UTHURU MITHURU

Education is a powerful tool to build resilience of the societies. The social, political and natural disasters greatly affect the education sector by destroying key infrastructures, disrupting the education cycles and forcing children to drop out of school for extended period of time. Formal and informal education, including, public awareness and training are critical for promoting sustainable development and improving the capacity of the people and countries to address environmental and development issues and to create green and decent jobs and industries. Children from the North and Northeast areas of Sri Lanka are the population who has been most seriously affected by the 30 years of war. Though it is few years after the end of the war, those areas are still rural and quality education is still not developed properly, primarily for Tamil children. Several natural disasters, geography and cultural background of central hills and Uva province also have significant issues in education of children. Also, the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks have drastically changed Sri Lanka’s social and political fabric. Over the existing ethnic polarization, Sri Lanka now faces polarization on the grounds of religion. It is obvious that the country once again requires proper peace and reconciliation plan. According to statistics of G.C.E O/L results, most students fail in mathematics and science subjects especially in these rural areas. This project was initiated in order to help the students to improve their results in these subjects as most of the students drop out of the school with the failure of these subjects. Schools with a passing rate of below 60% in the above subjects have been selected for this project. These students in rural areas are struggling with inappropriate teacher-student ration as well.

The scope of the project was to teach the students the basic concepts which are essential for the success of the subject. Also a cultural exchange program promoting peace building was being held along with this program.

Project Objectives were to help the students pass in mathematics in their GCE O/L examination in order to enhance their academic success ,to build peace and harmony among different ethnicities via cultural exchange ,to have a good relationship between university students and school students and sharing our experience and knowledge with them.

Rotary Club of Badulla, Sasnaka Sansada Foundation, John Sims Foundation Bandarawela and our Charter President - Rtr Pramod Wattegedara supported this course by monetary and material donations.

UTHURU MITHURU was an initiative by RAC Badulla to enhance the GCE O/L results of the students while rebuilding peace. This was seen as an effective project, as a group of students of different ethnic groups supporting the O/L students to gain better results and also reminding them the importance of the peace would be seen and understood with a great emotional value. Therefore this project was a major platform to rebuild the unity of the major ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. The project was initiated by a discussion with the members of Tamil students association of Uva Wellassa University. Objective of this meeting was to identify the suitable schools to carry out this project. This was effective as the students of the Tamil student association had a better knowledge about the locations of schools and had a good understanding about the need of the students in these areas By using that expertise knowledge of these Tamil students, seminar conducting centers and schools were planned.. It was planned to gather students from different schools in to few centers and decided to supply required printed materials and university students as well for the each center in order to conduct the seminarsThus seminars were conducted simultaneously in different centers at the same day. 

Therefore a big effort was put into the stage of planning at this project. Fine details were rechecked for the smooth flowing of the seminar and all the centers were finalized Next the financial support was provided by the Sasnaka Sansada, an organization which already owned one of the biggest mathematics seminar series in the country.

 But they were unabled to conduct the seminar in Tamil language due to lack of expertise in the language. Therefore after several rounds of discussions, the organization agreed to financially support to the project by printing all the required paper materials. The next task was to prepare the paper which was made after several rounds of discussions and standardization with students of the University of Moratuwa and the Department of Education. This paper was made in Sinhala medium and had to be translated into Tamil medium. This complex task was done with the guidance and support of DRR. PP Krishan Balaji. Then the paper was printed by the Sasnaka Sansada and the project was initiated after the distribution of the papers to the required locations.

 

Conflict between the Sinhalese (approximately 75 percent of the population) and the Tamil minority (approximately 11 percent of the population in 2012) simmered throughout the British colonial period (1815-1948) and lasted after independence. Finally it was caused to culminate the Sri Lankan Civil War in 1983.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was dominated by collaborating several other Tamil minority separatist groups and it became the main opponent of the government After killing LTTE’s leader by the Sri Lankan army, the war was officially ended in 2009. 

. According to BBC, the death toll at the end of the war was about 70,000. In other estimates, including United Nations (U.N.), put the toll as high as 100,000. The conflict displaced thousands of citizens, destroyed the educational system in war areas, and led to a scarcity of infrastructure, teachers, teaching materials, and specially the interest to the education.

Thus the UTHURU MITHURU project can be introduced as a bridge to connect the two different provinces, two different cultures and two different ethnic groups while empowering the quality of education.