A visit to the Kurunduwatta village
Writing by kosala on Friday, 15 of September , 2006 at 4:43 pm
We started our journey at about 1.00p.m. Destination was a temple in Kurunduwatta. Kurunduwatta is about 15 km from Gampola and it’s a suburban area situated in the Dolosbage Mountains. Fore of us traveled in the etuktuk, Asanka the driver, Anil the program producer, Prasanna volunteer, and me. The road was hilly and we had to drive slowly. It took about 45 minutes to get to the temple.
It was their annual meeting of the village welfare society. The villagers had organized a small cultural show in the temple after the meeting. When we got there the meeting was about to start. Therefore we had to stay two more hours until the meeting end. We decided to leave the temple for the time being and come back in two hours.
Kurunduwatta area is a partly remote place. Public transportation is comparatively less. The terrain is covered with tea plantation at some areas. Paddy is a common site. Most people in the area travel to the nearby city ‘Gampola’ to work. Others do farming, day to day labor etc. Kurunduwatta town is a developing small town. Most basic facilities of the town are still under construction.
We came back to the temple in two hours. The meeting had concluded and they were getting ready for the show. Basically it was a small folk song show. The show was hosted by an elder in the village who was a retired education director. The event took place in side a temple building. There were about 50 to 75 villagers gathered in there.
We quickly setup our equipment from the etuktuk and got ready to record the songs. We setup the laptop Mixer from the etuktuk and the microphones on the stage and we were ready to record. Anil was on the stage helping with the show presenter. Prasanna was monitoring the sound levels of the recording in the laptop.
The show started. All the singers were from the village and most of them were older people. Small musical group with two traditional drummers and a ‘serpina’(organ) supplied the music. Anil did not forget to interview each and every singer on the stage for a short time asking some personal details and about the song. The show continued. I was in the audience enjoining the show.
Asanka was sitting in the tuktuk without anything to do. I went to him and gave him some papers and a sheet with 5 questions. It was time to do some researching. I wanted to find out about the listnership in the area. Aasanka and I went to person by person in the crowd asking Questions.
Out of ten people which I interviewed 8 of them listened to the radio. 2 of them did not listen to radio but watched TV. Most young people who I talked with seemed to listen to radio but did not seem to listen to Kothmale Community Radio. They did not say it directly, When I asked about the Kind of programs that they listen to in Kothmale Community Radio they did not seem to remember any. Most interestingly out of 4 older persons three of them listened to Kothmale radio and did have favorite programs too. They gave a good feedback on reception of the radio. Each and everyone said that the Reception is not so good. Few years back the reception was very good but recently it has become worse. More over; they have sent a letter to the station about one year back complaining about the reception but never got an answer.
The story above was contributed by Kosala Keerthiratne who is the research coordinator at the etuktuk project and is supported by staff from the Adelaide University and Queensland University of Technology as part of the Finding a Voice Research Project.
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Category: field visit
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