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The Women’s Cooperative Society that runs the flour collective is a recipient of the government’s assistance program providing discounted food rations, such as dried fish, rice, and sugar, to the poorest members of the village. Before Community Friends provided the flour grinding machine, the women in the collective had to grind the flour by hand.  They make roti, hoppers, string hoppers and pittu and sell to little restaurants in the village. The restaurants open at around 6:30 a.m. selling. to fisherman and other workers setting out for the day.

The women don’t make enough money from the collective to support their living expenses so they also work in the fields growing vegetables. This type of farming program is called Chaina Cultivation and has a long tradition in Sri Lanka. Government land is made available in the jungle at no cost. The jungle area is cleared by entrepreneurial villagers through field burning and then villagers grow vegetables which they sell at a farmer’s market in town. Everything is organic because they cannot afford chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The land is in rotation and after cultivation it is given a 6-month rest.   

One of the big problems with the farms in this area is the wild elephants which trample the gardens and cause mayhem. The villagers have built huts in trees where they take turns guarding the land 24 hours a day. If they see an elephant, the villagers light a “cracker” which is like a very large fire cracker or small explosive device. The loud sound scares the elephants. 

Deva Ratnakara

Latha’s mother, Abehami, is 75 and a widow. She helps with the chili grinding collective although she is blind and needs treatment for cataracts on both eyes. She opens up the room in her home where the equipment is housed and secures it in the evening, locking windows and covering up the chili grinding machine.

She does not want to spend the money for cataract surgery because she feels that she will not live long. The medical care is actually free through the government’s socialized medical system. However, there would be some fees, transportation, food and housing costs of perhaps $250. She would have to travel to the capital city of Colombo or Kandy for the operation. This could be a 15 to 20 hour journey by bus and Abehami has never been far from her village. She seems content with her small contribution to the chili collective and she receives a small portion of the profits. 

Deva Ratnakara

After finishing with Latha, we brought the Rice Flour grinding machine to Mr. Piyasena’s house in Panama. In the early days right after the tsunami, Community Friends staff had stayed in the town of Panama, which is about 10 km south of Ulla, while doing relief work in the Ulla/Arugam Bay area. During our stays there, we often were put up by a friend of Geeva’s named Geetha. Upon arriving at Mr. Piyasena’s house, we learned that he was away, so while we waited we decided to visit Geetha and say hello.

After exchanging news, we explained to Geetha what had happened with the collective in Ulla. That we had taken back the rice flour grinding machine and were looking for a new group who wanted to get into that business. Geetha was stunned. She said that she and a group of women in Panama had formed the Panama Women’s Cooperative Society. They worked together as a team and would find various businesses to get into. Currently, they had a baking business – making roti, pitu, string hoppers and this sort of thing. As a group, they had decided that their next step needed to be grinding their own flour, since their profits were being stifled by the high cost of ingredients.

Being both familiar to us and well established running a business, we felt this was a perfect match for the equipment in our possession. So we entered into a deal with them on the spot, ran over to Mr. Piyasena’s house, collected the grinder and within an hour the whole thing was concluded. Good luck ladies!

Jay Goodfriend

The war in the North and East of Sri Lanka made it difficult and very unsafe for Community Friends to visit the village of Ulla. Guerrilla attacks in the rural areas surrounding the town were happening regularly in 2008 and early 2009, catching farmers and other innocent victims in the brutal conflict between rebels and government forces. Kidnappings and political abductions also started cropping up in this region, with the most senseless of incidents occurring with the abduction of the head monk from a nearby Buddhist hermitage – who found himself in the hands of the Tamil Tigers deep inside the interior of Yala National Park.

Fortunately, this incident ended well – the monk found an opportunity to escape captivity and somehow found his way home. But our inability to visit the community due to this danger created an obvious gap for us in our relationship with the two collectives. This problem was made worse by the fact that the school principal, Mr. Piyasena, who had been instrumental in overseeing the two collectives, was transferred to the school in Pottuvil. So for nearly a year we went without any reports from Ulla about the state of the two collectives.

With the war ending in the summer of 2009, travel has once again become possible to the East. And so it was with this in mind that we came to Ulla in December of 2009.

Coming here to Ulla again, it is obvious that the community is rebounding in most ways. Schools are open, restaurants and hotels are flourishing, roads and infrastructure has been rebuilt and everyone is generally back to work. You see small children everywhere. Now trees, scrubs and other vegetation have rebounded as well, giving the impression that the soil has managed to shake off the layer of salt that was deposited by the tidal floods. Still, the question remaining for us was, what has become of the two collectives that we had set in motion.

Parents from the community had volunteered to act as mentors for each of these collectives. Each also had a designated spot where the grinding machines were to be housed. The expectation had been that the mentor would supervise the four or five teenage girls in the respective collectives, one with the mission of grinding rice into rice flour, the other with the purpose of creating chili power.

The rice flour collective was supervised by a local fisherman named Shanta. His work shack, a small space standing next to the school, was our first visit. Regrettably, we found that the collective under Shanta’s supervision was not running. After much discussion, we concluded that this collective was not a good candidate for additional support from CommunityFriends, so we effectively terminated this venture.

The chili power collective was supervised by a woman named Latha. She and the young women originally set up their work in a small house located in Ulla. After finishing with Shanta, we made our way to Latha’s house to see how things were going there.

Like Shanta, Latha was very surprised to see us. After serving us tea, we explained what had been happening since our last visit. The house she had been using for the work had become unusable – she had difficulty accessing the property and the electricity was too sporadic. So, for mostly practical reasons, she relocated the business to nearby Panama.

There, the collective has been experiencing success. In fact, Latha’s group now nets 200-300 rupees/week ($2 to $3 USD) for each participant. These are:

Shamali, aged 17, student in Panama school
Nirosha, aged 29, Panama resident
Sabitha, aged 25, Panama resident
Abehami, aged 75, Latha’s mother

The five women feel that they now have a stable business and are looking to expand. They are now saving for a second grinding machine. Latha also wants them to go into rice flour grinding business. Good luck Latha and great job with your success so far!

Jay Goodfriend

It has been two years now since we established the first collectives in Ulla village. Unfortunately the war has made access to the village impossible without a military escort. The risk has been too great for our staff and volunteers to visit Ulla. As soon as it is safe to return to the village we will have an update on the rice and chili collectives. Our staff is hoping to make the 8-hour journey in the next month or two.

Carsten Henningsen

Well, here I am again in Sri Lanka. I had come with the idea of visiting Ulla on this trip, but the situation with the war has become much worse. The road linking Ulla, in the East, with Kandy and the rest of the country, has been effectively closed by the military. Not only is it very difficult to get people through, but supplies, even critical supplies like fuel, are only sporadically allowed to pass through the checkpoints.

There have been bombings and abductions in the areas of the East, some points in fact very close to Ulla. The military appears to be running an operations in the hills around Ulla and in Yala National Park, where persistent harassment from the Tamil Tigers is keeping the area terrorized. What this means to Community Friends is that we have no access to the programs that are going on in Ulla and no word from the micro-entrepreneurships that are under way. So, for the time being, we will have to focus on our work in the tea plantation at Waitalawa.

Jay Goodfriend

We have now all come to Ulla. Today I traveled with Deva, Seevali and Geeva to the Ulla school to complete the work with the girls and officially start the ventures.

Today we met with the folks from Ulla. A group of six of them has arrived in Kandy. Being here in the city is evidently a challenge for these people from the East coast. Besides the transition from a small community of several thousand souls, the visit to Kandy is all the more unnerving for them with the heightened security everywhere in town.

Deva and Seevali have arranged for them to stay at a hostel that is available to travelers who come here to Kandy as part of a Buddhist pilgrimage to the Temple of the Tooth, a very famous Buddhist shrine here in Kandy. This hostel is quite basic, but this seems to the least of their concerns. In fact, they seem much more comfortable staying in doors, so we have to drag them out into town for a meal.

We are meeting in Kandy with them to do two things. One is to enter into contracts between Community Friends and the collectives. Both the principal and the mentors will sign for the collectives here in town (the girls will also sign when we arrive in Ulla next week). Then, we are planning to purchase the grinding machines from the distributor, who will also provide training for both operation and maintenance of the machines.

Jay Goodfriend

I arrived in Kandy, Sri Lanka during a somewhat tumultuous time this fall in 2007. The war effort has been in full swing and the result is that everyone is on edge, being so uncertain whether a bomb blast might erupt at any time. Tension and fatigue seem to be running high and everyone I talk to just wishes the whole thing would end.

On a very positive note, Community Friends is starting a new and exciting program, and it’s my pleasure be able to do this during this visit. This program is to fund two new businesses, as part of our interest in supporting some of the folks in Ulla who we’ve been working with since the tsunami. As we have gotten to know the people in Ulla, we have noticed that a segment of the population consistently finds itself in a very precarious position – that segment is teenage girls.

By the time they reach the age of about 15-16 years old, they start to leave the school system. Very few are able to pursue education beyond this point. Many of these girls are married at this age, others become workers, and a very few are sent to the urban areas in pursuit of opportunities. Historically, many of these situations prove to be difficult, and the standard of living, or quality of life they are able to achieve falls far short of what we expect for our own children.

Through consultation with Ulla’s school principal, Mr. Piyasena, Community Friends has come up with a way to help those of these girls who want to work a way into micro-entrepreneurship. Mr. Piyasena has created a Community Development Committee (CDC), which is a group of parents and teachers from the school, which is doing the work of identifying appropriate businesses to start, and identifying individuals who would like to participate in the program. And this CDC is consulting to Community Friends and our main point of contact.

Today, in Kandy, we are awaiting a group of travelers from Ulla. Included are Mr. Piyasena, plus Malika, one of the head teachers from the school, and two parents – Shanta and Latha – who are community parents designated by the CDC as parent/mentors for the micro-entrepreneurships.

The CDC has recommended that we start two businesses that will be organized as collectives. Each of these collectives will have 5-6 girls and one parent mentor as its staff. The businesses that are to commence are food processing businesses. One will be a chili grinding business, which will use a grinding machine provided by Community Friends to convert local farm-grown red chilies into chili powder. The second collective will do a similar thing, but its output will be rice flour.

Both of these choices were made after we consulted with the CDC about our mission and interest in promoting sustainable practices in Ulla. Because the value-added of both rice flour and chili powder processing is performed outside of the greater Ulla area, the CDC came to see that bringing this processing into Ulla would keep those profits local and fill a niche. We are excited to be part of this process with our friends from Ulla.

Jay Goodfriend