What do we do?
We are a group of students and upcoming degree seekers that are willing to collaborate in making Sri Lankan schools better. The sri lankan scholar Lakni Abeysinghe being exactly from Sri Lanka hosted a presentation talking about the "Sri Lanka Project". Being particularly bonded with her own city of Galle, near the capital of Sri Lanka, she knew two schools:The Hostel in Galle(NSS) and Unawatuna School.
Our goal is to provide the best conditions to both schools and give these kids the opportunity to learn the same way we do.
Our Project in the Hostel in Galle (NSS)
Our project is to fully reconstruct the classrooms of the hostel in Galle. It was monstrous how the classes for the kids there were uncured and unacessible for their education. We therefore teamed up and started to reconstruct the largest classroom they had with new materials and the colors they liked the most.We painted the alphabet in the outer part of the classroom, both in Srilankan and English. We took all the splinters away from their orginal desks and chairs, and colored them in turquoise and yellow. We bought them markers, boards, new shelfs, clocks, and objects that made them aquire the english language like for example a calander with english words and figures.
Our Project in the Unawatuna Pre School
The conditions of the Unawatuna school were better than the Hostel in Galle, but it was always unacceptable to see some of the horrible conditions flourish in the lives of the pre school kids. In this school we focused on the bathrooms. Both girls and boys had broken doors in the bathroom and therefore there was no sense of privacy. The kids therefore told us that they never go to the bathroom because they are shy to find someone in front of them while they are in the bathroom. The school environment is supposed to be welcoming and the kids have to feel at home, therefore also the bathrooms are important because they are part of the process. We therefore bought the material for the school to adjust. We also adjusted the garden and playground that the school had. There was a broken slide, swings and other toys full of rust that could have been really dangerous for the kids. The grass of the garden was really high, therefore the kids never went outside to play becuase it hurted or itched them. We therefore bought new game quipment and cut the grass. We told the kids that if they wanted to play in the garden they had to take care of it, in fact at they end they have set up some turns of who would give the water to the flowers, cut the grass ect.
