Monday 5 December

IOM's Kalutara Moderawila Camp

Dealing with misunderstandings

We all meet at breakfast and make plans, arranging to leave our Waduwa hotel at 1.00. Paddy and I go off on an internet cafe search, and are delighted to find one at the hotel next door to ours.

Treated like royalty

It is a huge, cool, elegant and, sadly, virtually empty hotel. They treat us like royalty and give us cooling fruit juice and show us round the hotel while we wait to use the only computer that is working. Lots of cooling water and fountains and palm trees.

A beautiful and very large elephant ambles through the coconut grove with its mahout carrying a ladder so that people can have elephant rides - we decline a ride, as the elephant is far too beautiful and regal to be demeaned in this way, but I have a lovely conversation with her as I stare deep into her tiny eyes.

Once we get onto the computer, it is the best and fastest internet connection we have had in Sri Lanka and I am able to whoosh through my emails and be back at our hotel in plenty of time to pay the bill, pack and be on the bus in time for departure.

It is only a 45-minute drive to Kalutara (thankfully all the long drives are over and done with now, and we are nearing Colombo - wonderful though the bus journey was in many ways, it was incredibly exhausting and really sapped our energy.

Muddy - but no water

We find the camp fairly easily, but can't get the bus in, so park just outside. Carry the generator out and set up the PA. Masses and masses of temporary shelter buildings, packed tightly together and then a very decent sized open space - but there has obviously been heavy rain here recently and the ground is muddy and really churned up where large vehicles have driven. Not an ideal spot for a show. No shade at all, but there is a fence and we ingeniously manage to erect some poles and hang the parachute in such a way as to produce some shade for the show space. As soon as we had managed to achieve this, the sun went in and was no longer a problem, but the parachute looked very festive anyway, so it was not time wasted. Even when the sun is behind clouds, it is very, very hot and we all drip with sweat constantly. We're almost used to it now, but it is still very uncomfortable.

Nobody has thought to put water on the bus today, so I trek about half a mile back to the village and buy 8 big bottles and nearly cripple myself bringing it back to the bus - but you really have to keep drinking water constantly, or risk becoming dehydrated.

The hardened, corrugated mud is so uncomfortable for sitting on that we unearth the crash mats which are meant to be used for the inflatable for the children to sit on. (The small, inflatable bouncey castle that Teardrop put on the bus still hasnÕt had an outing - we must try to get this up on Tuesday or Wendesday so that Shane, Nat and John will know how to set it up and use it safely).

A nice little extra activity

We erect the Teardrop plastic playhouse and slide. This proves to be a great attraction and can cope with lots of small children swarming over it - but it doesn't fit together frightfully well, so we have to tie bits together to ensure the slide does not separate from the main structure. This needs to be sorted - perhaps the ground wasn't flat enough - once sorted, this is a nice little extra activity for the children that requires little or no manning.

We are terribly aware that we are leaving early on Thursday morning, and that Nat, John and Shane (and Percy, who is responsible for the security of the bus, and cannot therefore be involved in any of the workshops) will be on their own from then. Nat and John are planning to stay until the end of February, and (like us) were expecting there to be a full-time, permanent 7-person bus team who CWI would by now have trained up in all the different activities. It is clear that there are problems between Teardrop Relief and Impakt that have not been resolved yet, and that there will be no permanent staff forthcoming in the immediate future - though there should hopefully be plenty of volunteers at weekends from now on, at least in the Colombo area.

Because of this, CWI is taking a conscious effort to stand back a bit from the running of these last sessions, to enable John, Nat and Shane to see what they will be able to do when it is just the 3 of them on the road. They have all learnt the parachute games really well - Shane, who was really very shy and quiet two and a half weeks ago, when we first met him, has absolutely blossomed. He explains the parachute games really well to the children, works at the right pace and has good control over the children, who really like him - he has turned out to be the perfect person for the job. He can work well with the microphone and should be able to run the spiral dance, groups games and other large-scale games.

Tame? No, much enjoyed

Shane and Nat and John have all had experience of using the badge machine (and know how chaotic this can be with large numbers of children, and have hopefully seen ways that the chaos can be controlled), they have all had decent bashes at facepainting (though this activity, being so time-consuming, will probably just have to happen at weekends when there are lots of Impakt volunteers on hand to help). They have all run the drawing workshops, which though we at first thought them a bit tame, are actually very much enjoyed by the children (though these are impossible in some situations, such as today, where there are no tables or desks - the rutted, muddy ground is simply not suitable for leaning on for drawing).

Today, after the show (which was enormously enjoyed), the children make beanbags - putting sand into plastic beanbags, and then covering these with balloons, making a ball that can be used for catching, throwing or juggling. There is suddenly an unexpected influx of Impakt volunteers who have driven down from Colombo, and they help with the beanbag making. Again, a difficult workshop to run with not enough staff, so may only be able to be brought out at weekends when there are lots of volunteers.

All a bit much

As well as the unexpected Impakt influx of volunteers this afternoon, there was suddenly also an IOM influx and a team of Korean film-makers. All a bit much really. I manage to have a good talk to Jerry and Pam Porodo of Impakt, and express some of the frustrations we have been experiencing (very late bus and equipment arrival, complete lack of volunteers after arrival of bus and equipment, no permanent staff to train, the drawbacks of the bus as a touring vehicle, etc.) We agree that all the main parties need to talk together, and we manage to set up a meeting for this evening wtih Eshan, Impakt, me, John and Nat.

Towards the end of the afternoon we decide to try out the 'Ball Gun' - a strange piece of equipment that Children's World wasn't using much in England, so shipped out on the bus and donated to Teardrop for use out here. You shove plastic ball-pool balls in one end, and they shoot out the other end. Tomorrow we will try and run an organised 'catch the balls in the buckets' team game with the ball gun, but today (as there are far too many balls on the bus, taking up far too much space, and now that the decision not to use the ball pool for hygiene reasons has been taken) we shoot 3 sacks of balls out into the crowd of children and let them keep the balls.

This is chaotic but hilarious, and the children enjoy it enormously.

No driving in the dark

Yet again, because John and Natalie aren't happy to drive in the dark, we have to leave before we would wish to, but it has been a good afternoon and the 150 children and 80 or so adults have had a great time.

We keep thinking about workshops that we need to cover before we leave (the maddening thing is that once the equipment eventually arrived, there haven't been any volunteers at all, and so many of the activities simply haven't been able to be used - but we simply must go through some more of them before the end of Wednesday.) It sounds as though it is going to be rainy on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday is at a school with a covered stage area apparently, but no cover for the children. There are however apparently some classrooms we can use. We will have to wait till we get there and improvise, but if there are desks, as seems likely, we should be able to run mask and head-dress making workshops, which would be great.

We need the clay

For some reason Eshan never brought the clay that Children's World donated down to us and it is still being stored on the second bus. Hopefully we can get hold of some of that for Wednesday at least and try that out - clay model-making is a great workshop and can keep a large number of children very happily occupied for a long period of time. We need to check we have got enough hand-wash bowls and paper towels if we are going to do this though.

Once we are gone, the bus (which then won't have all our luggage on it, and will also be a bit emptier because of the badge machine and badge bits and parachutes that Jo and I are taking on to Thailand) really needs to be sorted through and reorganised. Not all the equipment needs to go to every venue, and apparently Impakt have storage space in Colombo. They need to find a really good way of storing the stuff, so that it is more easily accessible, and also safer. The 9 tables, for instance, which would be absolutely invaluable at non-school venues, are completely inaccessible at present.

John and Nat are very committed to the playbus project and have given up their entire life in Dubai for 4 months to come and make it work. They have been let down just as we have, but really hope that, with Shane, they can still continue to run worthwhile activities from the bus once we leave - and we are sure they can. They will get lots of volunteers at weekends, and the bigger camps should be tackled on those days, and during the weekdays, when they will be very short-staffed, Impakt needs to set up sessions at smaller camps for them. And then hopefully soon the problems between Teardrop Relief and Impakt will be resolved soon, and permanent staff taken on in plenty of time for John and Nat to pass on their experience to them, before they leave Si Lanka at the end of February. Having Shane is a great bonus. He is a tremendous translator, but is turning into far more than that, and will hopefully be able to lead this project forward once Nat and John are gone.

The heavens open

As we approach the Mount Lavinia area the sky darkens and the heavens open, and the last quarter of an hour of our drive is very, very wet. Most people huddle in the small available space downstairs (not actually very safe to have so many people on the platform, but soon there will be more room on the bus). I stay upstairs only until threatened with total soaking, but Jo (in Holly's amazing see-through waterproof poncho which emerges from and fits back into the tiniest envelope - as long as you are very, very careful!) and John (who has a very suitable waterproof coat) stick it out on the top deck for the whole journey.

Nat drives the bus to the Mount Lavinia Hotel, where it is going to stay for the night. A van from our new hotel comes to pick up the CWI team and all the luggage, and me, John and Nat, Eshan of Teardrop Relief, Pam and Jerry Porodo and Kumi and Aruni of Impakt go into the Mount Lavinia Hotel and have a meeting in the bar. While the others are very elegant and cool-looking, John, Nat and I look extremely sweaty and dirty after labouring in the camp all afternoon - goodness knows what the Mount Lavinia think! It's 'Happy Hour', so we drink the odd daiquiri or two, while trying to get to the bottom of some of the problems and misunderstandings.

An uncomfortable meeting

It's quite an uncomfortable meeting in many ways - but it was important to raise these tricky matters if the project is to press forward and succeed. As we are leaving in 2 days, and it doesn't matter if anyone hates me, I kicked off, expressing the frustrations that CWI (and Nat and John) had experienced. A lot of different, difficult issues were raised, and there have clearly been many misunderstandings and some lack of openness. We really hope that the two organisations can now move forward and that the children in the camps will benefit.

We left after about an hour and a half, and Aruni rang me a couple of hours later and let me know that considerable progress had been made - so fingers crossed!

6 December 7 December