Excercise and Quality Time (=

During the summer I have been taking daily walks in the morning often with my mother. As well as good exercise for both of us, it has become a mother-daughter bonding time away from the cares of the housework and my four year old brother. My grandmother is diabetic and overweight and she came for a week to my house and somehow never left. Her health problems have scared me and my mum into eating healthy and getting some sort of regular exercise. I have also been doing Pilates for 45 minutes twice or thrice a week. It is difficult but I’ve noticed I’ve become more flexible. 

Versus Cancer

It’s the end of the summer and now I fully realize the gravity of Ms. William’s words as she gave me approval for the charity concert and told me “You getting yourself into a lot of work.” Getting permission and drafting the proposal to be put forward to Mr. Coles and Ms. Williams was itself quite a task. Next I had to draft invitation letters to be sent to the local schools requesting their participation, get them approved by Mr. Coles and mailing them. It didn’t end there as I had to chase after certain people from the schools principals, friends, interact presidents and so on.

Organizing auditions was a real learning process as I didn’t realize how many people are involved and how many peoples’ co-operation is required to make something work. In this case I had to get Mr. Coles and Ms. Williams approval and then notify Mr. Chithra (head of security) and work out a convenient time with Mr. Kolitha (head of maintenance) and Mr. Rana (auditorium manager). There was a lot of emailing and I learnt that the proper procedure has to be followed and you can get peoples’ cooperation by being open, flexible and just being nice. We had auditions in the OSC auditorium on the 10^th of June and the 24^th of July. The second audition started off with a lesson that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. I had a presentiment that day and unfortunately I couldn’t get to school early like I planned. When I got to school I found that Mr. Rana had completely forgotten about the auditions, the security didn’t know what was going on and they had started maintenance work in the auditorium so the place was a mess! But the guards were cooperative and I managed to scare the workers into finding me at least 2 mics and 2 industrial fans (:

Getting sponsorships was a relatively easy task as Ms. Dilhara from the administrative office handled sending the letters. But at the moment we have Mobitel as our premium sponsor and The Sunday Times as our print media sponsor and I am a bit worried as we need more money. The sound equipment will cost around Rs. 60,000 and the printing cost will be around Rs. 20,000. That’s a total cost of around Rs. 80,000 and we only have Rs. 30,000. 

We are human beings not savages.

After the Colombo Model United Nations conference ended I suggested starting a debating activity to Ms. Wolfe with Mr. O’Kane as the teacher sponsor. I became the student leader of the activity. Unfortunately I couldn’t do much since activities were disrupted by changes in the time table, exams and holidays. However we did debate a local issue which turned out to be quite a heated debate.

In May the local media was in an uproar over the case of a mother throwing her baby in the Kelaniya river. The mother was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison. The mother’s action does sound horrendous until you look into the details of the hardships they had to endure. This 3 year old boy was the youngest of 5 siblings. The father, a heavily indebted alcoholic, had left the family and only returned infrequently to steal the little money the mother managed to scrape by selling lottery tickets. While he was with her he was in the habit of drinking heavily and coming home to beat her up brutally. The mother is also a tsunami victim. Unable to feed the children, she had repeatedly tried to hand over the child to the government probation office, the police, and orphanages and even tried leaving him at the Kelaniya temple in the hope that someone would care for him. This incident happened one day after a failed attempt at leaving him at the temple. When crossing the bridge she threw him into the river on impulse. He was rescued by a trishaw driver and was in the ICU for a few days before he passed away.

The local media was very biased towards the child and hardly anyone empathized with the mother. I supported her because I have a little brother of 4 and I know how the child crying can get on your nerves at time and I amplified this and was able to imagine what it would be like for a clinically depressed woman in an abusive relationship living in bad living conditions with 5 children solely dependant on her.

There was a clear divide among the group. I was really annoyed with the opposition members who actually believed she should be tried for murder! My point was that she should be put through a rehabilitation process and given back the other 4 children. And what enraged me even more was the hypocrisy of the Sri Lankan government. After this incident the probation office, which had refused the child, took custody of the other FOUR children. In Sri Lanka an average of 2 children are killed per week simply because their parents cannot provide them with food for survival. With such a glaring problem the government should be addressing the wider issue of poverty rather than trying to throw an already clinically depressed woman into jail!