Interesting People 1- Vasi

She talks like a typical Australian, including saying "teli" and "loo", looks like a typical beautiful Indian girl, We met while we both worked in "OG" (Ob-Gyn to us), and it was fun to have her translate some of what the patients and doctors were saying! I only know "Mooka!! Moooooka Ma!! Moooka!" (aka push/empuje/mas mas/good job!)

Where she really gets interesting is in the non-chalant way she explained to me why she speaks Tamil- I assumed her parents were from Tamil Nadu (the state I am in here in India), but I was wrong- she is from Sri Lanka, where she grew up speaking Tamil at home with her mother, an Ob-Gyn, and her dad, a teacher. The Tamil speaking population is actually a minority of Sri Lankans, only @ 25%, but a tiny group of them formed the Tamil Tigers guerilla group, hence a war has been going on for 25 years now, and still makes the news in this part of the world almost daily. I vaguely remember a few years ago some "guerilla" group bombing all the planes on the ground at some Sri Lankan airport- but I had no idea anything about them.

So using the same tone of voice I would use to say "Well, I was born in New Orleans and then moved to Dallas", she says "Well, we had a really great big house with land, near where my parents grew up and they loved it, but one day the guerillas came and took over our house, kicked us out, and ate all of our grain and rice, so then the government bombed it, so we had to move to another city. But then our education was interupted, because our school was under a bombing threat, so they closed it for 3 months, and so my parents decided to move to Australia so our educations would not be harmed."

Are you kidding me? This whole crazy story, coming out of a totally stylish, westernized Aussie girl, with an accent which could do the Crocodile Hunter justice, grew up in a house, it got taken over, then bombed, then school was out, again for a bomb- so they moved across the ocean! My life really has been a bore.