The concluding mission: Tucker's Jan 27th Report

January 27, 2005

Today was a very difficult trip. The two members of the Serendib Sri Lanka reconnaissance team got a very early start at 4:30 in the morning – bound for Hambantota. Nearly 4 hours later they descended on the city in search of refugee camps where children would be in need of school supplies and other vital materials.

It was soon to be discovered, however, that Hambantota, and other areas along the road towards Colombo, had successfully cleared out all the refugee camps, and both children and older people had moved into houses with relatives and other friends. The government’s swiftness in dealing with the situation in the South was in stark contrast to the North and East, where most of the internally displaced persons are still living in schools.

We continued eastward on a false hope of a refugee orphanage for children in Tissamaharama, which turned out to be exactly that – outdated information which when we arrived we found that the children had been moved onto other homes. In fact, the situation of inaccurate or incomplete information was to plague us for most of the day. In many cases, the local district offices had information which was several days late. This often translated into us visiting campsites that had been disbanded or split into several smaller sites.

Nonetheless we were successful the closer we reached towards Matara, and in particular Dikwella gave us the opportunity to visit a refugee camp with approximately 86 children of school going age. We have planned to visit this camp tomorrow afternoon, and then move into the larger city of Matara where there are at least half dozen camps of varying sizes. As we mentioned before, this will be the concluding mission of Serendib with the president of Serendib-USA, and the next stage in Serendib’s efforts will be to begin laying the groundwork for a team of educators to return in June and help with the rebuilding of schools and the training of new teachers.

Tucker

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