I spent the next fifteen years essentially in community development in inner city neighbourhoods, working with aboriginal people, and refugees and immigrants from virtually every part of the world.

While this was challenging and exciting work, it had its share of frustrations given the under-funding which was a basic reality of life. Despite this, we organized very successful events and community consultations on a shoe-string, pulling in other organizations and pooling our resources. We organized community festivals for each of the four seasons, drawing large crowds, particularly the children of newcomers to Canada who had a whale of a time at these no-cost carnivals.

We were fortunate to have the support of politicians of all three levels of government – Municipal, Provincial and Federal – inclusive of the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada who, herself, and through her office staff, was of enormous assistance to us, more than fulfilling her mandate as our Member of Parliament.

I had from the mid-nineteen eighties begun to get increasingly involved in electoral politics and, while working for a social democratic party in a very conservative province did not provide a pathway to political patronage, I never felt my democratic right to dissent ever placed me at serious personal risk, something I found so unlike the Sri Lanka I had left (and to which I was to return).

Thanks to my political activism, I had the opportunity of working on and managing election campaigns at a Federal, Provincial, Territorial and Municipal level, inclusive of managing a campaign in the Yukon Territory whose total population was about 35,000 voters! Each riding there had about 1,000 voters and covered an immense extent of land. I recall it took something like five hours to drive from the northernmost to the southernmost end of the Ross River-Southern Lakes constituency which was my turf for about a month.

A crumbling marriage and a hankering to return to my roots led to an exploratory trip to the land of my birth at the beginning of 2005, barely a month after the devastating Tsunami had hit Sri Lanka.

A new relationship and a realization that I would have to do so myself if I was to save my ancestral home and the land surrounding it from complete disaster then prompted the decision to return on a more permanent basis.

Still in two minds I returned to the land of my birth again in 2006 and began the painful process of trying to rehabilitate my home and my land.

As consumed as I was by the day-to-day tasks involved with what has turned out to be a monumental task, the constant irritation of corruption every step of the way and the terrible inefficiency that flowed from that situation continues to rankle as the days and months go by.

The terrible ethnic conflict, where literally no holds were barred, was a constant cloud over everything. Particularly coming from thirty-odd years in a country that is famed for its peace and the non-violence of its political processes, the civility of its people and huge value placed on human rights, this was (and continues to be) very, very hard to take. Any expectation of a change for the better in the matter of real peace and good governance now that the formal war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is over seems to be a pipe dream as well.

I still have not been able to accept the fact that the rule of law that I had taken for granted for so long, both in the Sri Lanka I left in the early seventies of the last century and in Canada, no longer exists. Extra-judicial executions by the so-called forces of law and order are more the rule than the exception, the excuse trotted out being that only 4% of criminal prosecutions are successful. Recently, a man allegedly responsible for a rape and murder was stoned to death by villagers, supposedly before the police could apprehend him.

Freedom of expression is subject to increasingly draconian suppression, up to and including the abduction, assault and murder of journalists. And what is most disquieting is that many of those who supposedly subscribed to a belief in what are basic human rights and freedoms are going along with what is happening, hiding behind the forlorn hope that once this "convulsion" is over, things will return to "normal." There is a stubborn refusal to accept the reality that once democratic rights are lost and absolute power without boundaries is appropriated by a group, that power will never be surrendered without a revolution or similar violent upheaval. Not a pleasant prospect by any means.

Having already been at the receiving end of the absolute lawlessness that prevails, particularly, it seems, in rural Sri Lanka where my new spouse and I live, a reader would probably be justified in asking why I haven’t packed my bags and returned to Canada.

This is indeed a very hard question to answer.

One of the reasons is that the woman who now makes my life worth living has known no home but Sri Lanka and I couldn’t ever try to wrench her away from friends and family who have been a part of her life for the proverbial three-score-and-ten years.

Another of the reasons for staying is probably a sentimental attachment to the land of one’s birth and wanting to live in a space that was once occupied by one’s ancestors.

Yet another element is an attachment to the beauty of the land and the softness and kindness of most of its inhabitants.

It could also be a bloody-mindedness that refuses to admit defeat.

Or maybe it is a combination of all of the above and the inexorable need to prove that things can be changed for the better and that one can be part of that change.

Whatever it is, I am here for the long haul, if there can be a long haul for a seventy-one year old!