Caine's Arcade

Caine is a nine year old boy, who spent his summer building a cardboard arcade using the left overs from his father's auto parts store. This video received an amazing response all over the world and The Imagination Foundation was set up "to find, foster and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in kids".

Warning: This video will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The Literacy Campaign

I found this, Classrooms around the World by Julian Germain on the Guardian website, a selection of photos that provide a fascinating insight into children, their classrooms and their education systems. Each photo has interesting commentary about the way it was shot, her thoughts on the children and the way they were or about the nature of their reality. I was particularly drawn to Cuba, a country home to Che, cigars and a youth literacy rate of 100%. I was intrigued to find out more.

The Cuban Literacy Campaign

not own image

1960, Castro vowed to eradicate illiteracy in just one year in post-revolution Cuba. He sent out posters, adverts, newspapers, anyone who could read and write was encouraged to become a literacy teacher or alfabetizador. 1961, more than 100,000 people volunteered - half of whom were women, they were enrolled on a rigorous two week training course where they learnt how to teach and how to withstand the harsh conditions of the villages. Literacy Brigades were then sent to the breadth and width of rural Cuba. Never before has a country mass mobilised unqualified teachers in such a way. People were engaged, excited to be a part of the social and political movement. The thirst for knowledge was ubiquitous, thousands of volunteers marched, carrying giant pencils, to the Plaza de la Revolucion on 22nd December 1961, all singing "Fidel, Fidel tell us what else we can do!" 

By 1962, the literacy rate was 98%. Classrooms were built, teacher training reformed, pre-school and primary education was available to all by 1970 (45 years ahead of the UN's 2015 deadline for its Millennium Development Goal). 

Maestra - a documentary by Catherine Murphy, exploring the Cuban Literacy Campaign through testimonies of young alfabetizadors. See the trailer below.

Now, education is free at all levels, irrespective of age, income, class. Mobile teachers are employed to teach children that can't attend school through either illness or disability. Cuba spends around 10% of their national central budget on education compared to UK's 4%. I remember reading that the Cuban government listed 20 books they believe every household should have. They are looking to give it out for free with their national newspapers. Despite a winning education system, there are concerns that Cuba doesn't prepare for life beyond the classroom, lack of opportunities coupled with poor wages has lead teachers to look for work with tourists. Cuba continues to change and update their education system, and what it achieved in 1961 was remarkable. Viva la Education. 

    

Entry #2

Sri Lanka 2010

I've visited Sri Lanka many times. Drove through many places, stopped for black tea at some and appams at others. The last time I was there was two years ago. Colombo was not exciting at all, it was stuck in the 90's and immersed in a dirty cloud of exhaust fumes.   

Tassles, our driver, listened to depressing music. He probably missed his wife. We were on our way to Nelliadi, from Colombo. We stopped at a house. A bearded man came to greet my dad. We were taken into a small, shabby room, double bed, dirty pillows and a desk. My dad told us that we were staying here for the night and that he was going to sleep at his friends, just down the road. He told me to ask the bearded man for anything I needed. 

Freya and I sat there. The bearded man knocked on our door, told us where the toilets were and left. The toilets are separate to the main house, usually tucked away in the garden. The garden was also home to a classroom. Blackboard, chalk and desks. I found this scribbled on one of the desks.

The bearded man turned out to be lovely. He had a wife and 2 children. We had spent the night in Vavuniya, my dad never explained why.

Entry #1

In preparation for the trip, I've decided to post ideas that I picked up from my travels, ideas I've had whilst brushing my teeth and just random tidbits I found through research. Some will be ambitious, some might not. It could be a total hoot or a complete fail. Most posts will probably be about none of the above, but I'm going to write it anyway. 

Travels 2011

Last year, I went to south-east Asia. I was one of those gap-yah types. I even bought myself a moleskin, the hall mark of a gap-yah ass. 

I taught English in Cambodia, tutored street kids in Nepal and jazzed up hospital wards in Vietnam. I thoroughly enjoyed my experiences in all those countries, exploring each vibrant culture through food, music, transport systems and night-life. Each country had its own flavour, manifested in several ways. Vietnam was perhaps the most peculiar.  It was a world where coffee beans were passed through the digestive system of a weasel. The people didn't seem to take to tourists very well, but that said, the volunteers we worked with were wonderful. The food was simple: each ingredient left to tell its own story. Noodle soups were my favourite. It always felt like the Vietnamese had no time to spare, the hustle and bustle of the streets of Hanoi started early in the morning and continued well into the night. The roads were filled with swarms of motorbikes with no regard for rules. Absolute refusal to stick to the appropriate driving decorum. Red lights didn't mean stop. Green didn't mean go. Waiting to cross the road would result in you waiting for hours. You had to just walk, make your way across the road, the motorbikes would work their way around you. I was always uncomfortable putting my life on the line like that. 

I volunteered with Haniah, a friend from school. It was our first night there, we met Anisa and Christian. Beth was arriving the next morning, so the rest of us went for dinner. It was posh. Dark wood tables. Stools. We were all discussing our travels: what we'd done, where we'd been, all the cool things we'd seen,  the foods we've tried, the mishaps, the number of flights we'd booked, infections we'd caught. It was Anisa's turn. She told us about Tenteleni. A project, based in South Africa, that she'd been to the summer before. She'd taught English at a local school alongside other activities including setting up a library. *lightbulb moment* I've always wanted to do something like that in Sri Lanka. When they were in South Africa, they sourced books from wherever they could. Put up posters and flyers around their resident town, it was a very successful book drive. They'd collected books, organised them, implemented a system and managed to form a library. That's what I want to do. A non-partisan project. The idea speaks for itself.

1000 books

1 Library 

1 Village

There was a Channel 4 advert for the National Year of Reading where celebrities read small extracts from different books and it was all edited so that they were finishing off each other's sentences, making sense and not making sense simultaneously. It was delightful! That's what I want to do for my promotional video. My dad is on site now so I'm going to get him to video a handful of children reading excerpts. Maybe get them to recite Bharathy, Avvaiyar or perhaps Thirruvalluvar. Make it look viral by getting him to tape it on his phone. I'll use my amateur editing skills to put  together something quite shabby but chic.

Projects and Programmes

This space will be used to share projects and organisations that work with communities living in the aftermath of the conflict in Sri Lanka.

First we have The Cartwheel Initiative, an organisation that uses art as a form of therapy for children living in communities recently affected by war. In 2011, around 250 children took part in a project conducted by TCI at 3 schools in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka: Mallavi Central College, Pandiyankulam College and Pooneryn School. The projects consisted of 4 different workshops: music, graphic design, photography and collage. 

They have a blog filled with wonderful photos of the children, the art exhibition that took place in Colombo and logs of the instructor's experiences . Check it out here.

Next, an exciting new project, The Vanni: a multimedia graphic novel about "the Sri Lankan conflict and rippling effects of war on a single Tamil family" by Benjamin Dix (author), who has worked with the UN and was based in Vanni from 2004 till the UN evacuation in 2008 and Lindsay Pollock (artist/film maker). 

This is supposed to be an on-going project, home to  blogs and news, so to keep posted about the continual developments and updates, check out their website and visit their facebook page. 

Pilot

You feel it's absolutely necessary to wake up at five in the morning, every day. 

You refuse to wear socks, even when it's cold. 

You threw my brand new cardigan in the bin.

You were almost thrown in to a well by your mother. 

You left school at 16 and you haven't been back since. 

This blog is dedicated to Sivayogam, now 67, who is training to be a teacher at Goldsmiths University.  

Contents

The Sri Lanka Repository will document the preparation for and the journey to Sri Lanka in the summer of 2013. It will be used as a log for all my ideas for things that I would like to do there. It will also be used to log the details of projects and causes to do with all things Sri Lanka, particularly post-conflict related ones.

Though I am interested in the politics of Sri Lanka, this will not be home to political ideas or discussion. I do, however, hope to include politically relevant details that I think might be fascinating. This is a mere record of personal thoughts and developments in relation to the two months I will be spending in Sri Lanka. 

p.s.  lie-ins aren't illegal and next time you go to Sri Lanka, take some sunscreen. It'll help avoid the situation you had this time around.