is doing alright, and organise a man night. The bad part is that until my cooking skills get better everyone's gonna have to pretend like they enjoy burnt muffins. Some of my friends are quite old fashioned and seem to think that its funny that a male like me is doing laundry and baking. However twice a week my masculinity draws strength when I help repair and organise an old storage house. Its just nice to hit things with a hammer sometimes.

After getting back into the swing of things, I'm absolutely stoked to be here. People's lives are getting changed everyday. Literally. I love that on a Saturday night at Surfer's Church we share a meal with the community and you get all sorts of people coming. Just this last Saturday night a few of us who are doing staff training baked some brownies and stuff to raise money for our upcoming trip to Kauai (and then I went and did some pushups). Our goal was $200, and at the end of the night all the notes and coins were counted and it came to $200 exactly (down to the last penny). The funny thing is we only had about $90 worth of brownies to sell. I'm pretty sure God hears prayers.

In my spare time we've been surfing quite a bit. We went surfing the other day at rockies and these guys came back from just checking the surf, like they parked and then walked down the alley to check the waves for 5 mins, but when they came back we were in their parking spot. I'm guessing someone flogged the truck (ute) while they were doing a surf check. Spew, they could even go surfing cause their boards were in the truck! The ironic thing was that it was parked below a neighbour hood watch sign. I'm just wondering what neighbours were watching for? Possibly an unlocked vehicle.

The Survivors

My time in Arugam Bay is over. I have to say that the people of Arugam Bay are probably the most welcoming friendly people that I've met anywhere in the world. So thankyou Arugam Bay for an amazing couple of months and I would definitely love to come back one day.

Now is the moment you've all been waiting for. After 10 weeks of life in Arugam Bay not only was I wowed by the spectacular landscape, amazed at the amount of sugar the locals consumed, and bewildered by their driving methods, but mostly importantly I was totally impressed by the quality of dogs that roamed the streets. Hereby I have carefully put together the first 2011 Arugam Bay dog calender. The photos seen are a small teaser. I was going to make actual calenders and use them to raise money for my future endeavours however I'm leaving the country again in 3 days to go Hawaii so this is not really possible. But if anyone really would like to get their hands on one of these limited edition calenders please contact me and we can try organise something. Most of the photos were taken on an Olympus fe with 4.65 optical zoom, 12 megapixels and a half broken screen.

Waterline

The more I stay in Sri Lanka the more I see a need here and more opportunity everyday. Yesterday was completely rad, me, Nate, and Andy helped connect a water line to a family's house. We dug, laid pipe, put fittings in the kitchen, toilet and made an outdoor shower and now for the first time the family has running water. It was so good to see, because for someone like the mother who stays there 24/7, it made a world of difference. I think she was pretty moved by the fact that we would help them and not want anything in return, cause her daughter came up and said, “Andy good but bad thing because mother is crying, but good thing because she is so happy”.

Surf Contest

Last week we helped host the Sri Lanka Nationals, the first nation wide surfing competition in Sri Lanka. After a very rushed lead up and planning, the two day event finally got up and running. It was so good how everyone from the community pulled together in the last couple of days to make it happen. This included a couple of tourists giving of their time to film and photograph the event as well as one of the long time visiting aussies volunteering to judge.

As for me my main role was to organise the food and be a judge. I was somewhat successful in that we had breakfast and lunch provided for the contestants. My only let down was that one of the days we ended up with two restaurants providing break

fast and consequently double the amount of food than originally asked for. Somewhat of a communication breakdown. It would definitely help if cooks would talk to their managers before volunteering to sponsor a surfing event and also would help if they wouldn't nod their head when I ask if they're the manager. None the less, there was more than enough food.

As for my second job, I couldn't believe judging could be so fun. I tried to make the judging as fair as possible, rewarding those who did critical manoeuvres and give lower scores to anyone who even slightly resembled Adriano De Souzer. Thankfully no one did any double claims after performing a serious weak floaters. At the start we were told that the surf club wanted us to judge the comp because they have live here afterwards and would have to live with the repercussions of their judging. But there were not real disputes aside from a heated discussion with a spectator about not receiving a free t-shirt. Aside from that everything ran smoothly.

My highlight of the event happened on day two when there were a couple of heats which we had 5 surfers and only 4 rash guards. We decided to that one of the surfers would just surf without and we'd write down there colour as 'skin'. After announcing each surfer's colours for the next heat, the 5th surfer finally came up to the stage and asked where the skin coloured rash guard was. For some of these surfers I think it was their first competition.

Overall I think the surf club was completely stoked at the help we provided for em and I'm sure we've made some life long friendships.

Special thanks to Amir for photographing on the day and providing photos for this blog.

Small staircases, sugar milk and 70's jackets

Need to write some things down about the weekend. It was amazing. We went up to the mountains to a place called Narellia for a pastor's confernece. Who would have thought Sri Lanka could be freezing cold in their summer, but yes, yes it can. Nareallia is a nice little town up in the mountains where most of the world's tea is grown.

First of all the journey up was unreal except that our driver crashed the van on possibly the busiest round about in Sri Lanka. Other than Tyler hitting his head on the windshield and the van suffering minor damage we were good to go again. We passed through so much diverse countryside, from dry grasslands to thick lush jungle, from big developed towns to derilict towns, and then finally finished at the beautiful tea plantations village of Narellia with British buildings. Felt like a cross between somewhere in Europe and Nepal (even though I've never been there). But seriously everything is nicer up there, like greener, fresher, even the dogs look a lot nicer. The weirdest part was that its only rained once or twice down in Aragum Bay on the east coast and then you go about 150km inland and its the wet season and is absolutely freezing. As you'll see by the photos we really didn't come prepared for cold, but we were soon greeted by a hot cup of tea by the Sri Lankan pastors. Even though there was about half a cup of sugar in the pot of tea I drank it anyway. I could literally feel my teeth decomposing as I drank the sugar flavoured milk.

At night we went to town and bought some ridiculous 70's clothing to keep warm and then had curry on pancakes for dinner. The little restaurant we went to was so rad. I think my favourite experience at that restaurant was what can be described as my “journey” to the toilet. I passed through a kitchen, then up a set of stairs which was the skinnest corridor with the smallest steps I've ever seen. I think it would have been easier climbing a ladder because firstly I had to duck for the ceiling, secondly the stairs were ridiculously steep. To add to the difficulty the steps were wide enough to fit about a quarter of your foot and they were rounded on the edge for extra slipperiness. Once up the top I worked my way through another maze of a kitchen with little Sri Lankans everywhere, steam everywhere and a little kitten on the floor playing with a ball of string. Finally we finished off the day at the pastors house overlooking a valley english style houses, tea plantations and tea factories. At night I was forced to share a bed with 3 other men, none the less I was thankful to be warm...

Fins, Jelly Fish and Berries

Fins, Jelly Fish and Berries

Well the last week has been interesting. After injuring my knee surfing and the team leaving to Colombo, I thought I would have a lot of time to myself.... but not really. Kids are here 24/7! Every afternoon after school the kids come around to do some sort of repair to either their bike or their surfboard. Anyways I'm just about going crazy not being able to surf while I wait to my knee to heal. But in the mean time I've been shooting plenty of photos of the surf and filming. People tell me its character building.

One thing that I've learned since being here, is that if there's an easy way to do something, Sri Lankan's will figure it out. One of the boys snapped his fin out of his surfboard the other day and came to me asking if I had a spare. I didn't have a spare but told him I'd look round and ask friends if anyone has a cheap one. Anyways a day or two latter I think he got over waiting, because calls me over and shows me his new fin. He'd pretty much just cut away the top of the fin making two new plugs which meant the height was reduced by 1cm. It took me a minute to realise what he'd done but when I worked it out I reckon I laughed for about a minute. Having one fin smaller than the others isn't the end of the world, but I think it encapsulates the phrase 'Sri Lanka System'.

Its funny the way some of the kids sort of sneak into the property to hang with us. Like seriously some of the kids who tell everyone how bad we are, the same kids who throw rocks on our roof, are the same kids who come in and absolutely love spending time with us. They have every reason not to come and visit, and yet the joy and excitement I see on their faces when they come and hang out seems to far outweigh any reason for avoiding us. Its real good to be able to be a part of creating an environment which is loving, safe and fun. And it really is the people which make that environment. The funniest part is when they put on their Sri Lankan techno beats and get in a big circle and film each other dancing.

If anyone watched one of those tv shows or movies where the main characters travel to do a difference dimension or universe and everything sort of appears the same, but everything is done differently. Well I think that's sometimes how I feel here. I remember this game that we used to play at the beach where dad would throw the ball and we would stand in the shallow water so we could dive to the side and try catch it. So I attempted this game with a couple of the kids yesterday down by the beach because they absolutely LOVE cricket and I thought it be a big hit. Except we didn't have a tennis ball... So I guess the next logical thing to use was a jelly fish. About 40 mins later the jelly fish was still in tact and doing quite well. Same game; just done a little differently. As we were leaving I looked over and one of the kids had found a piece of string and tied the jelly fish around his neck as a necklace. Very innovative I thought.

Yesterday afternoon was the Sunday School excursion. So the pastor hired a school bus as you can see in the photo, and we went picking berry's in the jungle. Very fun afternoon, although I was a little concerned that we didn't do a head count before we left because kids were just jumping off the tractor every hundred meters or so and running off into the jungle because they'd spotted a tree full of berries. Was also concerned a wee bit concerned of something eating us. I mean one of the local men was telling us that their was a big crocodile that lived in lake, but that didn't seem too worry the kids as they ran along the water's edge and bear foot to get to their next tree. I have to say but the lack of regulations in Sri Lanka is sort of refreshing. Kids don't need forms from parents, they don't need their allergy medicine, and they don't even need shoes. In fact one kids had cut a plastic bag and put it on his head as a hat. I think he realised it wasn't working when his head was heating up like a greenhouse and his hair was soaking wet.