ABDF

Hello everyone, and welcome to ABDF’s 2013 season! We’re very excited about the upcoming year, and we’re rarin’ to get started. Hope you’re ready too.

I arrived in Batticaloa just two weeks ago, and I have lots to tell you. But, as always, work before pleasure. So here goes:

Teachers and staff at the gate of the school at Karayakanthivu.

Last week I took the motorcycle and drove out to our school in Navatkadu where, among other work, we provided a lot of help and resources to the schools’ O-Level students in preparation for the national exams. Those exams took place last December, and it’ll be another week or two, at least, before the results are published. But I wanted to stop by, show the flag (as it were) and say hello to everyone. Outside our own work, I can report one big improvement at the school. UNICEF, in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, built a small block of new classrooms. They are the usual open-air un-walled classrooms, but there is enough space for three classes, which solves the overcrowding problem. It’s just enough and should the student population go up, overcrowding will again rear its’ head, but for now there is enough sheltered space for all the kids. So hooray!

2008: Balan helps distribute our seedlings in Thraimadhu.

We LOVE coconut trees! There is nothing negative to say about them. They provide food (coconut milk is integral to Sri Lankan cooking), fuel (the shells), shelter (the leaves are woven together and used for fences, roofing, mats, etc.), shade, they are a tremendous absorber of carbon (good for climate change), do very well in poor soil such as is found in Batti, are very adaptable when it comes to water, and floods, cyclones, and tsunamis seem to have no effect on them. They also require very little work. Coconut seedlings are also an easy project to do as they take little maintenance, except distribution; you plant ‘em and that’s about it. So we LOVE coconuts!

We’ve been asked by Balan, a frequent project partner, to buy, nursery, and distribute coconut seedlings to the village of Kaluwankerny, the site of our very first completed project, a computer lab at the village school. It’s a tiny fishing village of around 500 families about 30 minutes north of Batticaloa. The idea is to give each family three seedlings. We did this with Balan once before; back in 2008 when we distributed seedlings to families moved into the Thraimadhu Tsunami Resettlement Village.

Expressions and sayings exhort the kids in good habits and to be good students.

We’ve done several academically-oriented projects at our school in Navatkadu. However we’ve been receiving requests to help solve several infrastructure and equipment problems. Some of these requests, for example new classrooms (there aren’t enough) are currently beyond our capabilities to provide. However, there are a whole host of smaller problems that can be addressed quickly and cheaply. The Ministry of Education makes an annual inspection, clicks its collective tongue over the problems, but can’t, or won’t, do anything to fix them. So we will do our best.

We will be supplying the materials for these repairs and upgrades, and students, teachers, and parents will provide the labor voluntarily. Occasionally we will have to bring in someone with expertise, a mason or electrician for example, to supervise. That’s because we want our work to be quality work that will last. Whenever possible and assuming they are of quality, all materials will be bought from area merchants, and any qualified skilled help we bring in will be residents of Navatkadu or surrounding villages. Keep it local.