ABDF

Update - May 20, 2011

Meet our Fifth Grade teachers!

Pathinatham and Thiruchelvam, our two teachers.

These two gentlemen are carrying out our 5th Grade Tutoring project.

To your left is K. Pathinathan (Pa-dee-na-dan). Twenty eight years old, Pathin (for short) was born in raised in Navatkadu, and thus is a truly local teacher. He has been teaching since 2007, and at Navatkadu for 2 years. He created the pilot project for this program last year with excellent results. Hence this project is his project.

On the right is K. Thiruchelvam (Tee-ru-chel-vam), who ha also been teaching at Navatkadu for two years, having been a teacher since 2008. Thirty one years old, he hails from Mangikadu, a village some 2 kilometers from Navatkadu, and site of one of our water tanks, and a fence project.

The tutoring program started on May 1st. The 5th grade class is now receiving extra instruction Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 3 to 4:30 PM. This extra tutoring will continue for the next 2 ½ months, until the island-wide 5th Grade Scholar ship exam takes place in mid-August (the government has yet to announce the exact dates).

Despite being rather rushed, with a total of two months extra instruction almost daily, our pilot project last year yielded excellent results. This year we are taking longer, in an effort to take some of the pressure off the kids and allow them more time to digest what they learn.

For a more complete description of this project, click on this link.

So good luck to Pathin, Thiruchelvam, and especial to the 5th graders of Navatkadu!

As you know, Batticaloa District was ravaged by floods in January and February of this year; floodS far worse than any previous in living memory. As a result, ABDF responded by disbursing emergency cash to some of our partners and project recipients. The description of our disbursement can be found here, while photos of Batti under water can be found here and here.

ABDF friends and supporters responded generously, and we were able to help eleven families with a disbursement of 10,000 rupees each, or about $90. This may not sound like a lot to you and me, but here 10,000 rupees will supply bottled drinking water and feed a family of six for a month, as well as pay for the fuel to cook the food.

We did not have any strings attached, except that each decide the best use of the money, either for their families or their community.

I thought you would like to hear from some of the recipients, and find out what they did with the money:

Well finally! The last couple of weeks haven’t been the most productive, which has been frustrating. Most of our current projects are educationally oriented, and the past two weeks have been the end of the school term, which means that our partners, who are mostly teachers, have been giving and grading exams. So while I’ve tried to use the time productively, there has been no movement on new projects. Until today. I just returned from spending the whole day with Prabha, our main project partner for Mamunai West.

Meeting Mr. Paskaran (center) and the Assistant Director.

Mamunai West Division, I’ll remind you, is the area opposite the lagoon from Batticaloa which until 2007 was under LTTE control. All of our water tanks and several of our education projects are located there. I was concerned about our projects, particularly the water tanks, because during the floods in January and February the Division was completely submerged. So that was one goal for the day.

The other was for me to meet the Zonal Director for Education for the Division, Mr. Paskaran. The Division Zonal Office acts in a similar way as our local school districts do in the US, and Mr. Paskaran is in charge of overseeing the schools throughout Mamunai West. Given ABDFs increasing involvement in Mamunai’s schools it’s important that I establish a good relationship with him and his staff. They can be a tremendous resource in the future. They had already heard about our tutoring projects in Navatkadu, and wanted to meet me, as they had several other ideas that they hoped to fund.

So today was a good day; I was able to accomplish all these goals.