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by Karel Roberts Ratnaweera

To mark the 500 years since the presence in the then Ceylon of the Dutch, the Amsterdam-based Holland-Sri Lanka Foundation arranged for a small group of Sri Lankan students to visit the Netherlands and get acquainted with the country, its people and customs.

The familiarisation tour covered a considerable part of Holland,giving the students an idea of the people who governed the maritime provinces of Ceylon in the 17th century, making inroads into the central highlands, notably Kandy, the most famous battle being the Battle of the Balana Pass when the Sinhalese king's forces beat back the Dutch and gained the initiative.

It is, however, most unlikely that war would have been a topic during the students' visit to Holland; they were there to see what the low-lying Western European country had on offer, and take in as much as possible of the sights and customs of this country which is relatively little-known to the country they once governed, when compared with other European countries.

This writer met the group and the genial Dutch initiator of the visit Prof. Roelof Munneke, Director of the Holland-Sri Lanka Foundation, in the rainwashed but later sunlit gardens of Barbara Sansoni's Barefoot Gallery in Kollupitiya one morning last week.

The students were full of their tour, as could be expected, and had nothing but good things to say about the people who once came all the way to the Indian Ocean island of Ceylon-the Ceilao of the Portuguese who came before them-to rout their predecessors, take charge of the maritime provinces and implant their customs some of which are still extant in modern Sri Lanka.

The students had been carefully selected from schools in Colombo and the areas outside Colombo. From Royal College was Thilanka Perera, a 17-year-old A/L student of Maths, Anne Romanie Ockersz, a student of St. Cecilia's Girls' National School, Batticaloa, Yasmin Wazeer of Sacred Heart Convent, Galle and Premila Gnanatharan of Chundikuli Girls College, Jaffna.

The quartet set off from Sri Lanka on September 7 to spend one month in Holland where they were to visit several places of historic, cultural and administrative importance in the country that was once threatened by the sea because it is so low-lying but whose genius was harnessed to build dykes along its coastal areas to prevent the sea from coming in. But huge areas of Holland had already been swallowed up by the sea, as Roelof Munneke showed us in a map, with much of the existing land areas having to be reclaimed as a result.

'Although this visit was to mark the Dutch period in the Ceylon of that time, we are not looking back but forward,' Munneke said, blue eyes glinting in a face reddened by the fierce Colombo sun. Perhaps the Dutch who arrived in Ceylon and made it their home looked like Roelof Munneke though perhaps much less friendly.

Munneke was in Sri Lanka for the opening of the refurbished Dutch Period Museum in the Pettah in the early '80s and will be here again when the Museum is to be further refurbished as it ceased to be a museum during the 20 years of war in the country, serving, among other things, as a post office.

Thilanka Perera who wants to go to university and 'do' computers as a career, talked of feeling 'trapped in Sri Lanka,' a realisation that came to him during the trip to Holland. He was full of praise for the host parents with whom the students stayed. 'No,there were no shocks,' he said when I asked him whether anything in Holland had come as a shock to him.

Anne Ockersz who belongs to the ethnic group of Batticaloa Burghers, wants to be a lawyer. She is now doing Fine Arts for her A/Ls. She said that the Dutch people were kind and hospitable. Like her friends, she was very happy in the home of her host parents.

Premila studies Bio-science to become a doctor after she marries. As a Hindu Tamil,marriage would come first, she said. In Holland she had entertained Dutch friends to a Bharata Natyam dance recital,wearing the traditional sari and accessories. The entertainment was very well received by the audience, she said.

Yasmin's first observation was that Holland reminded her of her homecity of Galle, and that being so, did not feel at all homesick. She wants to be a physician like her Dutch host father, she said. She,too is an A/L student at the moment.

There were visits to Dutch museums and art galleries, flower festivals and canals and several other places of interest in Holland.

There was an official reception for the group hosted by the Municipality of Veere, a city that was badly affected by the floods of 1952.It was a fortress city like Galle with simple farming villages. Utrecht was another important stopover in their itinerary.

Prof Munneke said that he was happy that four people who had never met each other before had crossed barriers of race and creed during their stay in Holland.

'It gave you a positive feeling, and on a personal level it promises a bright future,' Prof. Munneke said.

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