ABDF

Welcome to my first post in this, the 2011 season of ABDF in Batticaloa Sri Lanka. I’m now back in Batticaloa.

I won’t go in to great detail of the journey to Sri Lanka; I’ve written about that before, and it was uneventful and Emirates Airlines made the whole thing as painless as a day-and-a-half trip with no sleep can be. I arrived in Colombo at 10 in the morning on Thursday the 3rd, jet lagged as all get-out. 12 ½ hours difference between Sri Lanka and California you know. With the help of friends I managed to stay awake the whole day, and went to bed at a normal time. Overall the jet lag only really lasted three nights; it gets a little easier each time I make the transition.

As you, my faithful readers, will know from posts I made during January and February, Batticaloa was wracked by two sets of devastating floods. Normally the monsoons will pour for a day or so, then recede for a day or so, then return. This allows the water to drain off and/or sink into the ground between storms. This year was very different; it rained every day, solid, for a week or two at a time. The amounts of rain were incredible, usually 6 or 7 inches a day. One day (I forget which, but it was in January) I read in the Sri Lankan press that it rained in 24 hours what Batti usually gets in one average rainy season. It was unprecedented in Sri Lanka, at least since records were begun a couple of centuries ago.

With the exception of one, all of this year’s projects are finished, and so it is time for me to leave Sri Lanka. I’m writing this in Colombo, having actually left Batticaloa this Tuesday. The past couple of weeks have been very hectic; the myriad of little detailed things that are so easy to put off needed to be finished before I left. Make sure I have all my paperwork signed by the people who need to sign it; drop the money off for the 2011 registration for the motorcycle (due in January); cancel the water delivery service; make sure our one ongoing project (the O-Level tutoring project which ends in December) is running according to plan; those sorts of things. As a result I haven’t yet had the leisure to scientifically quantify the results of this year’s projects.

I have been, however, thinking back on what we’ve done this year, and would like to share my thoughts.

It has been a long time since I last wrote – too long in fact. This has been largely due to a combination of travel and the dearth of a good chunk of time to sit to write, lack of internet access (making the lack of time seem more justifiable), and finding too much else to do when I do find I have the time. However, I’ve project progress to report, as well as news about ABDF-related work that is not specifically our project work but important nonetheless. So let’s put the past month’s hiatus behind us and dive in!

Delivery of new chairs and desks

Our tutoring project in Navatkadu is now finished; the 5th Grade Scholarship exam was given on August 22nd. This, you will recall, is the program we sent up in conjunction with the school in Navatkadu, which is designed to raise the traditionally abysmal testing scores of the attending students. We don’t have the results yet, but several of the 59 students say that they felt very happy with their performance. Some of the students undoubtedly didn’t like having to spend eight extra hours a week studying, but even for those who don’t improve significantly on their test, all that extra time will pay off in their future education. Right now all we have is opinion to go by, but we expect the actual scores to be released in early October. Then we shall know for sure if our efforts bear fruit, and take a decision whether or not to keep and expand the program. Remember: this was a PILOT program, an attempt to see if this is a good way to help the kids (and the school itself) who had been so affected by 30 years of civil conflict. You never know until you try, eh?