News Update - December 2006

Dear Friends and Supporters

As we approach Christmas with the end of the year in sight, it seems a good time to bring you all up to date with the progress at Camp Coconut over the past few months.
We returned from Ireland very refreshed after a summer break spending much needed time with family. We all had a wonderful time celebrating Anne’s mother’s 80th birthday.

On our return, and at the end of August we had a whole day of fun and activities for a large group of over 200 children and adults from various groups around Matara. The children were from the Child sponsorship programme at St Mary’s Convent, Matara together with the tea estates whilst the women were from various women’s programmes run by a local NGO, Healing Hands. The local Lions Club also came with elderly and disabled men and women from the Sambodhi Home for Elders.

It was good to see Camp Coconut stretched to capacity with such an all-age event and to see everyone have such a fun day out together.

During the summer Chandrasena completed building the large tree house and he constructed two more platform structures under the trees. These were immediately put to good use as meeting places for the after school music and dancing tuition classes. These after school activities are very popular and numbers are growing.

We have actively sought children from further inland such as Mategoda and Kalatyawala (4 kms inland) as they are less well provided for than those on the coast. We have a brilliant dancing teacher who teaches Kandyan (up country) and low country dance as well as Sri Lankan modern dance. Our excellent music teacher teaches singing and the Serpina (an Indian type of piano accordion). We have also now started guitar classes once a week from December. All these talents will be showcased at the Christmas Event that Camp Coconut is staging on December 27th. We are inviting the parents of all the children who attend Camp Coconut and will extend the invitation to all those interested in the community. We are giving a small Christmas gift to each child who attends Camp Coconut.

Our Sporting activities and classes continue well attended. We have a volleyball team from the local school in Kamburugamua whom we coach weekly and we have the Kamburugamua youth group attend weekly for coaching and games as well as children from further afield.
The cricket nets were finally completed in September and Nick together with Chandrasena has started a cricket coaching session on Saturday mornings for up to forty six very keen local boys aged 10-16. None of them have played with a hard leather ball before and are enjoying the experience of wearing pads and helmets for the first time.

There is some great raw cricketing talent - both batting and bowling. We are currently looking for a cricket lover to share the responsibility of coaching these boys. We hope to have a team worthy of competing against local schools and the local Matara cricket club before too long.
We have had a particularly rainy monsoon season and this has made it difficult over the past two months to implement the sports coaching activities.

Unfortunately , we have not been able to welcome our children from the tea estates in Deniyaya for their usual residential week-ends due to the fact that the government have refused to allow the Tamils to travel without necessary additional paperwork (fearing Tamil Tigers in their midst!) and the Deniyiya children don’t have any papers. Dudley, the teacher who normally accompanies them for week-ends at the Camp is in the process of collecting the required papers. But it is a bureaucratic nightmare as most of these children have never been out of the tea estates and don‘t have ID cards, let alone passports. Just getting them new papers will take months, no doubt. We are planning to organise a Xmas party for up to 200 children in Beverley, up in the Tea Estate.

Preparations are underway for the Montessori school which we are opening in January. The banners have been made and put up locally to advertise it and the daycentre is newly painted. Bethany, our daughter, who completed her International Baccalaureate in the summer, is now taking a gap year and studying the Montessori teaching method in Colombo. She graduates in December and will join Anne in setting up and running the Montessori school until June. We hope to train up local teachers to take over from us when we return to England / Ireland for a break at the end of June



We would like to thank everyone for their continuing support and wish everyone a very Happy Xmas and a joyous New Year.

Anne & Nick, Chandrasena and Devika and the whole Camp Coconut team