And what do you do?

Today was the closest I'll come to understanding what it must be like to be the Queen, or maybe Prince Phillip.



The role of the queen was very definately taken by Della. Check her out, garlanded with flowers, saying good morning to the children at the school before we presented them with the uniforms that the "friends of della and don" had bought for them. We think that she had been practicing all year in Oxford along the Cowley Road.

Personally, I would be far happier if the school just gave out the uniforms, but they insist on making a serious ceremony of it, with one teacher making very long speaches in Singhalese, which bored the pupils just as much as us, and they could understand what the teacher was droning on about. We then all took our turn giving out uniforms to grateful pupils:

But at least this shows what the whole thing means to them. This is not a bit of charity which gets lost in the general mix, but its we think the only attention paid paid to this school by anyone outside of their immediate community.

There is a lot to do. Attendence at the school is not great, partly because of the poverty of the families close by, and other priorities taking precedence over edication, and partly because in a school in a poor area such as this, the government pays the teachers such a low wage that they are unlikely to be motivated themselves. The school's English teacher left a few months ago, and has not been replaced. A volunteer teacher attends, but to say that this teacher's English was poor would be exaggerating. C and I hope to do a small amount about this starting next week, by going in and helping with English lessons.

As with any poor school, there is a limited amount that can be done through the school itself without addressing the underlying severe poverty in the neighbourhood, but Della contribibutes directly to a few families where parents are motivated to want their kids to attend school, while poor enough to not be able to do without their help earning money. We learned of one more child who could benefit from this today. His mother died in childbirth last week, and his father does not have the means to keep him at school.

So here is the final portrait with the whole school - or at least those that made it in today (dodgy English "teacher" sneaked in on the chair on the left; Colin, the fisherman who saved Della in the front on the right, and Udeiya, the fisherman who has taken on the role of coordination for Della, in the front):

And finally, I could not resist another post from yesterday's trip. Check out the girls from the orphanage singing their version of the Hokey Kokey: