Posted in Sri Lanka on October 31, 2024
DAY 1:
Bradley and I are on our way to join my incredible college friend & roommate Kathleen and a group to build a school in Kegalle, Sri Lanka through Developing World Connections. Ready to work our butts off to make a difference for some kids, meet new people, experience a new culture, learn, and enjoy the moments.
DAY 2:
Arrived in Colombo after 37 travel hours SO excited to see Bradley & Kathleen and meet the group we’ll be working & hanging with. 18 of us age 23 to 70s from all over the US, Canada & Italy. After a 2-hr bus ride to Kegalle we made it to our hotel. Elephants cool off and play in the river! Dinner was “Kottu” and kinda blew our minds – the show of making it, the presentation & the flavors!! Last, Doha Qatar, the Disneyland of airports.
DAY 3:
Today we learned about the projects we’ll be working on, schedule and safety stuff. Otherwise it was a free day. We sat on the balcony for breakfast and read with the sounds of the river and the elephants. Then a bunch of us went to a place where we could pet elephants, feed, wash, ride and get showered by them! They eat 300kg of food every day!!While we were splashing them with water and scrubbing their skin with coconut husks, they made a deep purring sound. Then we toured an herb/spice garden and learned about tons of natural herbs and things they cure from sore muscles to hair loss to sinuses and got short massages with a special oil. Escaped the heat with the pool and cold beer and told stories over another yummy, spicey Indian dinner. Fun group.
DAY 4:
Our first workday! The bus took us to the secondary school where we were welcomed with so much ceremony it brought tears to our eyes. Sharing a few clips but sparing you the speeches we were a little uncomfortable being honored this way before we had done a lick of work! But we quickly shifted to the work of demoing a concrete floor with heavy poles and shovels, hauling heavy wheelbarrows full of concrete down a hill and filling columns with concrete.
When we thought we were almost done with the floor, backs breaking and hands shredded, they said we needed to go a level deeper. Tough team including three 70-something’s kept at it till the end. Back at the hotel, cold beer at the pool was top priority. The band at dinner played country road which David and I have heard in pretty much every country we’ve ever visited! And 74-year-old Richard held court the second night in a row with all the 20-something girls teaching them to play cribbage. May try playing tomorrow!
DAY 5:
Bright & early back to the site to finish the demo of the concrete floor and some partial brick walls. Part of the team used huge sifters to sift sand which was mixed into concrete. We went hard all day manually jackhammering up 2 layers of concrete but a Spotify playlist everyone contributed to sparked singing, dancing and sharing memories & kept us smiling. Bradley was a beast! And the floor was ALMOST clear and ready to pour concrete when we left. A highlight of the day was giving stickers I brought of the US states to a bunch of the kids when they were on a break. They were so excited about these tiny things and we saw them later walking around wearing them like tattoos. Exhausted beyond what we could have imagined, blistered & covered in concrete dust we once again went straight for quick showers, the pool and pool bar! Bradley and I learned to play cribbage which is a great game but having to do fast second grade level mental math made us head for our beds.
DAY 6:
Bradley & I switched with 2 people from the other team that has been working at a different site with just a primary school. The work is to add a room to the existing schoolhouse from scratch. The team had spent 2 grueling days digging —2’x2′ 3ft deep holes in dense mud & concrete. Our hopes for work using different muscles dashed, we jumped in – literally – and helped the team finish the last foot with long poles, pick axes & shovels. We built metal structures for columns and hauled & mixed concrete using sand, cement, gravel & water and used it to create solid pads in the bottom of the holes.
Cool experience walking through the jungle setting to a family’s home for an authentic Indian lunch. My goal has been to learn a Sinhalan word a day… Ayubowan (like Aloha in Hawaii) can mean hello, good bye, good wishes and live long. The kids here are adorable and so friendly and it’s fun to hear their lessons and songs from the open air classrooms while we work. They LOVE Saige and Meredith and kept coming out to play games like musical chairs and taught us their motions to songs like Frere Jacques.
We saw monkeys!!! Climbing, peaking around trees, covering their eyes and leaping from one tree to the next.
DAY 7:
Day two with our new tribe at the primary school. Learned to mix & pour concrete, attach giant rebar frames to grids into the holes & attach and align & straighten them for columns. Sticks used for measurement, strings to align and ropes holding them straight… pretty sure this is a proprietary Sri Lankan approach but they’re up!
Had some downtime for our 20 something’s, Saige, Meredith, Noelle, and Bradley to lead some activities for the kids like singing “head shoulders, knees, and toes” playing “red light green light” and giving them stickers with the US states that they were using trading cards. LOVED all of this and getting to do it with Bradley & my dear friend! Every evening sitting at the pool we see bats flying overhead ~20 at a time spread out across the sky all flying the same direction constantly for about an hour. Must be thousands… We’re told they’re called flying foxes and have at least a 2 foot wingspan
DAY 8:
Productive but emotional last workday at the school for Bradley & me. We/the team installed metal rectangular boxes in the holes around the rebar frames that we first greased with motor oil (using coconut husks!) so the concrete wouldn’t stick. had to connect them tightly to prevent leaks with heavy duty wires twisted using a nail. Then hauled the ingredients & mixed concrete by hand and filled each box one bucket at a time.
The kids brought cards they had made to their new 20-something friends, tried on our sunglasses, grabbed phones and took selfies. They found endless excuses to leave their classrooms to come out and call us by name & practice their English then laugh at our attempts to say theirs and test our Sinhala words. They sent us off with huge smiles, jumping high fives and hugs… dang, I did not expect to cry on this trip!!!
Day 9:
Days ago, I embarked on a trip w 18 volunteers from across the US and Canada to build schools in Sri Lanka, an island country just south of India. Our work has been incredibly physical, ripping up concrete, digging column foundations, assembling rebar, forms and pouring concrete, all by hand. At every opportunity we turn around and see the most beautiful and curious children watching and wanting to play with us. Our lunches are home cooked and served by the parents, all very authentic and spicy!! Each night we return to our hotel perched on the river where a heard of elephants can be found playing in the water. It’s hard to put into words what it’s like to experience a new place in this way, working hard to make a difference, meeting the most interesting people who have endless stories to share because they are hooked on doing trips like this and truly experiencing what life is like so far from home. I hope this post and these pictures might inspire you to want to do this with me next year!
Posted in Sri Lanka on October 31, 2024
