Will You Be Bringing Any Cow’s? First Day with Hope House 1

We travelled by bus to Ampilantharai, about 40 mins direct from Kallady bridge to meet the management staff of Hope House. Hope House, running for over two years, is a women’s empowerment community project run by Ocean Stars Trust. Ampilantharai was heavily affected by the civil war, leaving many widowed women in the community. The vision of Hope House has been to empower women in the community to learn new, employable skills such as IT and sewing, to in turn boost local employment and business activity. To date, 54 women have completed the sewing training, with many now in employment.

Our work with Hope House focuses on generating income for the centre with the aim to make the centre financially sustainable in the long-term. This, I know, is an ambitious task, but we are working with the management team to think of new income generating ideas and to test them over the coming months. It is only through testing ideas, that you can understand ‘what works’. Zeddy and I are using elements of the Balloon business curriculum that we are familiar with when we worked with entrepreneurs in Kenya.

We encouraged the staff to really focus on having a business mindset and to think of ways in which Hope House could make money. Firstly, using the ‘Cow Challenge’ as an activity to ‘think outside the box’, by thinking of how many ways can you make money from a cow. We could see the management team have many ideas for the centre and seemed to just want some encouragement. There was a slight miscommunication though, as the team momentarily thought we were donating them some cows! This is not happening.

Zeddy also worked through a SWOT analysis, discussing the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities for the Hope House business. It was certainly a new way of thinking for the management team, and they were quite adamant about the unique potential of the centre, located between two schools with very few shops and businesses nearby.

After discussing ideas, the staff really liked the idea of pillow cases. Zeddy made a prototype, and we have agreed to make a set of pillow cases next Monday to sell.

We will be using scrap material from tailor shops as the pillow stuffing which is very cheap and sustainable. We will see how it goes on Monday, what is for sure is that we left Hope House 1 feeling incredibly encouraged by the motivation and enthusiasm from the management team and are excited by what we can achieve. 

Week 1 in Batticaloa

We write now at the end of our first week in Batticaloa with Ocean Stars Lanka. Here are some reflections on the first week:

Zeddy:

It was great to meet the Ocean Stars Lanka team on Monday, who have been very welcoming and made me feel at home in Batticaloa. The week has been busy and I'm now looking forward to a restful weekend!

A highlight for me this week was meeting the women learning to sew as part of the Hope House 2 community project in Karavetty. I interviewed the women with our translator Gawsh, to create a CV+ for each attendee. The women meet from 9am - 3pm on a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and we will be doing business / finance skills workshops with the women in the next few months. My initial impression was that the women were quite shy, the majority were under the age of 20, and somewhat lacked the entrepreneurial spirit that I am familiar with in Kenya. Although some expressed an interest in business, others had no real understanding. That said, I am confident we can develop skills such as simple record-keeping, idea generation and testing business ideas with the women. I believe that by making the concept of business accessible and understandable, we may 'sew the seed' of opportunity. Exciting few weeks ahead!

Another interesting experience was the contrast between children in pre-schools where we visited to collect data for the Ocean Stars Community and Livelihoods Study by interviewing parents of pre-school children . Before the interviews we met with the pre-school children, the first pre-school (Thirukovil 1) children were very shy with a few children crying, however the second (Karavetty) all said 'MORNING' as we arrived and performed songs in front of us!

I am also learning that Sri Lankan time is very similar to Kenyan time...(if you know what I mean!)

Dan:

Great to be back in Batti, and work with the OSL team again...and this time for 3 months! It's been a very tiring week, including a school trip to Trinco on Tuesday (with a 4.30am wake up!), travelling to pre-schools via tuc-tuc and working in the OSL office in the afternoon.

I have really enjoyed the interviews with parents of pre-school children for the Communities and Livelihoods Study. There is always a slight apprehension when we arrive at a pre-school, wondering whether there will be parents available and willing to speak to us! Thankfully we have been able to conduct 13 interviews, each taking 15-20 mins. I really get the sense that the parents involved enjoy the process, where they are simply talking about their lives. We ask questions such as: 'Tell me about your daily routine' and 'What does education mean to you' and have been getting some really interesting insights into the dynamics and belief systems of the communities in which OST operates. We have now collected data from 5 out of 16 OST pre-school locations, 11 more to go!

Looking forward to what the next few months bring! It's been two weeks now in SL, already feels like 2 months!

Stay tuned!

DB & ZK

First Few Days in Sri Lanka - Zeddy's Thoughts

Before we start working in Batticaloa next week, we have enjoyed some restful days exploring Sri Lanka.

For me the first days in Sri Lanka have been wonderful. After a little stress at immigration where the immigration officials were curious as to why a young Kenyan girl wanted to be in Sri Lanka for so long, they thankfully let me in! Arriving by myself in a new country was quite daunting, but the flights all worked out fine and I was picked up at the airport by a taxi driver and driven to the hostel. Dan arrived in the late afternoon the following day.

Some observations so far from Sri Lankan culture that are very new to me:

• Rice and Curry for breakfast! Particularly Kiribath (rice cooked in milk) which is really tasty but very different from Kenyan food. Especially as breakfast for me is normally milk/tea and bread
• I have more attention on me! Now I can understand what is was like for Dan in Kenya! Maybe Sri Lankan people don't often see people like me on the street! Nonetheless they have all been very friendly and welcoming to me.
• Women riding motorbikes/scooters. This is not very common in Kenya!
• I rode on an elephant!!

After Dan arrived we left Negombo for a few nights in the jungle. Peace and quiet was so nice. Visiting Dambulla Temple and Elephant safari too, amazing experiences understanding Sri Lankan culture.

I now write from Trincomalee on the East Coast of Sri Lanka, where we have just returned from snorkelling on Pigeon Island, seeing lots of tropical fish.

I'm having a wonderful time so far and excited to get to Batticaloa to start working with Ocean Stars.

Here are some pictures of the first few days below:

Feeding the elephant some pumpkin

Amazing to see wild elephants

Dambulla Temple

Chilling in the middle of the jungle. No one in sight.

Pigeon Island, clear water.

Zeddy Leaves Kenya

After saying her goodbyes Zeddy is making her way to Sri Lanka, her first time outside of Kenya, to work with Ocean Stars Trust. She will be working on Monitoring and Evaluating projects as well as providing business skills and expertise to the Hope House projects. A very exciting time! I (Dan) will be flying out Sunday evening and will meet Zeddy in Negombo Monday afternoon. We will both be posting on this blog in the coming months.

This blog will document our experiences throughout the next 100 days in Sri Lanka. Writing about the work we will be doing and other experiences we encounter.