Saturday 23rd April 2022

This was the start of my first weekend 'off', but it felt no different really, as the school has been closed for the past three days because of the troubles, which I will focus a bit on today. The first picture below shows a beautifully tilled patch of ground that I can see from my room. I have watched barefoot workers in the heat and the rain make a wonderful job of this over the past few days.

I spent the morning resting and catching up on paperwork, then ventured out on a rainy walk to GROW, which is the company that Donald and Ladushan, two former teachers from Tea Leaf Vision School Nuwara Eliya, set up. It is great to see the success they are making of their business in the current economic climate, including employing Kawya, another former Tea Leaf Vision teacher, on their staff.

I spent some time helping Donald with ideas for his business, and then walked back into Nuwara Eliya town centre, where I took a photograph of one of the petrol stations in the centre, but sadly failed to capture the huge queue of traffic trailing to it in the hope of paying a fortune to get some petrol before the petrol station ran out of fuel. The fuel crisis is causing serious difficulties right across the country.

Sri Lanka is such a beautiful country, and the people have been so welcoming, so it is distressing to witness at first-hand how the country has been brought to its knees by a corrupt government that has seriously mismanaged the economy, with a huge rise in inflation, shortages of basic goods and fuel, and daily power cuts. I wonder what else I am going to witness here in the next three months of my stay.












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