Brown by Kamal Al-Solaylee

Author:Kamal Al-Solaylee
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ONE MINUTE AFTER NINE on Saturday morning, I try Randeniya’s cellphone. He doesn’t pick up and no voicemail kicks in. I wait fifteen minutes and try again. Same thing. I try every twenty minutes and send an email in case it’s easier for him to respond with a quick note on his smartphone. Nothing. At around noon, I finally get through to his voicemail and leave him a message to call me back or email me. Still nothing. It’s my last full day in Colombo and I suspect I probably won’t get another chance to visit a training centre. I’m disappointed, but I know that my exploration of the lives of Sri Lankan migrant workers will resume in a few weeks, when I visit Doha, Qatar, home to an estimated 150,000 of them (in 2013). For now, I leave Sri Lanka knowing that despite a late start and an abundance of trouble-prone unskilled workers, the country is finally taking steps to rewrite its migration narrative of exploitation and abuse. There’s still a long way to go. And it can always keep looking to the Philippines for policies to borrow or steal. Sri Lanka may not be able to compete in the skin-tone department—fair is fair, so to speak—but it can divert attention from that by focusing on what the rest of its workers’ bodies and minds can do.

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