Ad Hoc Interviewing

This is a write up of the things I learnt from the spontaneous interview I had with Bandula Sir yesterday.

These are some notes I was able to take down from the informal, unrecorded, spontaneous interview with HR manager Bandula Sir. He told me, contrary to what Gihan Sir had told me earlier, that there are 1640 employees, of whom 350 are Muslim, 127 Tamil and the rest are Sinhalese. This is because the Ampara District is a predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese District, with just a few Tamil and Muslim settlements closer to the coast. Some of the production lines are more mixed than others, as they try to arrange production lines around location, so that everyone on the same line can come on the same bus. I had been starting to get a little worried about holding participatory mapping sessions, as employees come from such a large catchment that I could have been dealing with just several employees, but so far spread out that I wouldn’t have been able to get much meaningful data. As it is, I should just be able to hold participatory mapping sessions with members of just one line, in the knowledge that they will all be from the same vicinity.

I asked again about relations between Tamil and Sinhalese employees, and just like everyone else I asked, I was told there are no problems between employees caused by ethnicity. I’ll touch more on this point in a later post, because it’s forced me to do a lot of thinking recently.

Ampara itself is about 95% Sinhalese, with only 3% Muslim and 2% Tamil. During the civil war, the town itself had very few problems – it tended to be coastal areas that were more affected, but only by ‘small, small’ incidents – conditions were much worse in the North. The East was used mainly as a base for the LTTE, where they could store supplies and from where they could attack Colombo. Some of the workers are from those areas, but they didn’t have any problems apparently. Although, this said, apparently on some days Tamil workers couldn’t come to work, but Sinhala and Muslim workers could. There were many checkpoints that buses would have to drive through, and Tamils were wary at first of working in Ampara, until they were guaranteed security when travelling. Mrs G has told me previously that in fact, many employees were affected by the war, losing husbands, brothers, fathers. Many mixed messages, so it’s difficult to extract reliable information, and Baba G tells me this is the sort of thing that I’ll never read about online or in a newspaper – the only record of these events is that held in people’s memories and reproduced verbally.

The LTTE is still present, but everything is peaceful. Nobody knows who the LTTE are now – they are living life just the same as everyone else, working in offices or wherever. I decided to ask if any of the employees had any relations to the LTTE, and he threw up his hands as if to say ‘how on Earth would I know?’ If people are in any way related to the LTTE, he told me, they will not say. If they say, they will immediately be taken by the police or the army. But none of our girls are.

Despite telling me that Ampara had not had many problems during the civil war, Bandula Sir mentioned a couple of events. One was a small motorbike bomb, and the other was a large bomb at the bus stand. He told me nobody died, just small injuries, and limbs lost. He did keep repeating the word small, even when telling me that people had lost legs. ‘You know, small, small things’. Mrs G had previously told me that 3 employees lost their lives in a bombing in Ampara. He also told me about a bus that blown up after it had left the bus stand, as it was driving past an army camp outside Ampara. Apparently nobody knows whether it was the government or the LTTE who were responsible for that one, and Bandula Sir said that in this one, 9 or 10 workers lost both legs, but again, nobody died.

I probed further about problems between Tamil and Sinhalese people, and again, he was telling me no problems. There were some tensions further south in the fishing industry, because Sinhalese people were allowed to fish in Tamil waters, but Tamil people weren’t allowed to fish in Sinhalese waters. This leads onto the issue that Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim areas are very separate to one another. Only now are Sinhalese people starting to move into Tamil areas, in order to buy land and build houses. Whilst there are small amounts of movements between the three religions, with some Muslims and Tamils filtering into Sinhalese areas, most areas are still predominantly if not exclusively Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim, with Sinhalese making up the vast majority. These areas may be close to  one another, a matter of a couple of hundred metres even, but they are separate nevertheless.

I asked Bandula Sir how the Tamil employees could speak Sinhalese if everything was kept to separate like this, and he shrugged and just said that it was through experience in the factory: practical experience gives Tamils knowledge of Sinhalese. I also asked why the three ethnicities remain so separate. He said that Tamils just live in certain places only, and Muslims are the same. Sinhalese are everywhere. And it’s been like this for maybe, three or four hundred years. It took me a little while to latch on to what he was saying, but then it clicked that of course, these Tamil and Muslim settlements would have sprung up when the British imported workers from the Empire to the then almost exclusively Sinhalese country, and it just hasn’t changed since. They would have been like pockets of another culture embedded in a Sinhalese landscape, and by what Bandula Sir was saying, it doesn’t sound like it’s changed terribly.

I went on to ask why even Ampara still has such a concentrated population of Sinhalese – I would have thought that naturally through rural-urban migration the numbers of Tamils and Muslims would have increased. The answer I got was a real surprise. When the British built the Inginiyagala Dam, 50 or 60 years ago, they brought workers into the area. They gave construction jobs to Sinhalese, driving jobs to Muslims, and office jobs to Tamils. From what I gather, the Sinhalese and local government were less than impressed with this distribution of jobs, and since then, ‘new people’ are not allowed to settle in the town unless they are Sinhalese. The only Tamil and Muslim people in the town are ‘old people’, who were there before these regulations were introduced. There are only two Muslim shops in the town – all the rest are Sinhalese. There are ten Buddhist temples, three churches, but only one Hindu temple and one mosque. I can’t understand why these rules haven’t changed, but it would be interesting to find out.

I asked again about problems that the workers faced, and about any underlying tensions between Tamils and Sinhalese. Bandula Sir simply said that relations are all okay now. 5 years ago, perhaps, there were some problems, but everything is okay now. This confused me again, because despite his insistence that none of the workers had any problems with each other, he managed to hint that maybe there had been problems after all. Perhaps he just meant generally in the area though.

To summarise, there has been no previous conflict between workers, but the ethnic groups in the District are very separate. There are laws preventing non-Sinhalese from settling or setting up businesses in Ampara, and only now are the ethnicities starting to blur the borders a little, as limited migration has commenced in their respective areas. Whether there is or was conflict between the workers is hard to tell for certain, but it’s looking like there hasn’t ever been. What is conflicting is the information I’m receiving. Much work to be done!