Sri Lankan Adventures: Work and weekends away

The last few weeks have been really busy with visits from the UK, meeting up with the other volunteers, and a lot going on at work. Having been here now for about 10 weeks, I am really beginning to feel relaxed and at home in Sri Lanka and have learned to love some of the things that I struggled with at first!

At work I have been busy helping staff improve their skills in written and oral communications. A lot of staff are engaged in some PR activity at my NGO, so I am planning a series of workshops to give them some new ideas about ways to work with different audiences, and with different mediums.

After the Sinhala and Tamil New Year holidays which are coming up I will be running three workshops – a general introduction to PR and communication (thinking about different audiences, why communications is important, different methods of communication), skills for written communications (reports, press releases, newsletters, writing for the web) and also on design and photography. I’m also going to be giving individual training sessions in producing a newsletter, the annual report and maintaining the website, which should be going live in the next few weeks.

Yesterday I went to the Tangalla special school to see an art exhibition that had been organised by a couple of other volunteers who were teaching at the school. They had worked with the children over three months to explore using many different mediums of art – from sand painting to salt dough. Some of these children had never had the opportunity to express themselves in this way, and you could tell how excited and proud they were (although this probably had a lot to do with the fact that there was cake there!)

Outside of work I have been taking advantage of the weekends to see more of this amazing country. Since I last posted on this blog I have been on a jeep safari and saw elephants and loads of other animals. It was always one of my ambitions to see elephants in the wild and I was so excited when we came across a massive herd of them crossing the road and playing beside the jeep.

Olof and I also went on a tour of the hill country and met up with his parents who were staying in Sri Lanka. We went on the train from Ella to Kandy, which was also an amazing experience. Unlike the bland train services in the UK, where the biggest event is the buffet car getting stuck in the aisle, the trains in Sri Lanka are seriously fun. There are no health and safety precautions so you can hang out of the windows and doors to see the amazing views. The train only goes at about 20mph so you can watch people running up beside it and jumping on as it goes through stations and villages. And instead of a boring buffet car with watery coffee, men got on at different stations offering tasty lentil snacks, fresh pineapple pieces or other yummy things.

In Kandy we visited the botanical gardens and also saw a display of Kandyan dancing which was pretty amazing – it reminded me of something in the Edinburgh festival fringe. We also saw the Temple of the Tooth relic – a shrine dedicated to Buddha’s tooth.

After Kandy we visited Nuwara Eliya and walked through another national park to World’s End – a plateau that drops nearly 1000 metres to the plains below. Being Sri Lanka you could pretty much sit on the edge with your feet dangling off if you liked!

So here are some of my photos from this time. I hope you enjoy them.

Children at the special school art exhibition