Page 30 - Hemas_Piyawara_Book

While the social fabric too is different in Salalihini-gama with many parents being
labourers, mainly helpers at construction sites, doing a little carpentry work or
clearing large gardens (udalu gana weda or kuli-weda), some families are women-
headed households with husbands abandoning them or being far away in cities such as
Colombo where they have gone looking for work. A few engage in seasonal cultivations
including pumpkin, string bean and ladies’ fingers in their home gardens.

The hand-to-mouth existence is obvious with the children being gaunt and skeletal
and arriving at the preschool after a cup of plain tea with tummies growling in protest.
With starvation staring them in the face, malnutrition is evident and many of the
children have not had a bite of protein in the form of an egg or a piece of chicken or
fish, even tank fish, since their birth.

The teachers watch with sadness as the little ones open their food parcels – with some
rice and thel-daapu kehel muwa (fried banana-flower) or mallun (green leaves), while
many slink out to play without a bite.
The varied backgrounds of the children in the different preschools are reflected in their
footwear – in shoes and socks; sandals or rubber slippers; or just barefoot – and are
indicative of the homes they emerge from. After opening the new Jaffna Preschool in 2003 (above), Mr. Husein Esufally addresses the gathering (below).
For the children of all these preschools, it is a special day as visitors from the Hemas
Group have arrived from Colombo. Some children are in their Sunday best, chosen to
represent the different communities co-existing in Sri Lanka. They walk in, hook their
bags on the brightly-coloured chairs and run or skip out to the well-tended garden
with trees and flowering shrubs.
Surrounded by green netting fencing, the Jaffna Preschool shares a boundary with
a building which had been its earlier home after Piyawara’s intervention in 2003.
Before the birth of the 2003 school, however, what had been available was a less-than-
satisfactory ‘preschool’ in a dark and drab garage near the Nallur Kovil.

The very first preschool to be built under Piyawara had been in Jaffna in 2003 at the
premises of the Medical Officer of Health (MOH) office familiar to parents, for it is here
that they bring their children for weighing and vaccination under the country’s public
health system. From there, the preschool had been moved to the current location right
next door in 2011, after the end of the northeast conflict.

22 Hemas Piyawara - A Journey to the Future