Sri-Lanka-Child-Care

The launch of our charity Sri-Lanka-Child-Care was so successful and the response from our friends and colleagues so generous that we exceeded our target by a considerable amount. So Off we went to Sri-Lanka to organize the next 20/30 children to be added to our support package. The obvious place to start was down the south west coast in the same area that was affected so badly by the Tsunami and where all the children that we currently support are living. We contacted the person that administers our present support scheme Mrs. Hazel Corteling, and arranged to meet her at Sumaga Farm, Baddegama.

Sumaga Farm turned out to be a fantastic social community project. It all started as a small vocational school to teach life skills to young women from deprived village backgrounds. They are offered a six-month residential course and are taught useful skills, which include sewing, health and hygiene, cooking, animal husbandry and organic gardening. They are taught to look after chickens, pigs and goats and the manure from these animals is used to fertilize all the fruit and vegetables that they learn to grow. Some of the meat, eggs, fruit and vegetables that they produce are sold in the farm shop to the local people and some are used to help feed the students.

In response to the Tsunami, they have recently started a day care center for 200 deprived children aged from 3 ½ to 11. The children come in the morning at 7.30 and are given breakfast, lunch and a snack before leaving at 4.00 pm and of course they receive an education including English. They all have uniforms made by the life skills students in their sewing lessons and some of their food is provided by the student's efforts on the farm. After our tour of the farm, vocational school and day care center we went back to Mrs. Corteling's office and told her what a fantastic project we thought she was running. Then she gave us the bad news, Sumaga Farm was running out of funds and unless they could find another source of income they would have to close the whole project down within the next few months.Our immediate reaction was to say that this must never be allowed to happen and that we would support them as much as we possibly could.

On our return to the UK I began to reserch organic gardening and soon came across The Food For Everyone Foundation.I was so impressed by the Mittleider Method that I decided that our next target would be to introduce this method to Sri-Lanka through Sumaga Farm.To learn more about the Mittleider Method Click Here!