Tuesday 28th January 2025

I was up extremely early again this morning, ready for a 07:00 breakfast, and for Reggie to pick me up at 07:30 for my second day at Tea Leaf Centre (TLC) Ragala. It occurred to me today that TLC is generally used as the abbreviation for Tender Loving Care (and we can all do with a bit of TLC at times), so I think it is quite good from Tea Leaf's point of view that we can think of Tea Leaf Centres giving Tender Loving Care to an impoverished community that sorely needs it.

My Tender Loving Care today was focused on Mr. Elangowan, the Outreach Project Coordinator at TLC Ragala, who is also required to do a bit of teaching. I was with him for his morning lessons today, and it was probably the best fun that I have had in ages, as I think that I was pretty much born to teach, so I was in my element with him. My focus with the students was getting them to see the difference between 'Tamil' English and 'English' English in terms of their pronunciation.

To explain the above very briefly, it's all down to phonics. Tamil doesn't have the same phonics as English, so they have to learn a number of new sounds. In particular, they encounter 'soft' sounds, such as the 't' in 'time' and the 'w' in 'we' (this one being particularly challenging for them). I was extremely impressed with the way they responded to being taught how to pronounce English letters and words, and their enthusiasm was 'uplifting' (one of the staff's words of the day!).

After a slightly shorter day at Ragala today, Chooty arrived to take me home, and I went straight to Nanu Oya, as I was spending the evening with Ladushan and Kawya, who have been  married for 4 months now! I waited in a local tea shop for Ladushan, and bumped into 4 Tea Leaf staff from Tea Leaf Centre Nuwara Eliya, who had been out doing some promotion work to recruit some more students. I spent a lovely evening having dinner with Ladushan and Kawya.

Today's photos are a couple that I took from Sky Heaven early this morning, a couple from TLC Ragala, including one of me taking a photograph of a mirror I gave them for their staff room, and one of me having a cuppa with the Tea Leaf staff from TLC Nuwara Eliya.







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