A research career in setback-mode, I began my seven-year stint in Italy learning Italian and more importantly studying the particular cultural traits which were subtle, historically ingrained and did not appear to resonate with transactional logic familiar in other societies.

 

Civil war in Sri Lanka ended in May 2009. I first visited the former closed off warzone, the Jaffna Peninsula in 2011, gathering oral histories of lived experience of running education and health services in the warzone for a quarter of a century which would form my preliminary research for a thesis undertaken six years later. In the aftermath of war I curated an independent website iSrilankan.com and created podcasts and digital content with an iMac uniting the Sri Lankan middle of the road voices in the diaspora and local communities. My network of Tamil diaspora members from the opposite community swelled and humanitarian intervention in the former northern warzone began with that first teacher-interviewee now head of an orphanage.

 

In Italy I met leading oral historians  Prof Alessandro Portelli and Prof Luisa Passerini and worked as a freelance copyeditor of EU academic publications, training with the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP now CEIP), UK. However the main life achievement in these seven years was setting up home as a mother of two very young children.  I integrated with a conversational level of Italian and an increasing understanding of how Fiorentinis related to transactions of quotidien life and a philosophy of surviving hard times post-financial crash with no job-creation light at the end of a long tunnel.  'Here nothing much has happened since Leonardo (*@~) da Vinci and Michel (*$@~*) Angelo' said a cynical Italian lady!' Later, my Californian friend and I would reflect on how we had moved beyond a panic-response to the pandemic or economic austerity, having had the experiential reality of tenacity and humanity in the face of economic uncertainty.

 

Daily I witnessed how a tightening of belts did not deter the ritual of visiting a local pasticceria for the morning espresso, dressed and shod elegantly. The discussing of the daily imponderabilia of life including the state of tomatoes, as if life depended on it, took on a significance in later engagement with social anthropology.  Bourdieu's 'habitus' was a concept I would better understand for having lived in such particular cultural contexts, and for the first time away from a capital city, where neither English nor French languages were ever heard. 

 

In 2015 with a nine year old daughter and five year old son, we moved to London, an international hub where we could finally settle our young family.