Over The Rainbow

By Lela De Silva

A funny and touching account of Lela's adventures as a volunteer with the charities supported by her own Trust. A journey which takes her through from living with a donkey "hard" enough to cut diamonds in Bolivia to goat shopping in Guatemala for her kids. An opportunity to reflect and experience the resilience and optimism shown by the underprivileged children and their families.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lela De Silva
• Release date: Sep 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781291042153

Lela De Silva

When God was distributing smiles, I was the first in the queue. I can't imagine living my life without loving, sharing and exploring. I don't want to live my life without a purpose like most of the people I know. I wanna be useful and bring joy to those who live around me, even if they don't know who the hell I'am. I wanna keep living, even after I'm gone ... and live forever

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

London 2011

Once upon a time there was a dysfunctional Italian couple who had three daughters. My mum had seen little women on TV and was desperate to copy the series but after three girls my dad chose to have a vasectomy instead! My name is Lela De Silva and although all my family and relatives live in Italy, I fell in love with the tropical weather and public transport in London and moved here when I was a spring chicken …

I'm the youngest of three and had a happy childhood. Money was tight as my dad left the north of Italy with my mum and older sister to move to Sardinia, a small but gorgeous island in the Mediterranean. His dream was to live somewhere sunny where people were warm and less materialistic. He ended up with his bum looking like a sun dried tomato, however he raised a loving and happy family.

Success for him was not defined by the amount of zeros in your bank account but by the amount of people you were able to touch and help through with your own actions.

Dad had many job opportunities but my sister was little and always sick because of the smog in Milan so he had to choose between buying a second hand pair of lungs from EBAY for my sister or live somewhere where his pay would be a joke but the quality of life would be better.

He put his family and happiness first and didn't care how much money he could make there so we moved to the south of Italy. Everything has a price tag except happiness, I guess this feeling is priceless.

I'm very much like my dad. They say I'm funny, affectionate, caring and positive but a terrible businessperson, stubborn, sarcastic and outspoken.

I was raised in a household full of love and laughter. We built our own home and spent our evenings and weekends plastering, tiling and doing the electrics of the house.

My dad was a builder and a good one. He often built a house, a kitchen or a bathroom and never got a penny for his hard work. People would ask him to build something but they would run out of money because of the arrival of a baby, penis enlargement operation or loss of their job and my dad would feel sorry for them and say his famous words: "non preoccuparti, quando puoi" which it means in Italian don't worry, you'll pay me when you can and of course they never did!

I was only six years old when our home was finally ready and finished. My parents asked my grandmother to move with us but she was a strong, independent and stubborn woman and decided to stay in her own house. Despite being only six, I told my parents that I would go and live with nana and protect her. Our new home was only ten minutes walk from nana's place so I would see my parents and sisters every day.

They were reluctant at first but when they saw how stubborn and determined I was, they gave in and gave me the green light.

I lived with nana until I was fourteen. When I started high school, I had to commute to another town so it made sense for nana to move with my parents but unfortunately she died three years later. No, we didn't murder her, she died of natural causes. We did try to kill our other nana though but she was tougher than rubber, we tried to push her down the stairs but she would bounce back like a tennis ball and when we left her on a couple of occasions in the mountains, unfortunately she always found her way back home.

I started high school and had a great time, I always passed my exams but I was not very academic.

I discovered that I had a talent in forging signatures so I started charging the students the equivalent of 20p when they skipped school and needed a note from their parents for their teachers.

Business was booming and so once a week I would treat my school friends to a movie in town or a pick-nick on the beach and lied to my mother when she asked why my shoes were always full of sand. As I was very sporty, I told her that I was doing long jumps at school and she bought my story.

I was quite good at sports, even though I sank like the titanic when I swam and had a certificate of exemption from our dance classes because I looked like a constipated hippo in a china craft shop. After my diploma I wanted to get a sport degree to become a sport teacher but the travel agency next to the University was more appealing and with the money for the University fees I bought a one way ticket to London instead.

My parents were afraid. London was a big, dangerous city and on top of that I couldn't speak a word of English.

They thought it was much easier to find a sex tape of the Pope on the net than seeing myself living alone in London so they waited for me to come back with my tail between my legs but I was very lucky and found an office job. I worked hard, I bought my first flat in London and married a guy my parents didn't approve of. He was not Italian, he was Buddhist and he was not white. Everything my dad dreamt of! I got a massive harlequin Great Dane called Lisa who loved watching cooking programs and MTV but after 12 years, I left my husband and Lisa died in my arms a couple of years later because of a heart failure.

Losing Lisa was heartbreaking and made me realize how lonely and empty my life in London was.

I had a good job, a lovely home, friends and some serious husband materials happy to settle down with me but I didn't want to live my life without a purpose like most of the people I knew. I wanted to be useful and bring joy to those around me, even if they didn't know who the hell I was. I wanted to keep living, even after I was gone...

I realized that something was missing in my life and that I would never be able to fit-in in London despite living here for eighteen years. People were cold like the weather and the only way to see the sun was to watch it on discovery channel. Everyone was in this rat race, working long hours to earn more money and buy those unnecessary latest gadgets, Prada bags, flashy car and big house to feel accepted and worthy.

To be cool and socially accepted, you had to drink until you were so drunk that you could not remember what you did the previous evening, wear UGG boots and sign up to a gym.

I remember making a coffee in the kitchen at work and listening to a couple of colleagues who had been working out for several months at a rather expensive gym called virgin active down the road from the office and this puzzled me for several reasons. How could you be virgin and active at the same time and why their weight was 70 kilos before joining the gym and weighted 150 kilos three months later? It was not because they toned their bodies but because they did a work out once in a blue moon, paid 50 bucks a month to be a member and kept doing free marketing for the gym because they would just carry their gym bag from home to work every day for free on the tube!

Catching the tube was often a stressful experience, the trains were overcrowded, people spread the pages of their free newspaper and almost suffocated you with the sport page so the only way to deal with it was to be a yoga guru and put your legs behind your head to take as less space as possible or drink lots of camomile and stay calm.....

Once a woman with huge and floppy breasts was trying to sit next to me, I thought how many nations this woman could breastfeed but I couldn’t figure out the number because as she sat, she slapped me across the face with her left breast and left me unconscious for the entire journey. The builder standing in front of us was trying to read the Sun paper but put two hundred people in one square meter carriage and unless you are a flipping contortionist there is no way you can pick your nose, let alone read the paper.

Nobody speaks or smiles on the train in London, they all read the paper and if the train driver announces a delay of five minutes because of a signal failure, everybody has a long crocodile face and fumes like a Kenwood steamer.

They reach their station and run faster than the Jamaican athlete Usain Bolt. I often found myself caught up in the race and to be honest with you I never knew why the hell I was running too. This is London and how my daily life in London had been for the last eighteen years.

I went to work every day, got a coffee from our vending machine and it tasted like domestos bleach but if you added a drop of milk it tasted like Viakal so much better and obviously thanks to the bleach all seemed so much clearer and I couldn’t wait to start another day in the office. Most of my colleagues in sales were depressed due to the credit crunch and housing market at the time so they tried to commit suicide by jumping out of the windows but as we are in UK, you needed to queue up even to kill yourself, the queue was longer than the Chinese Wall, people got stressed even more so they gave up and sat at their desks again.

Before working in real estate and finance field, I worked in a Zoo too. I was planning to become a vet and wanted a taste of life with animals beside my family and various relatives but when I found out that the cat of my auntie was pregnant, I decided a career change. You must be wondering why such a drastic decision, well I made a disturbing discovery. I thought the father of the kittens was the cat next door but my cousin Will was the father!

Working at the zoo was a very interesting experience though, once a couple were leaving the zoo and as I approached them and told them that they were not allowed to take the chimpanzee with them, the father was livid and shouted: hello ??? This is our son! I was mortified but the kid was hairy like a monkey and in my defense he could have been the major star in the movie planet of the apes.

The next day a group of nuns were admiring the penguins but they were shorter than the sea birds so I didn't think they were real nuns and pushed them inside the pond. The visitors were cheering and clapping their hands because the nuns were swimming better than the real McCoy and they were obviously not saying the rosary but swearing in languages that they didn't even speak.

I sent a text to Father Ralph from the TV series Thorn Birds to save my ass but let's get real people, the nuns were not looking shit hot like Rachel Ward so Richard never replied to my text and I got a verbal warning from my Line Manager!

Two weeks later my sight was so bad that I couldn't see the hippos anymore and I'm not referring to the women selling candy at the entrance, the llamas kept spitting every time I went close to them so I was forced to wear goggles around the Zoo and everyone thought I was the sister of Ali G!

It was time for a change so with my solid experience with canny creatures there were only few careers I could peruse, I could become a lawyer, an estate agent or accountant. The first two would both sell their mother in law for a snickers bar and who can blame them when most of the people I know would give their mother in