Before we completely departed the home, Ganesh gave us a guided tour of the home's farm which includes, amongst other things, banana plantation, dairy (with ~30 contented cows), vegetable garden and rice milling plant. We were also given a tour of the home's kitchen, where cassavas were being chopped up and a wide variety of home-grown vegetables were being stored in preparation for the next meal.
Then we visited the older girls' accommodation (c/w library & computer room) where we met a few of the girls and some housemothers - by that time most of the girls had left for a morning at school. Finally, we visited the boys accommodation where we played ball games, frisbee and skittles - empty water bottles proved to be excellent skittles. Two of the boys showed great ingenuity in retrieving a ball from a locked shed in which two big combine harvesters (for rice harvesting) were parked up!
A couple of hours later we all arrived in a house in Vavuniya where we were the guests of Thusanthan - the Vavuniya station-master. The house belonged to Nadarajah, the lady who founded Grace House, a children's home which was established in Vavuniya to care for boys orphaned by the tsunami of 2004 and which was one of Dilanee's main inspirations in setting up Ocean Stars & in giving steadfast support to the boys brought up in Grace House. Thusanthan was one of those boys. Nadarajah, having sadly died not so long ago, Thusanthan now lives in her house and many of his friends from Grace House days appeared to participate with us in a delicious meal. There was much merriment and it was a joy to see that boys who had experienced such trauma had, we believe substantially through the work of Grace House & of Ocean Stars, established themselves happily in the adult world whilst also maintaining the friendhips formed at Grace House years ago.
Then back in the minibuses and off to Batticaloa. On the way we experienced some local heavy flooding and stopped to admire two elephants by the roadside. Unsure at first of the elephants' gender one of our drivers said that if we saw that an elephant had a third back leg it was male. One was indeed male. Looking at the other elephant, one of our party said she could see some wee titties. So that was the matter settled! A bit further along the road we saw, three or four hundred metres away, a herd of forty-eight elephants of all sizes (and, we presumed, genders) strolling majestically across grassland beside a huge lake with towering hills beyond.
Arriving at Batticaloa we met some of the Ocean Stars staff who presented us with bright garlands. Then fish curry and verbal receipt of tomorrow's timetable!
(Today's blog was written by Hugh)
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