Happy Christmas!

In the interests of saving on environmental waste (honest) there’ll be no Christmas cards from us this year – so we wish you all a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

Photo: Sri Lankan Santa giving out sweets at our office Christmas party.

Despite our desperate attempts to make ourselves feel like it’s Christmas here in the tropics (putting up a cheap fake Christmas Tree, playing the usual Christmas CDs, and purchasing Galle’s only Turkey) it still feels more like July.








On Christmas day we will go to our local Methodist Church, which we're now attending regularly, shown in this photo.

We'll then eat and party with 30+ people, mostly other foreigners like us, round at our friends’ house. The meal will include chicken curry, rice, daal, and stir fried veg, with Turkey, stuffing, gravy, and roast potatoes contributed by us! Oh, and the Christmas pud our friend Trudi has brought over.

It may feel more Christmassy on the day than usual in the end, as Mike, Trudi and another chap, have been press-ganged into setting up a band and leading us in carol singing. Another couple are organizing the kids to do some sort of alternative nativity play. I want Joe to be a sheep – sooo cute – he can even Baa, but he may be too hot in a sheep costume even if I could make one by then, so perhaps he should play a shepherd … or come to think of it, maybe he could just be . . . Joseph!?!



We are enjoying Trudi’s company and are looking forward to celebrating Christmas with her. We are discovering a few more local tourist sites, like tea plantations and temples within close reach.

Trudi is travelling round the country at the moment and will join us again for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, before flying out to India, then returning for a couple of weeks volunteering with a charity in Galle.


We the Boxing Day Tsunami anniversary at the forefront of our minds at the moment. Mike's employer is working flat out to get the maximum number of people re-housed prior to the anniversary. Relatives of local people will travel to Galle and other Tsunami-hit areas for alms-giving ceremonies for the dead. There are a number of memorial services taking place. It is not just those who have lost family that are still suffering. Many people are still not in a home of their own, and many have not managed to rebuild their livelihoods. We hope and pray for this situation to continue to improve with the work of ours and other agencies in 2006.

We had a Galle office Christmas party/ carol concert, which was fund and interesting to see. Everyone was given a present of a packet of jelly mix and pineapple jam!

Poor old Mike was press-ganged into playing the keyboard for the carol singing. He hopes desperately that no-one recorded it.

Mean old Santa made Joseph cry!

Our friend Darshie enjoying looking after Joseph afterwards. Darshie's completely lovely. Joe's usually a bit wary of Sri Lankan women as they all want to touch and hold him wherever we go. More to the point, he's a man's man, and will leap into the arms of any Sri Lankan man at the slightest opportunity, and they're all great with him.

And here's our friend Ahamed, who absolutely loves Joseph to bits. Ahamed helped us find our house, and will do anything for us. He has bought Joseph a neck-chain with a pendant with his "birthstone" in it, for Christmas.

Here's a photo of an interesting custom . . . a party to celebrate a young girls "coming of age". I'll leave you to work out the biological reason for the party. Suffice to say we can't imagine any UK girls enjoying such a public announcement . . .

We’ve included a few pictures of Galle town here so you can see where we shop . . . Not quite the Trafford Centre.

And here's a photo of the original Sri Lankan Tea Company's warehouse (an off-shoot of the original East India Tea Company) , which is now a museum of fishing. It shows great things the whole world should know about fish including a tin of pilchards and a jar of fish paste.

Mikes job . . . and more adventures

So, we’ve been here 8 weeks now, and in response to many requests, here’s an attempt to tell you a bit more about what I do at work. So far this week I’ve done the following:

• Reviewed our programme for well construction and well refurbishment. Many were polluted or destroyed by the tsunami
• Put together an internal proposal requesting that we get involved in the provision of solid waste disposal sites for handling domestic waste. Sadly household waste is generally dumped anywhere in many parts of the country. I am hoping to gain support to develop well managed landfill sites, and by “coincidence” bumped into a chap from the UK who manages Brighton’s solid waste disposal sites, so he has been fantastic in helping me develop good proposals
• Visited a number of sites to review options for provision of regional wastewater treatment works (WwTW). There is only 1 single WwTW in the south of Sri Lanka, and that was commissioned last week. We need many more here
• Evaluated the provision of manual versus electrical pumps for household water supplies. The difficulty is the ability to pay for electricity versus the greater likelihood of a manual pump breaking and not being repaired. Thankfully I’ve found out that my employer has already developed agreements with the relevant national and local government departments for ongoing maintenance
• Progressed the development of construction administration procedures, needed to manage our contractors consistently
• Evaluated options for providing surface water drainage at a number of flooded housing sites. Our beneficiaries are being provided with the worst land available as those are the sites that no-one else wants to build on
• Progressed options for the management of gully suckers and disposal of the sewage that they collect from transitional shelter and housing septic tanks. Current disposal regimes are unacceptable
• Had three meetings with other NGOs (charities) regarding collaboration on much of the above, to ensure we’re working with a common strategy and not pulling against each other. We are combining funds in places to ensure we develop robust solutions, rather than several separate attempts that risk being unsuccessful
• Met with two other NGOs regarding developing a common approach to the decommissioning of temporary shelter sites. Decommissioning can be more costly than provision of the original shelter site as we have to consider future site use
• Put together a number of variation orders to contracts for the provision of final finishings to houses
• Agreed a way forward with colleagues, for dealing with a poor performing contractor
  
  . . . and it’s only Tuesday morning! This all feels very rewarding and worthwhile, to feel that I'm helping progress some essential improvements to the local and national infrastructure

Family news:
Last weekend we hired a driver with Sarah’s parents to take us to Yala National park. The landscape on the way is more swamp like becoming more desertified the further east you go.

On the way we visited:

• Matara underground temple. An amazing place with a “secret” underground monastery and tunnels dating back at least 600 years. In more recent years a huge Buddha was constructed on top – the photo shows Hazel stood at the bottom, some distance in front of it, so it’s bigger than this even makes it appear
• Mirissa beach, which is a beautiful cove, with fishermen who sit on sticks - no idea how they manage it!. We ate Seer fish, which is quite like sword fish, and is just gorgeous
• We took Mike and Hazel to visit one of my construction sites in Hambantota - the block of flats pictured above. You can also see the concrete blocks they are making on site in the second picture

One the way to Yala park we saw an enormous crocodile, maybe 20foot long, near to the side of the road – we think it was eyeing up a nearby cow. We decided not to go walking in that area!

At Yala park we saw wild crocodiles, elephants (one chased us!), mongooses, water buffalo, eagles, buzzards, bee-eaters, swallows, kingfishers, peacocks, hornbills, spoonbills, white spotted deer, and loads of other animals and birds. We were seeking out bears and leopards, which other groups managed to see, but we only managed to see leopard footprints.

To top this excellent week, Sarah’s parents looked after Joseph lastnight and we went out for a lovely meal at the Lighthouse hotel, overlooking the sea. What a privilege. . .

So all in all it’s been a fantastic week and we feel very very blessed to be here, and reasonably useful.

Photos of Yala trip below. The park was hit badly by the tsunami. The remains of a restaurant are shown below.