Showing posts with label Sri Lanka. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sri Lanka. Show all posts

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

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.



Friday, 12 October 2012

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