Sam Weerawardane Illustration

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Land of the Savages

This observation is one that I’ve been tracking on social media for a few years, and it’s been difficult to come to terms with. For one, foreign-run NGOs do critical work in Sri Lanka, so this is in no way dismissive of that. This instead highlights specific bias in the online communication of one particular group, who at one point last year continually posted horror stories about their rescues and made a point of portraying locals as violent, unreasonable, bloodthirsty, and hateful. Previously it had just been portraying locals as difficult, so you hardly noticed the subtle digs. The subtlety over time, working like slow poison, leads us to have a not-so-pretty picture of ourselves subconsciously.

I struggled to put my thoughts and emotions into words for some time, until an unexpected interaction happened after a visit to the vet with Jack one day. Read it at your own pace at my Substack: https://3mongrels.substack.com/p/land-of-the-savages

Told alongside the final weeks of caring for Jack.