On the road learning from different schools of life
View(s):25 young change-makers who took a bus around the country, visiting schools under the Sri Lanka Unites(SLU) initiative share their experiences with Duvindi Illankoon
Formed to promote reconciliation and understanding among youth more than three years ago, Sri Lanka Unites (SLU) has held flagship events like the Future Leaders’ Conference. Last year the conference held in August in Jaffna saw almost 600 young people taking part.
Following the conference, 25 of these young leaders spent 20 days travelling the country, meeting other youngsters just like themselves and sharing with them the concept of reconciliation. Like in the previous years, they spoke to large assemblies at schools, sharing what they had learnt through SLU.
The ‘Dream Team’ was part of the SLU School Relations Tour, an initiative that aimed to strengthen the relations SLU built with schools at the Future Leaders’ Conference (FLC).Ama Peiris, Chamal Mediwaka, Michael Jeyakumar and Rowena Jayaweera, fresh off the tour spoke to the Sunday Times about their experiences and insights. Ama is currently in her second gap year, while Chamal, Rowena and Michael ‘Micho’ are just out of school.
Chrisjit Xavier, a senior team member explained the concept behind the road trip. “With FLC, we lay the foundation for our extensive school network,” he said. “With the School Relations Tour, we expand on it.” “Sure, it’s exhausting,” says Rowena. “But it’s also so much fun! All of us knew each other from FLC and it was a chance to strengthen the friendships we built up during the conference.”
“On the first day we met diplomat Jayantha Dhanapala and some others, and they spoke to us about the vision they had for Sri Lanka and it really inspired us,” says Ama. “Wherever we went we tried to remember the bigger picture. There had to be a proper goal for what we were doing.” It was that bigger picture that kept them going when they travelled from Kandy to Matara in one day. It kept them awake when they went into a morning assembly straight off the bus. And it kept them strong whenever the going got tough.
Starting from Ragama, moving onto Akkaraipattu and other cities, at each stop they held workshops, with three or four experiential games and forum theatre among other activities. An experiential game gets people involved and then evaluates their experience. ‘Reach for the Globe’ for example saw the students forming a human chain to get their hands on a globe. “There’s a lot of underlying meaning to these games,” explains Ama. “We use them to communicate with our audience.”
The team went on to Trincomalee, Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Vavuniya, Kandy, Maskeliya, Kegalle, Matara, Puttalam, finishing off with a massive workshop in Colombo itself. They remember with fondness the warm welcome they received. “The way we were welcomed was different from place to place,” smiles Chamal. “But that sense of warmth was essentially the same.” There were a lot of firsts. Like the team members from the north had never been on an elephant till we went to Kegalle and some had never been to temples or kovils.
“We all had to learn the other’s language,” says Chamal. “If we went to a Tamil-speaking school, we had to make a speech in Tamil. If we went to a Sinhala-speaking school, vice versa. We weren’t allowed to slack off just because we couldn’t speak the language.” At the end of each day, each team member would be mentored by the driving force behind SLU, Prashan Devisser. Likewise, at the end of the tour, each put together a comprehensive report on their travels and experiences.
In Akkaraipattu, they met children from a special needs school and before the Dream Team left, the children had been given essential school materials, funded by SLU. In Kilinochchi, they donated books given by the Asia Foundation to a school that desperately needed them.
In Kepappillavu, the team was taken to a village where the last of the Menik Farm refugees had been resettled. “The conditions the villagers lived in shocked us,” remembers Ama. “There were about 500 people sharing toilets, with limited access to water and practically no jobs. We were pretty quiet once we got back into the bus, but then Prashan reminded us that we had the power to do something about it.” That was all the confirmation they needed.
The Kepappillavu Project, as they call it, will see SLU raising funds to strengthen three vital areas in the community – nutrition, education and employment. They’ve already begun collecting milk powder and school packs from around the country for the children and paving the way for employment by giving them essential English and IT skills. They’ve also partnered with Brandix to build a toilet system for the villagers.
Faced with a large community of needy children lacking the most basic of items in Mullaitivu, the Mullaitivu Christmas Shoebox Project was born. The team collected a shoebox that contained essentials including a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and an outfit of clothing, stationery, sweets and a toy for each child. In short, the perfect Christmas surprise in a box. They’ve also kick-started a project to provide bicycles to children in the area so that they may have reliable transport to get to school everyday.
If you’d like to help, write to christin@srilankaunites.org or visit www.srilankaunites.org
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