January 2010 Update

Latest News – 31st January 2010

January is one of the most pleasant months to visit Sri Lanka, with low humidity and cool, sunny days. Tissamaharama is fresh and verdant after the Monsoon rains. Green paddy fields stretch to the horizon. It is a beautiful part of the country.
With the start of the new school year, much of January was given over to buying school shoes for children. Many families are too poor to spend £6 on a pair of shoes. Some children have gone without shoes for years or wear shoes that are falling to pieces.
We bought shoes and socks for 190 poor children during January, using the schools to identify the most-deserving cases. The process involves drawing the outline of the children’s feet on a piece of paper, taking the wad of paper to the DSI shoe shop in Tissa then returning with 30 or 40 pairs of shoes. Some inevitably are the wrong size, and it’s back to DSI to change them. Some of the schools are very remote and it can take hours to sort everything out. But the reaction of the children to their new shoes makes the effort well worthwhile. Thank you, everyone, for your donations. You make it all possible. Thanks to DSI for giving us a 10% discount on purchases.

Schools in the district receive little or no funds from the State and we are helping wherever possible. Sports facilities are scarce. Schools with 300 – 400 children often have not even one volleyball or netball for games. During January we bought and distributed dozens of volleyballs, netballs, badminton sets and cricket sets in time for the annual school sports meets. Children and teachers were extremely grateful.

Work has begun putting up a wire mesh fence to protect a nursery school playground from a busy main road. At present, the only protection for the children is a line of rough-cut wooden sticks held together with barbed wire. The fence will cost about £1,150, which is a big outlay for us, but it will last for years. In Sri Lanka, cement and metal posts and mesh is very expensive.
We bought five bicycles for children who were having to walk miles to get to school and also bought school bags, books and first aid items for schools.

Many schools have no playground equipment – swings, seesaws, climbing pyramid and slide – or equipment that is broken and dangerous. Over the next few months we hope to provide new playgrounds and carry out repairs. Little children get so much pleasure from these facilities, especially when coming from mud huts with no electricity or water and coconut thatch roofs. By fixing up the schools, we can provide a safe and happy environment for them for at least part of their day. We cannot help every poor family, but we can help thousands of children by improving school facilities.

In some circumstances, it is impossible to ignore the plight of poor people. It would be inhuman not to do something. We found a widow and her two teenage daughters living in a half-built house with dirt floors, no doors, no windows and only a metal sheet covering the two small bedrooms. This is a very difficult situation for three women at night living alone. We put a new roof on the house at a cost of £340.

In August 2008, Yala paid £1,500 for an emergency brain tumour operation for a 14-year old Tissa girl, Chathuri. She subsequently received radiation treatment for cancer. Happily, Chathuri has since made a good recovery, although she has lost vision in her left eye. She is doing O-Levels in December and finds it hard to see the blackboard during classrooms lessons. Starting in February, we are paying for three private lessons per week, English, Maths and Science. The teachers will come to her house and give her personal tuition. The cost is about £42 per month. It is nice that we are able to look after Chathuri in this way.

Each month, Yala pays about £400 in support grants to various children and families. This is a big commitment for us, at £4,800 per annum, and we’d like to thank donors who donate by standing order each month since this really helps with budgeting. The money pays for medicine for 15-year-old diabetic Kumudumali and for a little girl, Shashini, who requires monthly blood transfusions for Thalaseemia. It also pays for private classes and study support for poor children in the district, as well as Chathuri’s private tuition. In one case, the money is paying a support grant to allow two young girls to remain living with their grandparents. The children were going to be put into an orphanage because the grandparents could not afford their upkeep.
One school, Weerawila Maha Vidyalaya, has created jobs to help two families in dire need of income. Yala is paying about £27 per month each as a salary. Sri Lanka has a tragically high rate of suicide, supposedly the highest in the world, and a common method – because it is easily available – is drinking agricultural pesticide. A Weerawila man died in hospital during January after drinking pesticide, leaving a widow, Mallika, and four children. They have no house and no income. Mallika is starting work this month as Weerawila school caretaker. She will sweep the grounds and generally help out. Later, we hope to build a small house for the family.

In the second case, the mother of two teenage girls has severe mental problems and lives in a small mud hut in the grounds of the family home. The younger daughter, who is meant to be doing A-Levels this year, has been unable to attend classes due to her mother’s problems and lack of income. The father earns a little money climbing coconut trees and selling coconuts in the market. Weerawila school has agreed to employ the elder sister as a library assistant at the same rate of £27 per month, and the money will enable the younger sister to resume going to school. It is very nice of Weerawila school to help by creating jobs.
This is the sort of highly personal work that Yala Fund does. It is intensive and difficult, but highly worthwhile. Tragedies on the scale of Haiti – like the 2004 Tsunami which was the original impetus for Yala Fund – require urgent and immediate help running to billions of pounds, and British families are always incredibly generous in reaching into their pockets in such situations. Yet this smaller scale, invisible work, working far away from the headlines of earthquakes or mass famine, is equally important. This is why we are so grateful to all our donors for helping to keep Yala Fund going from year to year. Thank you from Bev, John, Suzy and Jon for sticking with us.

Jon Ashworth
31st January 2010