Tag Archives: tsunami

Breaking Our Hearts

Posted on by
Reply

This week, it seemed as if the world was determined to break my heart. I am sure I am not the only one who felt that way, but I may be the one who puts two seemingly unrelated events together and wonders how we come to such a pass. I often write about how we can minimize losses from natural disasters, but today’s topic is tragedy wrought by humans upon others.

Illinois

Let me start closer to home. In Crystal Lake, an outer-ring Chicago suburb, a five-year-old boy, “AJ” Freund, was found in a shallow grave in an isolated site near his home. Police found him during an investigation triggered by the boy’s father, who called 911 to report that he was missing. Police dogs tracing his scent at home found no evidence that he had walked out the door. Interrogation of the father, a 60-year-old attorney engaged to a former client in a divorce case, the boy’s 36-year-old mother, caused the police to become suspicious of the couple themselves.

It turned out that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had been involved with the family since the boy was born with opiates in his system, clearly indicating a drug problem for the mother. One police report a few months ago indicated that the home was filthy with pet feces and utilities were shut off, but DCFS apparently found concerns about neglect “unfounded.”

So, how did AJ wind up in his shallow grave? According to the police, the couple kept him in a cold shower before beating him, resulting in his death from head trauma. Needless to say, the couple are now in jail, facing murder charges, and are separately secluded from the rest of the McHenry County jail population for their own safety.

I don’t wish here to focus on the court case. Judge, jury, and prosecutors will make their own determinations as the case proceeds, and like anyone else, the parents are entitled to a defense. What concerns me is what needs to happen at DCFS to prevent many more children from being similarly harmed. This is an agency with serious problems that must be solved.

In the past four years, we had a governor with a serious empathy deficit, who preferred to engineer a stalemate with the Democratic legislature over the state budget while bills went unpaid and progress at agencies like DCFS sputtered, and numerous nonprofit social service providers went unpaid for months on end. But Republican Bruce Rauner did not initiate the crisis at DCFS, which is a product of neglect and malfeasance by several prior administrations, not to mention the frequent unwillingness of the legislature to prioritize funding for social services. But funding is not the only issue.

How bad has it been? According to today’s Chicago Tribune, “DCFS has churned through 14 previous leaders since 2003 and has seen its budget and staffing dwindle.” This turnover implicates two previous Democratic administrations as well as that of Rauner, who had his own revolving door for DCFS executives in the last four years. No one can establish stability and quality of services in such an environment. We can only hope that Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who took office three months ago, can make this a priority and turn the situation around. He has brought in Marc Smith, previously the head of a suburban social service organization, and more importantly, has requested a $75 million increase in funding for the agency. He is taking heat for proposing to amend Illinois’s constitution to allow a progressive income tax in order to gain new revenue from high-income residents, but the money must come from somewhere and the state needs to balance its wobbly budget.

But let me get more personal here. And I do take this personally.

My wife and I have been foster parents since 1991. Two daughters we adopted are now grown, and there are grandchildren. We also have guardianship for one grandson at the moment, so we have a long history of interaction with DCFS. Like many other foster and adoptive parents in Illinois, we have long had reason to question the managerial culture of the agency, which has tended to emphasize restoring or maintaining the custody of natural parents whenever possible. I understand that generally, but not when there is obvious abuse or neglect and caseworkers either fail to take notice or fail to act to protect the children. As headlines have often suggested, that happens more than we may want to know.  AJ has become the latest case in point.

Long ago, two children from a large family reached out to connect with us, and we often let them visit and share their story. We relayed some concerns to DCFS. As a teacher, my wife fell into the category of mandated reporters under state law. Doctors, school officials, and others who may suspect or witness abuse or neglect are legally obligated to report it to the DCFS hotline. In this case, nothing happened until one child died of starvation. Then the remaining children were placed in foster care.

On another unrelated occasion, I became concerned about belt marks on a three-year-old child. I called the hotline, where an imperious responder told me that “under Illinois law, parents are allowed to use corporal punishment to discipline their children.” Appalled by her disinterest, I raised my voice: “We are talking about belt marks on a three-year-old!”

“Mr. Schwab,” she responded sternly, “it is not illegal for parents to use corporal punishment.” Stunned by this indifference, I faced the same dilemma I am sure has confronted others in the same position: Where do we go from here?

Such responses, to be sure, are not always the case. They simply happen too often. Sometimes, an overburdened caseworker takes shortcuts or fails to investigate. The point is that something must change.

Some Illinois legislators—from both parties—were seeking answers from DCFS officials at a hearing in Springfield yesterday. I hope they are all, finally, serious as hell about fostering positive change and not just grabbing headlines in a dramatic case. Too many children’s lives and welfare are at stake.

Sri Lanka

By now, I don’t imagine there is a need to rehash the details of recent bombings in Sri Lanka. It would have been hard to escape the news: suicide bombings by apparent Muslim extremists in three hotels in Colombo as well as several Christian churches on Easter Sunday, killing well over 250 people. The body count has varied, in part because it is difficult to count bodies that have been so badly burned and blown apart. Exactly who planned what is not entirely clear yet, although authorities have blamed a homegrown Muslim militant organization, National Towheed Jamaat. Whether there are ties to Islamic State is a subject of investigation. The precise motive is something that remains unclear.

This comes just a month after the attack by an Australian white supremacist on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, which I discussed last month. I noted that I had spent time in New Zealand in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow for a research center in Christchurch. Thus, I found it disturbing in part because of a personal connection.

It so happens that I spent 10 days in Sri Lanka in 2005 as part of an eight-member interdisciplinary team of Americans invited by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects to assess damage from the Indian Ocean tsunami and recommend options for rebuilding. In the weeks before the trip, I made a brief, stumbling attempt to acquire some familiarity with the dominant national language, Sinhala, but found it daunting. But I find such efforts allow me to breathe in a little more of the ethos of the nation I am visiting. And from further reading and from talking to our hosts, I learned some very interesting facts about Sri Lanka.

The civil war that once raged is now over, but that was not the case then. We traveled from the capital, Colombo, on the western coast of this island, along the coast to Batticaloa, halfway up the eastern coast, before we were forced to turn west through the Central Highlands of Kandy back to Colombo. The Northeast and the Jaffna Peninsula were under the control of the rebel Tamil Tigers. Along the way back, we encountered some military checkpoints. Caught in the middle of this long-running tragedy were the people of many rural villages and smaller cities. As one architect on our team from New Mexico, who was a Vietnam veteran, commented, “The rural people are the ones who always take it in the shorts.”

But this struggle had little to do with Muslims or Christians, except coincidentally. They were largely bystanders. The battle was between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, which wanted rights to sustain its own Tamil language and culture in a multicultural nation. That sounds fair enough, but the Tamil Tigers became an incredibly vicious movement that had few compunctions about sending suicide bombers to blow up public buses. They demanded a Tamil homeland in the regions they controlled. Thousands of Sri Lankans died during decades of armed insurgency. Finally, the rebellion was suppressed by the government about ten years ago.

When we arrived, a cease-fire negotiated by Norwegian diplomats was in effect, but 35,000 Sri Lankans had died as a result of the tsunami—drowned in a wall of water, washed out to sea, crushed beneath shattered buildings. The southern and eastern coasts were devastated. A nation that had suffered so much needless death suffered even more at the hands of the forces of nature, reinforced by a noticeable lack of preparation for such an event.

Even before I left for Sri Lanka, I experienced a personal connection to it all. The Rev. Eardley Mendis, a Sri Lankan-American pastor, had worked as the custodian for Augustana Lutheran Church, of which my wife and I are members, while studying at the nearby Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. By 2005, he was the pastor of a local Lutheran church largely supported by Asian Americans. But his wife and daughter had returned to visit family in Sri Lanka over Christmas in 2004. When the tsunami struck on December 26, they were aboard the coastal passenger train that was destroyed by the second major tsunami wave, largely due to lack of warning of the impending danger. Eardley’s daughter survived; his wife did not. I interviewed him over lunch before I left Chicago. Later, during the trip, a villager in Peraliya took me to see the demolished train, stored on a side track as a memorial. For me, it was one of the most emotionally powerful moments of the entire tour.

The ghostly memorial of the train after the tsunami, May 2005

This man then showed all of us what was left of his home by the sea, including his makeshift oven, where he cooked meals that he sold to travelers along the road. That was his now fragile livelihood.

David Downey, Alan Fujimori, and others visit with my new acquaintance and his makeshift, post-tsumani home.

Sri Lanka has had a measure of peace for most of this decade since the end of the Tamil Tigers insurrection.

A note on Sri Lankan demographics is in order at this point. About two-thirds of the nation is Buddhist, mostly of Sinhalese ethnicity. About 15 percent are Tamil and largely Hindu. The remainder of the nation mostly consists of two religious minorities, half Muslim and half Christian. The Muslims are mostly descended from traders who occupied the coastal cities since medieval times, with Sri Lanka about midway between the predominantly Muslim Arabian peninsula and predominantly Muslim Indonesia. While a very small number of Christians are descended from European colonial settlers of centuries past, most are converts of native Sri Lankan ancestry. The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are part of the fabric of modern Sri Lanka.

And so it may seem curious that one minority might attack another, but it is far more important to know that the vast majority of Sri Lankans of all faiths have had more than enough of war and bombings and sectarian violence. The perpetrators of the Easter bombings appear to include some children of a wealthy spice dealer in Colombo. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe apparently has expressed doubt that the father knew what the children were up to, but the police rightly seem determined to find out. Muslims, like other people across the planet, sometimes experience the pain of children who choose an evil path. The Bible is replete with such stories.

So, for the moment, Christian bishops are warning worshipers to stay home and avoid danger. Churches and other houses of worship no longer appear to be sanctuaries, but targets. Here, it is probably worth quoting the words of the chairman of one Colombo mosque, Akurana Muhandramlage Jamaldeen Mohamed Jayfer, in an Associated Press story today, describing the attackers as:

“not Muslims. This is not Islam. This is an animal. We don’t have a word (strong enough) to curse them.”

My only comment would be that he may have inadvertently insulted the animals, who merely hunt for food. Only humans harbor hatred powerful enough to motivate such heartless mass murder.

Jim Schwab

Comparing Disaster Recovery Around the World

Posted on by
Reply

There was a time not long ago, in human history, when a faraway nation could experience a wrenching natural disaster that most of the rest of us would not know about for months, or even years, afterwards. The idea that anyone else should or could help the stricken cities or nations recover would have seemed foreign, if not utterly impractical. Help from the U.S. federal government for San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake was minimal and slow to arrive. American involvement in an earthquake at the time in China would have seemed preposterous and quixotic.

2002 planning meeting in Bhuj following the 2001 Gujarat earthquake. Photo by B.R. Balachandran, Environmental Planning Collaborative, Ahmedabad, obtained from Robert Olshansky.

Modern transportation and communications have changed all that, and as we became more instantly aware of hurricanes in Florida, earthquakes in Japan, and volcanoes in the Philippines, we began to realize that there were ways to help—and much to learn. Governments became more aware of a responsibility to assist with planning for long-term recovery, and the field of urban planning, which for decades saw natural hazards as outside its purview, by the 1980s began to undertake systematic studies of how to make recovery more effective. As disasters became more expensive in light of widespread urbanization in recent decades, the stakes have risen dramatically. Researchers and practitioners over the past 40 or 50 years have exchanged data and ideas at major international and national conferences, and national and local policies on post-disaster recovery have evolved rapidly. One can now find a substantial literature on the topic.

One recent and noteworthy entry into this literature is After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2017; 380 pp.). The authors, Laurie A. Johnson and Robert B. Olshansky, are both highly experienced in the international arena and, I will add, good colleagues of mine in this field. Johnson is an independent consultant based in northern California with past ties to various firms engaged in hazards work. She was a major contributor to Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation (2014), a project I led at the American Planning Association. Olshansky is a professor and head of the department of urban planning at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The two previously co-authored Clear as Mud (Planners Press, 2010), a book that chronicled recovery planning in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

They have worked in the countries whose disasters they describe in the book: India, Japan, China, New Zealand, Indonesia, and the U.S. These are, of course, vastly different nations in wealth, geography, size, and circumstance, and the question that the authors confront is devilishly simple: Are there lessons from these nations’ experiences in managing long-term community recovery that are transferable? What, pray tell, does flood recovery in Iowa have in common with tsunami recovery in Indonesia or earthquake recovery in India?

My own international experiences have largely been different from those they describe: I have been involved in the Dominican Republic (after Hurricane Georges), Sri Lanka (after the 2004 tsunami), Taiwan, and New Zealand, under varying circumstances, and that very question has grown in my own mind over time. Those experiences have also provided background for assessing the lessons that Johnson and Olshansky derive from the countries they study. I think they do a very solid job of assembling data, shaping the narratives, and drawing useful conclusions from their case studies. At the same time, they make clear what is unique in each country, and where nuances and differences in national frameworks for disaster policy shed light on larger issues.

One fact that is clear from this book is that those national policies are anything but static. Every nation they study is learning from each major disaster and implementing changes over time. Except for New Zealand, these six are large nations with events occurring frequently enough that many of the lessons multiply and reinforce each other. It is equally clear that political history has a major influence on how these nations organize disaster recovery and how it evolves. Teasing out the lessons that are generally transferable is thus devilishly simple. They emerge only after researchers immerse themselves in the details and compare them closely.

For instance, India, like the United States, has a federal system of government. Both nations thus tend to push down to state governments a number of responsibilities that more centralized China and Japan might reserve at the national level. Prior to the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, a state in India’s northwest, India had only a very small disaster management division within its Ministry of Agriculture, a location within the national bureaucracy that itself speaks volumes about how India once perceived the nature of most disasters.

It is worth noting, however, that the U.S. did not consolidate its own disaster relief and recovery functions within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) until 1979, when the agency was created under President Jimmy Carter. The U.S. did not have any federal statutory framework for systematic disaster response until 1950, and created the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968. As the authors explain, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, then completely reshaped the administrative landscape of American disaster management as Congress reacted to those events by creating the Department of Homeland Security and placing FEMA under its umbrella.

The fact that India was at most a generation behind in assuming greater responsibility at the national level should not be surprising in light of its development, but rapid urbanization has also forced reassessment of many issues of federal ministerial structure. India is also a nation that, because of its relative poverty, has relied much more on international assistance, even as it has steadily expanded its home-grown expertise on natural hazards and urban planning.

A sewer line is laid in the old city of Bhuj in Gujarat, India, in 2004. Photo by B.R. Balachandran, Environmental Planning Collaborative, Ahmedabad. Reprinted from the book with permission from authors.

Two weeks after the 2001 earthquake, the state established the Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority, led by the chief minister. Like state and national agencies in every other country studied, GSDMA experimented at times, made mistakes and enjoyed successes, and helped rebuild homes and infrastructure. There is no perfect way to recover from disaster, and there are always disappointments. For housing reconstruction, Gujarat, the authors report, employed both an owner-driven plan and a public-private partnership plan. The owner-driven approach had no precedent in India on such a large scale; the earthquake had flattened almost 6,500 buildings and killed 7,000 people. This fact alone illustrates one highly transferable lesson from international experience—that disaster recovery provides a compelling laboratory for such innovation, providing that authorities are prepared to accept the prospect of some measure of failure and to learn from it. A more positive way of making that same point is the “silver lining” theory, which sees disaster recovery as a unique opportunity to advance positive change in a “teachable moment.”

Such lessons take shape in very different cauldrons, however. New Zealand, for instance, which suffered the 2010-2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, the major city of the South Island, has a smaller population than any Indian state or most states in the U.S. The nation is also comparatively prosperous. With only 4.7 million people in an area about 70 percent the size of California, New Zealand has no need to decentralize most government functions, except for rural districts and municipalities. The national government thus found it easy to take control of some recovery functions from the city, and there was no intermediary authority. China, with the world’s largest population, tends to concentrate power but nonetheless also finds some decentralization of recovery functions a practical necessity. In the U.S., however, such power sharing is integral to the system and enshrined in the Constitution. These issues of central authority versus state or provincial and local autonomy tend to set the terms within which the experiments in recovery operate. Moreover, as the chapter on Indonesia following the  2004 tsunami through subsequent lesser disasters illustrates, disaster management institutions are evolving rapidly in developing nations as well as in those with more developed economies such as the U.S. and Japan.

So, what can we learn? This book provides a wealth of detail in its case studies, but the authors note that a key leader of Indonesian recovery efforts stated to them his belief that there are no general lessons to learn because “all disasters are unique.” It is certainly true that each event has its own special context and contours, but that simply makes drawing lessons more challenging, not impossible. The authors conclude with seven recommendations.

The first is to “enhance existing structures and systems to promote information flow and collaboration.” Often it makes sense to retain new agencies or programs because they serve more purposes than simply advancing disaster recovery. Second, the authors emphasize the need for data management, transparency, and accountability. The availability of information is crucial for citizens and stakeholders to make good decisions as they rebuild.

A village meeting discusses details of the post-tsunami resettlement in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, India, in 2008. Photo by Divya Chandresekhar, obtained from Robert Olshansky.

The third point is to “plan and act simultaneously.” The paradox here is that reconstruction can never happen fast enough, yet it is important at times to slow the process down in order to inject some thoughtful deliberation into the process. In short, planners and public officials must learn to work efficiently with limited time to make things happen. In some settings, that may necessitate at least some decentralized decision making to prevent bottlenecks. It becomes essential to learn on the run because not learning can be extremely detrimental.

It is also critical both to budget for the costs of communicating and planning, because these functions are critical to success, and to increase capacity in local governments to make recovery decisions. Effective communication aids empowerment, but so does the ability to hire adequate staff with adequate training. Pushing some of that power and capacity down to individual citizens also expedites decision making. That requires sharing information.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami dramatically affected shoreline communities in Tamil Nadu, India, but fishing families were often reluctant to relocate. Photo by Robert Olshansky (from the book).

The authors also suggest avoiding “permanent relocation of residents and communities, except in rare instances, and then only with full participation of residents.” The risk of forced relocation is greater in more authoritarian and highly centralized systems like that in China, while the U.S. heavily relies on voluntary relocation, and total community relocation remains a rarity. But the consequences of such relocation can be devastating unless the community has bought into the idea and clearly understands how it will benefit—presuming it actually will.

Finally, the authors, again picking up on the theme of time compression after disasters, say, “Reconstruct quickly, but do not be hasty.” Exactly when undue speed becomes haste is, of course, very much a matter of judgment, and good judgment often relies on experience, all of which strongly suggests the value of pre-planning for disasters in order to create the opportunity to evaluate options beforehand and train staff for the eventuality. It might be added that expanding the literature available to them that will expand their familiarity with the issues before disaster strikes is also valuable. This book, in its own way, helps advance that mission.

Jim Schwab

Prepared for Disaster in Maui

Posted on by
1

Paradise is not always paradise. Hawaii generally is vulnerable to a number of potential disasters, including tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, drought, and, in the case of the Big Island, volcanoes (although not of the explosive variety). The entire archipelago is nature’s creation following volcanic uplift in the middle of the ocean over millions of years of geologic time. Humans have occupied these islands for less than a millennium, after their discovery by Polynesian explorers, and Europeans only discovered them in 1776, at the time of the American Revolution, when England’s Captain Cook landed there. We are a mere blip in the evolution of the Hawaiian landscape. It is best we approach such landscapes with humility, for our own sake.

Officials in Maui County, which includes not only the island of Maui but the nearby smaller islands of Molokai, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, seem to realize as much. The best way to convey what they are doing to prepare Maui County for future hazardous events is to let them speak for themselves. In August, at the American Planning Association, we taped a podcast interview with both James Buika, a planner for the county, and Tara Owens, a coastal hazards specialist who has worked with the county on behalf of Hawaii Sea Grant. They explained the county’s planning process to prepare for future disaster recovery needs, including sensitive approaches to native cultural concerns.

Click here to listen to this 23-minute podcast.

Jim Schwab

Learn from Taxi Drivers

Posted on by
2

“How old do you think I am?” the cab driver asked.

It was an odd question, but the conversation with my driver from Reagan National Airport to my hotel on 10th St. NW in Washington, D.C., had already caught me by surprise with his first comment before we had ever exited the airport.

He asked where I was from, and I said Chicago.

“I haven’t seen you for a while,” he said. I was thinking that I had never seen him before at all. Why did he say this? I expressed a little surprise.

“Dr. Morse?” he asked. I soon learned that I apparently looked a lot like Dr. Morse, but I informed him that I was neither a doctor but an urban planner. Dr. Morse is apparently a frequent visitor to Washington, was also from Chicago, and must more than once have found his way into this man’s taxi. The fact was that I was not Dr. Morse produced its own line of conversation, and this was one of those rare cabbies who was actually good at generating conversation out of whole cloth. He worked with whatever conversational material his riders apparently seemed to offer, even inadvertently.

The fact that I did not turn out to be Dr. Morse was no obstacle. And now he took off his hat to let me guess his age. I studied his appearance from behind. “Forty-five,” I said after some consideration. He had only the slightest tinge of gray hair, a youngish-looking face, and seemed fit. Middle-aged.

He proceeded to tell me that a local magazine had cited him for looking much younger than his age. I was not the first to peg him at 45 or thereabouts. It happens a lot. Then he finally tipped his cap. “Seventy-two,” he admitted. I admitted that he looked remarkably good for 72. I asked him how old I looked, and he said 62. Off by just two years, I told him, I am 64. Perhaps my gray hair betrays me more than his does.

But this was about more than just age. He informed me that he had run a marathon, coming in fourth, I believe he said, in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Knowing that the U.S. had boycotted the Moscow Olympics that year because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the year before, I asked what country he had represented.

“Ethiopia,” he answered. But he had been in Washington 12 years and liked it. I did not ask when he came to the U.S. Somehow it did not occur to me. I was more interested in the man’s story than in mere numbers and dates. He seemed to look so young because of sheer fitness. It is curious how many immigrants become taxi drivers—it seems to be a port of entry in the job world, as well as a great way to learn your way around a new city—but few are former Olympians, for this or any other country. U.S. Olympians, of course, often have much greater opportunities in life if for no other reason than access to money, if they become heroes, or at least education. Such opportunities can more easily escape an aging Ethiopian runner. I would wager, however, that it is not escaping his grandchildren or, since he claimed to have some, his great grandchildren. He seemed amused that I could only claim grandchildren who are nowhere close to being old enough to produce their own offspring.

Soon enough, I found myself getting out in front of Embassy Suites. I tipped him nicely, adding $4 to a $16 ride to offer him a twenty. Taking my luggage as he pulled it out of the trunk, I commented that Washington must have been a significant shift from growing up in Ethiopia. He smiled. Yes, it was, and he did not seem to mind.

Earlier that morning, I had a somewhat more mundane conversation with a young man driving me to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. I had noted, in this 5:30 a.m. ride on Fathers’ Day, that I typically take the CTA Blue Line to the airport, that I traveled a lot, but that I simply had too much luggage on this first leg of a triangle trip to Washington, then Boston, then back to Chicago later in the week, to take the train this morning. It was a business trip. Only as we neared O’Hare did he suddenly mention, for a reason I have now forgotten, that he was from Sri Lanka, though he had moved here with his parents when he was five years old.

“I’ve been there,” I mentioned. He was stunned. Almost no one from America, to his knowledge, went to Sri Lanka, and it is probably true. I am sure it ranks poorly on a list of U.S. tourist destinations, although it ranks well with Australians, who don’t have nearly so far to go. I noted that it was unquestionably the longest journey one could possibly take from Chicago.

“When were you there?” he asked.

“April and May of 2005,” I answered. He immediately guessed that the reason for my trip must have been the tsunami. I confirmed that was the case, telling him I had been part of a team of planners and architects invited by the Sri Lankan Institute of Architects—but that I was an urban planner.  We discussed some details like how long I was there (ten days) and the army checkpoints that marked off barriers at the time to territory held by the Tamil Tigers.

By then, we had pulled up to the American Airlines terminal, and I got out and collected my luggage. I am also sure that encounter made his day. He had encountered a passenger who actually knew something about Sri Lanka and had been there for a serious purpose.

It’s amazing what conversations you can have with cabbies if you are willing. It’s a window into the immigrant experience in America. You might learn something.

 

Jim Schwab