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Chil­dren from six to six­teen years of age attend the Butterfly Garden for nine months, one day a week, in groups of fifty drawn from the local Tamil and Muslim pop­u­la­tions. Many of them have endured pro­found fam­ily loss and wit­nessed great hor­ror: they are the chil­dren of ter­ror. In the Butterfly Garden these chil­dren are slowly restored to them­selves and to the world through play and sto­ry­telling, music and drama, the arts of paint­ing and pup­petry and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the life of a gar­den. Reconstructed rit­u­als of genogram-making (The Mother-Father Journey) allow them to begin telling the story of their fam­i­lies and their vil­lages; group sto­ry­telling allows them to find the nar­ra­tive and dra­matic power to rep­re­sent new worlds of their own mak­ing. Many of the Butterfly Garden staff were them­selves child vic­tims of the war, and work­ing there is for them a process of heal­ing and recov­ery. The work of the Butterfly Garden extends to the vil­lages in the coun­try­side through a pro­gram of out­reach and by means of the Butterfly Garden Bus, which was a gift from the World University Services of Canada.

The war in Sri Lanka is becom­ing a very old war, and it has made refugees of more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion peo­ple. Sri Lanka is an island half the size of Newfoundland, with a pop­u­la­tion of 18 million.

A cen­tral expe­ri­ence in the Butterfly Garden is play­ing on Mud Mountain (a pile of mud), an activ­ity which often leads to the devel­op­ment of story ele­ments. The story that fol­lows found its begin­nings with a group of six chil­dren who met at Mud Mountain in 1997.

Blood of the Mango

The broth­ers Iqbal and Mustan lived on Mount Himalaya, which was a moun­tain not to be con­fused with the Great Himalayas of Northern India, for Mount Himalaya was sin­gu­lar and small and located on a jun­gle island in the south­ern sea, where Iqbal and Mustan were both cir­cuit court judges who used to ride around on their camel hear­ing cases, weigh­ing evi­dence and decid­ing people’s fates.

One night when Iqbal and Mustan were out on their cir­cuit they stayed in a rest house where they were both bit­ten by a mos­quito. They were annoyed by this and decided to find the offend­ing mos­quito and bring him to justice.

Along the way they asked every­one they hap­pened to meet if they had seen the cul­prit, and indeed almost every­one they asked had also been bit­ten. There was a mouse, a tur­tle, a rab­bit, a duck, a snake, a deer and a mon­key. The mos­quito had bit­ten each of them in turn. They decided to join in the search and help Iqbal and Mustan track down the culprit.

With so many in the posse it was not hard to find the mos­quito. They entered the shade of a cool gar­den in a small sea­side vil­lage and there he was, sleep­ing soundly under a coconut palm on an over­turned bucket beside the well. They approached him stealth­ily, arrested him and secured him to the stalk of a tall orange marigold with his wings tied behind his back. The inter­ro­ga­tion then began:

“Are you the crim­i­nal who bit us?” asked Iqbal.

“I am not a crim­i­nal,” answered the mos­quito. “I am just doing what comes nat­u­rally. I was hun­gry so I bit.”

The mouse, the rab­bit and the mon­key cried out for jus­tice. “He admits it — he bit us! He must die.”

Some of the oth­ers dis­agreed. The wise old tur­tle stepped for­ward and pre­sented a thought­ful alter­na­tive. “It is true that he bit us, but it is also true that seek­ing blood and bit­ing are in his nature. He can­not help it. Let us have mercy and not take his life. Let us instead ban­ish him from Mount Himalaya to a place so far away he will no longer bother us.”

The duck and the snake imme­di­ately agreed. This was a more rea­son­able and com­pas­sion­ate course to fol­low. The deer kept silent. He had found some fresh grass to chew and was more inter­ested in that. Iqbal and Mustan con­ferred. “Where will we send him?” they asked.

The ani­mals dis­cussed it among them­selves and came up with a pop­u­lar destination.

“Let us send him to Canada,” they said. They all seemed pleased with this, but the mos­quito him­self dissented.

“Oh please don’t send me to Canada. It is so cold and the blood of the peo­ple there is very bland, I’m told. Not hot and spicy blood like I’m used to.”

Mustan spoke. “We are not send­ing you on leave, Mosquito. We are ban­ish­ing you for being such a men­ace here.”

Iqbal pon­dered aloud. “The prob­lem with send­ing him to Canada is that he will become a men­ace there. Surely, after time, he will break down and bite a Canadian, even if their blood is not to his taste. Then the Canadian will try to kill him. He will be in the same fix there as he is here. Sending this mos­quito to Canada does not solve the problem.”

“Then send him to Colombo,” said the duck. “The place is full of mos­qui­toes. Who will notice one more?”

“That is true,” said Iqbal, “but jus­tice is not served by send­ing him there for surely he will bite a Colombo per­son and we are back where we began.”

“Then send him to Eravur,” said the deer, look­ing up from his grass. “The peo­ple there are very nice. Maybe the mos­quito will not bite them.”

But we are very nice too,” said the mouse. “That didn’t stop him from bit­ing us.”

“True,” said Iqbal, “the mos­quito bites good and bad alike. He makes no dis­tinc­tion. Wherever we send him, he will bite.”

“So let us not ban­ish him,” said Mustan. “Let him remain here where we can keep an eye on him, but he must agree to leave us alone. He must under no cir­cum­stances bite us.”

“Then what will I do when I’m hun­gry?” asked the mosquito.

“How about this,” said the tur­tle. “We will find a fruit whose juice you like. You will agree to eat it and leave us alone.” The mos­quito thought this was a very naïve solu­tion but he kept silent. The court appeared to be run­ning out of steam and if he did not agree they’d soon be propos­ing the death penalty again.

The ani­mals favoured the turtle’s sug­ges­tion and even the judges seemed con­vinced of its merit. But the blood of which fruit would most likely sat­isfy the mosquito’s needs? That was the ques­tion. The mos­quito was untied and many dif­fer­ent kinds of fruit were brought before him. Wood apple, guava, pineap­ple, durian, rambu­tan, jack­fruit, papaya, banana, bread­fruit. The list went on inter­minably. He would stick his stinger in and choke back a small sip but most of the fruits were very bland or oth­er­wise dis­agree­able. The Canadian option was begin­ning to look more and more attrac­tive. The mos­quito decided to change his mind and argue for ban­ish­ment to Canada. It was dif­fi­cult pre­tend­ing he liked the unpalat­able fruits he was being forced to sample.

Then the snake slith­ered over with a beau­ti­ful ripe mango in his mouth. This looked rather tempt­ing. The aura of the mango seemed dif­fer­ent from that of the other fruits and when he tested its skin for per­me­abil­ity he found there was both a give to it and a resis­tance, not unlike human flesh. Maybe he could get to like this fruit?

The mos­quito pressed home his prod and drank deeply from the juice of the mango. His translu­cent belly filled up with its deep golden nec­tar. All the ani­mals gath­ered around. The mos­quito drank his fill, then mer­rily buzzed off burst­ing with bright mango energy.

Iqbal and Mustan mounted their camel and headed for the near­est rest house. It made them happy to think there would be no more mos­quito bites to worry about that night, or ever again, on Mount Himalaya.

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