Wednesday 20th November 2024

We were back in school today, as usual, with Valerie continuing to work on checking through lesson plans, and me tasked with producing a 'paper' on establishing a Student School Council at the Royal International School. Alongside this, I was finishing off a report on our recent visits to each one of the five Tea Leaf Centres, and thinking about interviewing Tharika Perera this evening, as a former member of Tea Leaf Trust's Central Management Team, who now works here.

James Houston, a member of my teaching staff when I was a Headteacher, now working with Tea Leaf Trust, had asked me to record an interview with Tharika Perera during my time here. I came to know about Tea Leaf Trust through James, who had volunteered for them with his wife, Beth, and through that I met Tharika in 2019. We have been good friends ever since, with her inviting me to come to Kurunegala to see her and to see the Royal International School.

Tharika came round to our apartment after school, and Valerie recorded my interview with her, but midway through the interview, I realised that a monkey had come into the kitchen! We later discovered that it had pinched a large, unopened packet of Bombay mix, that had been lying in a basket on top of the fridge. Fortunately, it just took the packet and ran back out of the kitchen straight away, so we barely had any time to react to the monkey's brief visit.

Having completed the interview with Tharika, we took her out for dinner at Cafe Amakie, just a short tuk-tuk ride away. If it wasn't for Tharika, we would never have had this amazing 2-month experience in Kurunegala, so we are enormously grateful to her. Cafe Amakie is very pleasant, and we enjoyed a lovely meal there, whilst trying to figure out how to send Tharika's interview to James using WeTransfer, which took an incredibly long time!

Today's photographs are all from our evening excursion to Cafe Amakie, apart from two at the end showing Huey Yun, a current volunteer with Tea Leaf, who visited a local primary school in Maskeliya today, and sent me two lovely photographs from that experience.