ABDF

• Project Completed! (See below)
• Location: Zahira IDP Camp, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
• Recipients:124 war-displaced families
• Objective:Give refugees a day of fun!
• Final cost:$45 US

Zahira is a small IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp of 124 families on the outskirts of Batticaloa. The people were displaced from their village near Sampur, near Trincomalee to the north, two years ago at the beginning of the final phase of the civil war. Traditionally farmers, they have been living in this small camp awaiting resettlement. Unfortunately, the government security forces declared their village and farms a High Security Zone, meaning that they will not be allowed to move back to their homes. The tight-knit group has been assigned land to the north of Batti, and is scheduled to be relocated next month, finally.

ABDF.org was approached by an Australian NGO, NTA East Indonesia Aid, to meet and share best practices. Melton Cartes, ABDF’s Development Director and I had a fascinating conversation with Dr. Colin Barlow and his wife about the founding and maturation of NTA during a recent visit to San Francisco.

Among items discussed was the concept of building trans national partnerships while retaining the culture of a small, independent NGO. ABDF highly values the concept of tangible, transparent projects and the opportunity to scale impact with a partner can both complement and challenge this culture. You can learn more about NTA at www.nta.org.au. I’ll continue posting on this topic as it develops.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Greetings from Galle, Sri Lanka’s beautiful city at the island’s southernmost tip. I haven’t written in a bit, in part because for the last week I’ve been on the road. This has been a very productive trip, project-wise.

Last weekend I met the Minister of Education for Central Province, the area to which we will send English teachers next year. I was fortunate; he was in Kandy for the weekend, and I had some friends I wanted to visit anyway and thus had a place to stay. So although the Minister is a busy man, we were able to meet for 15 minutes on Sunday afternoon. Although we hadn’t met previously, he knew all about me and the project, and so we were able to attend to business efficiently. It’s always good to meet folks face-to-face so they know you and you them. It humanizes the whole situation, to have a face with the name. The Minster is an Estate Tamil, the target population for our project, and the Estate Tamil political and economic elite is very, very small. Thus it was no surprise to find out he knows about me and the work we do.