SUNFLOWER VILLAGE

Sunflower Village has been cancelled this year as a result of the students not being able to attend due to study commitments. While this is quite sad as the sessions had quite a lot of social and physical benefits for the children, we have had to show innitiative and reform the group to continue our work in the pool but in another direction.

Shamith our group leader was made aware of a hospital/school in Colombo 5 called Chithra lane. They expressed a need for help and so on the second week of CAS we visited the intstitution to find out what they needed. As they had a pool themselves and quite advanced facilities it became obvious that it was not weekly interaction that they required but instead help with their technology facilities. They need our help to set up a website by which they can gain publicity and hopefully increase their funding which has dropped considerably in the last year.

As not all memebers of the group can work on this we again explanded our reach and those of us who are not website technitians can get back to the pool. A local government school in the area now sends a group of 15 boys to learn to swim once a week. We had our frist meeting with them last week and it was particularly interesting. We are used to dealing with the Sunflower Children and most of us attempted to treat them in the same way, however this was not relavent. Language is even more of an issue this time as we are trying to tech the technicalities of swimming as opposed to simply being social and playing.