New Blog series

title Q&A –Moss Memories 1

Recently I turned 96 and my son suggested I should share some of my adventures before it was too late.

Having worked in many countries (16 at my last count), and multiple times in some.  I have carried out aid missions for five countries and worked for three United Nations organisations.

 I have travelled widely,  have had some great home hospitality, and been to many places tourists couldn’t get into.   It has been a lot of fun, excitement, and hard work, and I have learned a lot.  Throughout my travels, I have felt very privileged, at times scared, and often grateful.

Q- What were some of your most memorable events?

Answer 

Ceylon/ Sri Lanka,1976

I was sent to Kandy under the Colombo Plan (a New Zealand aid initiative) to run a five-week workshop to train agriculture extension trainers. My assistant was Don Treadwell – now a retired professor in the USA.  Neither of us had any formal training in the subject we were sent to run, although our three local assistants all held post-graduate degrees in agriculture extension! 

When we first met the Director of Agriculture we were told if our training was not relevant and the participants went home they would have his full support, this had happened in the past. 

The first week we started with 29 participants and each week the numbers kept increasing.  By the fifth week, we had 94 participants attending. A very stressful situation. There was no air conditioning – it was so hot!

Our participants were used to being lectured, not consulted in a workshop style.  We were seeking their thoughts and ideas, with the best responses being recorded and published in three languages (Tamil, Singhalese, and English).  I ran the training similarly to how they ran Staff College events in New Zealand. I had often worked at the College at Tatum Park.

 At the finish, they put on a party for us with plenty of coconut arrack (distilled coconut flower whiskey), a very pleasant alcoholic drink.  At one point we ended up being tossed in the air with blankets  –  that’s when the Director called the party off! 

I went back to my hotel room and soaked in a large bath (we were booked into the Queen’s Hotel in the middle of Kandy, it was a grand old hotel, but well past its prime).  l was elated that we had succeeded, but I was utterly exhausted!  I soaked for hours in that bath to relieve my tense muscles – and my salty tears rolled down into the bath.  Against great odds, it had been a success.

Little did we know, but as luck would have it the weekend prior to our training workshop Kandy was expecting an extra million people into town to celebrate Lord Buddha’s 2,600 birthday.

The highlight of the weekend was the Perahera in Kandy where I saw 125 elephants parading, all decked out in silk coats, many lit up with lights from car batteries. They led a huge elephant carrying Lord Buddha’s tooth around the Kandy Lake.  It was an amazing sight!

At night the roads were lit by thousands of lamps, small pottery dishes containing a wick, and burning coconut oil which gave off a distinctive, pleasant exotic smell.  Dancers in their traditional costumes carried large metal baskets of flaming charcoal on the end of long poles. Children were singing, music was blaring from loudspeakers day and night, and dancers were beating drums.  It was a sight and smell I will never forget.