ABDF

Vantharumoolai (Van-TAH-roo-moo-lie) is a village about 18 miles north of Batticaloa, site of last year’s computer lab.

The school is run out of these half-finished block-style buildings.

The town is mostly made up of rice farmers, a handful of small shopkeepers and craftsmen (mechanics and such), and a few employees of Eastern University, which is some 5 miles south. The school at Vatharumoolai serves the entire community, starting with kindergarten.

The school was used to house refugees fleeing from the 2007 military offensive in the east. The place took quite a beating, physically, and neither the government nor the organizations caring for the refugees has offered to make any repairs or replace destroyed property. This has left the school with a whole list of repair and replacement needed just to bring the place up to pre-2007 status, which to be honest, wasn’t at that high of a level to begin with.

There are a couple of decrepit older buildings which have their own disrepair problems.

At the time the refugees arrived, the school had a very popular, brightly painted kid-friendly playground for its kindergarten, the classrooms for which face onto the space. No one is quite sure what happened, but by the time the refugees were removed to a better equipped refugee camp in 2008, the playground had been thoroughly trashed. The swings had been demolished, the see-saw ripped off its fulcrum, the murals vandalized, etc. The playground is now unusable.

A view of the demolished kindergarten playground.

The school has requested ABDFs aid in repairing the playground so that it can again be used by the kindergarten children. Playtime is a valuable part of a kindergartners’ education, encouraging such vital social skills as cooperation, sharing, and fairness. Not to mention that the tykes need to let off steam at regular intervals!

This is simply not a space kids can play in anymore.

Repairs are needed on the following: a seesaw, a merry-go-round, a slide, a set of swings, and a set of monkey bars. Additionally, there is now the opportunity for the students to repaint the playground murals.

As you can see, it was once a cheerful place.

While playground repair is probably not as immediate a need for the school as is the replacement of destroyed school furniture in the Vantharumoolai School Furniture Project, we do recognize it’s value. Therefore this project is priority number two on our list of Vantharumoolai projects.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Factsheets, Proposed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.