Miss Minali and Miss Delecia

19th March 2008

Early morning start again. My close school friend Delecia is in Lanka too and is up for helping out so my father picks her up and drops us both to the Shilpa Childrens Home at 8:50 am. The message that I left yesterday has not been communicated to Ruth, the English teacher, or to Niranjala, the administrator. Spoke to Ruth on the phone and she explains that as she didn’t know we were coming to Shilpa, and that she had organised for her class to be transported to her flat and her pupils were set to interview two of her fellow expatriates. The girls would then take their interview notes and prepare a fact file sheet for each interview candidate. She asked if myself and Delecia could help the girls with the fact files, assisting them to prepare a presentation. Sounded like a great idea. Once the girls got back we got started with our work. They were very shy at first but very appreciative to spend time with us, and was very inspirational. After the ground work was covered we got each pupil to step up to the front of the classroom and present their fact files. They were very supportive of each other and breezed through the task. We set them homework to print up their fact file sheets in time to present them to Ms. Ruth during their next class, and they thanked us for our time and visit. 

We had some lunch with some of the other girls and then Priyani the matron gave us the grand tour of the buildings and the girls sleeping quarters. Shilpa have a brilliant system where donations can be made in the form of meals (called a "Dane") for all residing girls. So all the leftover funds that we had raised were donated towards two main meals on behalf of me, Delecia and everyone else that helped back in the UK. We picked their favourite breakfast and dinner meal that served jelly as dessert. We had been told that jelly was a novelty that the girls do not get to eat very often. Made me think about how much jelly my mum used to make me and my brother when we were little, whenever we wanted it.

Jelly!

Our time was up, and I felt like I needed much more of it. So much more can be done with next to nothing effort being made. But this is only the beginning.