ABDF

Meet the preschoolers!

Nelluchchenai (NEH-loo-chen-ay) is a hamlet down a very long dusty road sitting right where the rice paddies end and the jungle begins. As with all our project sites in Mamunai West Division, it was formerly under LTTE control, and thus has missed out on a generation of development. However, unlike most villages in the area, water is not a problem; the wells have water all year round, even during the dry season. We were recently approached by a villager to help solve a different sort of problem: a school fence.

The village has a tiny one-room structure that is used as a preschool and kindergarten during the morning and early afternoon and as a community center-cum-meeting hall in the evenings. Additionally, after the rice harvest, the building is used to store bags of harvested rice. We have been asked to build a concrete-post barbed wire fence around the property, typical of the kind you find in the area, and similar to that found at our fencing project in Mangikkadu.

This is the school, an the property we will fence in.

The fence is needed to keep the kiddies safely on the property during school time, as well as keep the animals, both domestic and wild, out. The greatest need is at night, Nelluchchenai being on the edge of the jungle. Sri Lanka has a substantial population of wild elephants who, despite the conflict, have managed to thrive in the jungle. These elephants have learned that if they go into the villages at night, particularly the ones in and around the jungle itself, such as Nelluchchenai, they can smell the harvested rice. Elephants effortlessly punch holes in walls or break through windows to get at the easy food and so elephant damage is frequent. Normally villagers store their harvests in their houses, but in places like Nelluchcheni this is simply too dangerous, and all the harvest is stored in the community center.

You’d think that barbed wire would offer no protection from elephants. But what experience has shown is that A) if you can keep the elephants far enough away from the grain they won’t smell it and go after it and B) they find the barbed wire irritating and will only try to break through if they are very hungry; otherwise they’ll wander off in search of easier pickings.

Nelluchchenai is at the end of this road; you can see the start of the jungle.

The people are ever-so-slowly trying to rebuild their homes after the war.

So it is with pleasure that ABDF has agreed to find the funds to install a barbed wire fence around the building, and we hope to have it completed sometime during May of 2012.