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.

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Typical residence, Vavunatheevu.

Vavunatheevu, a village of 105 families, is the first village you go through when you cross into what was formerly LTTE controlled territory. It has all the hallmarks of other area villages in which we work; being on the front lines of the civil conflict the population experienced multiple displacements, and the only economic activity is sustenance rice farming, meaning that the people there barely squeak out a living and are mired in poverty.

Sadly, Vavunatheevu also suffers from the same water shortage problem during the summer months as our other villages; the water table subsides below the bedrock and is extremely saline at that level. For the past two years Vavunatheevu villagers have been taking water from our water tank at Shalampailkerny. The tank there was built for the use of the villagers of that village, which has only half the population of Vavunatheevu, and as a result they are sometimes unable to access water for drinking and cooking. Therefore it is reasonable to install water tanks in Vavunatheevu itself. In fact, the local RDS (Rural Development Society – a sort of self-help organization which each village has) made just such a request to ABDF.

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The Government of Sri Lanka has released the results of the national 5th Grade Scholarship Exam. Our efforts to increase the results at the school in Navatkadu, which seemed so successful last year, have yielded a decidedly mixed result in 2011. While there were no losses when compared to last year, 2011 has not been the resounding success we had hoped. The following are my thoughts on what is going on, and what we have decided to do about it.

Last year we threw together this project, and winged our way through it in a very short time. The kids only had two months to absorb a lot of material, and the pressure on them was accordingly increased, and in a way they are not normally accustomed. However, as you can see here, the results were rather impressive, with a record year in terms of 100+ point scorers. Of course there was the ominous 33% of very low scorers to worry about as well.

This year we repeated last years’ project, but rather than cramming Read the rest of this entry »