New Year Care Packages - Week 1

I arrived in Sri Lanka just before a Friday that was also full moon poya day, so not much that could be done until the long weekend was past. However, I was able to make contact with Prof. Malkanthi Chandrasekera at the University of Peradeniya and make arrangements to meet her as soon as I got to Kandy. She was also able to confirm that the funds sent from the Vihara Relief Fund had already been credited to her account.

My first priority was to make arrangements for the cloth and other gifts to be purchased so that we could get moving with the task of packing these ready for distribution. Prof. Chandrasekera had already given some thought to this and was confident that it would be possible to get some volunteers to help with this. I learned that she did her social services work under the name of the ‘Gemi Sarana’ project (Refuge for Villagers). We agreed that it would be appropriate for her to use this project as the local sponsor of the New Year Care Packages we were going to distribute.

I got to Kandy on the Saturday (26th March) and was able to meet the Professor on Sunday evening to discuss the details of what we would be distributing as gifts and how we would allocate the available funds. We agreed that in addition to providing the cloth/books to the children and cash donations to the families, it would be good to give something to each of the teachers since otherwise they would feel left out. Additionally, we would give text books to the Ulla school which had lost everything in the tsunami. The other school in Pothuvil was not affected by the tsunami, but the families of the children attending this school were all affected. Therefore we decided that we would not buy textbooks for this school since it already had a reasonably stocked library. Finally, we decided that if the budget allowed, we would get some sweets/chocolates for each of the children since they would really appreciate this.

Having gone through the budget and agreed on what needed to be purchased, I undertook to buy the cloth from Colombo later in the week and also find something suitable for packing the gifts into. Brown paper bags were rules out because they tear too easily, but regular polythene shopping bags were also not suitable since I wasn’t keen to add to the environmental problems! It was left to me to find something suitable.

On Tuesday I set off for Colombo and braved the streets of the Fort to locate the cloth wholesaler that my cousin had put me in touch with. The streets were teeming with people all trying to get a jumpstart on their New Year shopping and parking in that area was an absolute impossibility. So, I chickened out and headed to the relative calm of Colpetty and the Crescat shopping mall where I was able to park and then took a rickshaw ride back to Main Street. After a bit of searching I was able to locate the wholesalers and made the deal for the fabric. There was some confusion about whether the price originally quoted was Rs.45 per meter or yard, but in the end we agreed on Rs.43 per yard and I was presented with 11 bolts (each containing 60 yards) that now needed to be transported back to my car. We managed to load it all into a rickshaw, and with me sitting on top made it back!