16th - 17th January 2007

Tuesday 16th January

At Siri Sumana School today I used the flash cards again and compared a few words, like bat and bag, hat and cap, fork and four. This I did as 30 minute lessons with 5 different classes of grade 4 students (9 years old). So, over 2 ½ hours I taught about 150 children.

One nugget of advice about blackboards, if you’re reading this with a view to coming here yourself. Although they can be a little dirty, you will probably find the bit only you can reach (i.e. the top) to be almost as clean as new. But you ought to remember to clean the blackboard when you’ve finished, because you will be the only person in the school who can..!

In the afternoon at Nirasha I found things a little tough again. I was only working with 5 children, but they were at different levels of ability and it the work I had in mind would not have been suitable for them all. Some of them lost concentration, and seemed to be keen to play around with teaching me Sinhala words. I turned this to my advantage though, by getting them to tell me about their families in Sinhala, and then English.

After school Indiga, a friend of Nalinda’s invited me up to his house, which was really nice of him. It’s about a 15 minute walk up through jungle paths. All three generations of the family were really welcoming. I started singing “Head, shoulders etc” with the kids to break this ice. This ended with raucous enthusiasm from the adults though, as I became the student of their language. And how’s this for an orchard in the back yard: coconut, mango, pineapple, passion fruit, papaya, jakfruit and bananas..!

Wednesday 17th January

I was at Ranapanediniya School this morning. I took four 40 minute classes from grade 6 (11 years) to grade 11 (15 years). With the younger kids I used the flash cards, and gave them spelling tests on 10 of them. I did past and future tense exercises with the middle groups, again using the flash cards, and with these two sentences:

“Yesterday I went shopping and I bought a…”
“Tomorrow I will go shopping and I will buy a…”

With the oldest children I got them saying and writing things like what their favourite colour or sport is.

This afternoon I paid my first visit to Baranasooriya Boys’ Orphanage near Hikaduwa. We delivered the VCR and videos Help Lanka has donated, and arranged when I would be back there to teach.

Last night, on the way to play Karam (a popular board game, somewhere between billiards and drafts) we stopped off at a grave that was being dug. The work was being done by the light of a lamp hanging from a banana plant. Today we were passing through Rathgama as the funeral procession was making its way to the site. Walking at the front was a small band of musicians – drummers, and a local instrument a bit like an oboe. I’d very much have liked to have captured this music on minidisc, but I only have 2 hands and one brain, and all these were busy with my camera.

Following the musicians were close family, and then the coffin upon four shoulders. Another group of men were responsible for laying cloth in front of the procession. They had two or three pieces, each about 3 metres long, and they would quickly nip one bit from under the feet of the parade once the coffin had passed over it, to lay the same piece just ahead of the musicians again. A sort of manual caterpillar track, if you like. The dominant colour at a funeral here is white. White ticker tape hangs across the street all the way from the funeral house to the grave, for several days before the burial. A lot of the clothing worn by mourners is also white, embellished here and there with bright colours.