Greeting from Sri Lanka

I have arrived safely at Colombo Airport after the very long flight from Washington DC (via London). It was such a relief to have my friend, Kapila, waiting for me at the exit. Since my flight arrived at 5:00a.m., we went to the near beach area to sit back and enjoy a nice breakfast together. After the relaxing breakfast, my friend took me to a local fish market where I saw the cobra for the first time. (I would die if I encounter cobra on a street… )We gave him about $1 for his performance which made him so pleased. I felt so sad to know that his income resource is limited by this unstable job.



After the fish market, I checked into my hotel and slept for several hours before the dinner party that we were invited. This party was organized by the chairman of the HelpAge Sri Lanka, and there were many people from various background enjoying the beautiful garden party. In that party, I spent most of my time talking with a lady from HelpAge International to learn about their work and social pension system. When I expressed the interest of elder care and shelter issues in developing countries, she immediately challenge my idea and said “I do not think that we should promote any type of elder care setting, because the elders in the aged care are not happy. We should come up with a system that helps family members to look after elders.” Although I agree on her point of view, I decided to ask question that “how about the elders who do not have family members, or who develop dementia or Parkinson?” She said “then, they have to move into elder care…”

I might just be too cynical about the current elder care situation, but her argument did not convince me because her approach does not fix the current elder care (especially frail elders) situation, it may even create the bigger gap between homecare and aged care. I asked her that “Is your organization addressing the issue of reducing the gap between the home-care and institutional care, such as diversifying the services?” She said that various services are available for the people who would like to stay at home, however, they would not like to encourage people to use the idea of “elder care homes.” When I heard her comment, I felt that her negative image about the long term care is so strong that she could not think of exploring the care option with “residential care.”

Yes, it is very important to have elders to stay at home with their family, yet we should not be too naïve to think that this type of living condition is sustainable in our current society where modernization and urbanization have strong impact on how we live our life. Although I do not quite agree on the current long term care living environment for elders, I still believe that the concept of “aging in community” will be a viable option for the society where sense of community and family care practice are still strongly exist.

I was told that what I am doing in Sri Lanka is a “development work.” However, I strongly disagree on that comment, because I have been learning such a fundamental value of elder care from the people in Sri Lanka. Developed countries have higher standard of infrastructure, yet we have so much to learn from Sri Lankan about how and why we care for elders in our society.

Please click here to read previous blog postings about this project.